Director David Gordon Green has one of the most unique filmmaker voices of the 21st century. Snow Angels, All the Real Girls and George Washington are beautiful films, which all have clear influences, but also stand on their own as a piece of a distinct voice. In 2008 Green took a surprising turn. With Pineapple Express, he made a pot and violence-fueled buddy action comedy. It went down as one of the best of the decade in its genre. Earlier this year, Green’s fantasy film homage Your Highness didn’t fare as well. It was endearingly odd and fun, but went fast and unnoticed.
His newest babysitting comedy, The Sitter, will disappear from one’s mind even faster. The tonal shifts from Pineapple Express is gone. The bizarreness of Your Highness, even more so, is nowhere to be found. Making a conventional comedy, if funny, is perfectly acceptable. However, a boring one scattered with missed opportunities is not.
How a filmmaker like Green, with the actors and concept at hand, makes a comedy this dull is a mystery. The Sitter plays it safe, but within that safety hardly any laughs are captured. There are no baffling bursts of violence or dirty action set pieces, both admirably featured in Green’s two previous comedies.
The story is the basic babysitting-turns-to-chaos structure. Every expected beat is hit, in a clunky and stilted way. The misadventures of semi-jerk Noah Griffith (Jonah Hill) are always tonally off. Green never seems sure whether to push the meanness and darkness he’s capable of or going the safe and plain route, and he chooses the latter most of the time.
The Sitter only has energy once Sam Rockwell appears, playing the bi-polar drug dealer Karl. Rockwell is the oddball factor for the film, and every bizarre character trait Karl has, Rockwell revels in. By the end, one wishes Green instead made the Karl the drug dealer story, not the bland Noah Griffith story. Green is more than capable at making a narcissistic jerk empathetic and even a smudge likable, but none of those traits could be used to describe Noah. The combination of Green and Hill should have made for something special, and the promise of that team up didn’t come together in the way it should have; the whole film comes off that way, actually.
I find it snobbish when someone labels Green as a “sellout” for making these studio comedies. The director’s passion is shown in Pineapple Express, the messiness of Your Highness, and his work on Eastbound & Down, but this time around his voice is sorely lacking from the screen.
The Sitter is now in wide release.