*** (out of ****)
Starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Paula Garces, Neil Patrick Harris, and Ryan Reynolds
Directed by Danny Leiner & written by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg
2004
88 min R
So much better than I thought it would be. “Harold & Kumar” makes the existence of “School of Rock,” “Dude Where’s My Car?” and all those sophomoric Adam Sandler vehicles somehow worthwhile by being so good. Yes, it shares the same director as “Where’s My Car” but “Harold & Kumar” is a goddamned art film by comparison. That it is a series of non-sequential comedy sketches, built around a barebones plot, is not such a rarity. (Plot: two 20something semi-professional roommates get high and set off for White Castle, the one fastfood place that will satisfy their munchies.)
What is a rarity is that the sketches actually kind of add up to something, the characters are interesting, and, most importantly, about 98% of the sketches are really funny. Brilliantly, nothing more substantial in the plot department ever emerges: there’s no crap about saving grandmother’s house, about hitmen, about lookalike briefcases, about the hero making a big speech at the end, to which everyone applauds and he gets the girl. No, it is a distillation of the genre to its basics: two losers roam around looking for a good time. As they drive aimlessly around New Jersey, they have strange visions of beautiful women just out of their reach, while self-satisfied white people mock them at every turn. I was reminded of those days in high school and college when my crew and I used to drive around aimlessly, speculating how the right girls were waiting for us around 4:00 am when the hip-happening place would magically de-cloak, if only we could find it.
No, instead of a plot, “Harold & Kumar” has an agenda: to breezily look upon the plight of America’s “well-behaved” minorities (Asians and Indians) when they hit their twenties. Because there’s been no after-school special about them and few popular movies where they don’t play bumbling ethnic sidekicks, Asians and Indians are still a conundrum to the mainstream, making for distinctly middle-class scenes of awkwardness. They are out-and-out picked on by homophobic bullies along the way, but mostly Harold (John Cho of “Better Luck Tomorrow”) and Kumar (Kal Penn) have to navigate more subtle racial divides.
In their nocturnal quest to find White Castle, they get lost, beat up their car, pick up a hitchhiker, get bullied by cops and the same pack of obnoxious skateboarders, and are lured into the lair of a guy named Freakshow, who has a beautiful, kinky wife. The highpoint of their odyssey, however, is Kumar’s lotus-eater vision of what life would be like if he married a giant bag of weed, a sequence that blinded me with laughter and had me punching a table with delight. This is a four-star scene in a three-star movie, which explains my probable over-rating of the whole experience.
All this culminates in a bizarre speech given by Kumar in which the immigrant experience is unapologetically connected to the consumption of greasy, bad-for-you American fastfood, and the nearly-religious relish with which Harold & Kumar finally consume it proves that, while the “real” Americans may not call them Americans, they can’t possible be real Koreans or Indians either. I’m sorry if I ruined the ending for you, but if they didn’t succeed, the only other suitable ending would be that they should die noble deaths trying.
As the two leads, Cho and Penn have an easy, utterly convincing chemistry, with Cho as the straight man (responsible and insecure) and Penn as the goofy one (we find him naked and using Harold’s nose hair-clippers to trim his nethers). In a strange way, “Harold & Kumar” might recreate, in its audience, that same exciting breath of fresh air that came over audiences in the early 1970s, when genre films that had grown stale under mainstream filmmakers came to life again by putting African-Americans in the lead roles. It’s no accident that the obnoxious co-workers and extreme sports guys who plague Harold and Kumar look like the typical heroes to movies like this, and “Harold & Kumar” even plays a quick trick by starting on two white guys instead of its real heroes.
“Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle” is a genre film done well, reminding us why the formal conventions exist in the first place, instead of just following them blindly. The film is also sophisticated enough artistry that it really made me want to get high.
Finished Thursday, July 7th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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