Both Kenny and Ronnie are severely unbalanced individuals who routinely treat everyone around them with utter disdain and disregard. And because of that, I find it very hard to laugh with or at them. If anything, I want to get these characters some psychiatric help. Kenny, for all his pomposity and vitriol, is, for the most part, just a harmless blowhard unless you really piss him off. Ronnie, on the other hand, is more than just an asshole, he’s mentally unbalanced and extremely dangerous (as the many people he severely wounds during the course of the film can attest). If Observe & Report had ended with Ronnie going on a mall wide shooting spree I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit surprised.
I guess that’s sort of the point, though. Compared to just about every character Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell have ever played, what Ronnie does in Observe & Report is pretty much par for the course. But the world Ronnie Barnhardt lives in and the people around him are relatively normal, unlike the world and characters of a Sandler or Ferrell film. Behavior that goes uncommented upon in those films really stands out in Observe & Report precisely because everyone around Ronnie is so recognizably normal. Thus the film becomes something of a dissection of what mainstream comedy has become and what and who a mainstream audience will laugh at.
That said, it still doesn’t explain why people would find the film funny. If the point of the film is to examine why audiences find disturbing and dangerous behavior funny, laughing at that behavior implicates you as part of the problem. Hill seems to be suggesting that if you laugh at any of the terrible stuff Ronnie does in Observe & Report (random beatings, date rape, attempted murder, etc.) then you’re missing some vital component of your emotional DNA.
But that makes very little sense to me. Why would someone make a film that’s only real function is to critique and insult its core audience? Is the whole thing an elaborate prank? (i.e. See how I can insult these idiots and still get them to laugh hysterically.) Or does Hill really think this stuff is funny? If it’s the former, then I guess Hill is something of a mad genius. Though why he’d spend so much time and effort to make a movie that his target audience will mostly misinterpret is beyond me. If it’s the latter, then Observe & Report is perhaps the most disturbing mainstream movie ever made.
And the film has no shortage of disturbing material in it. Take, for instance, the scene where Ronnie has vigorous sex with what appears to be a comatose Brandi (Anna Faris) (complete with vomit crusted on her pillow). After a few seconds—presumably to allow the audience to recover from the shock of what they’re seeing—Brandi comes to and yells at Ronnie to keep going before appearing to pass out again. The initial fifteen seconds of the scene, wherein it appears that Ronnie is raping Brandi (and a pretty good argument can be made that even though she wakes up briefly, what Ronnie is doing is still statutory rape) are so deeply horrifying that I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly laugh when Brandi wakes up and commands Ronnie to continue.
But some people in the audience I saw the film with did laugh. And I just don’t know what to make of that. Is Hill trying to see how far he can push the envelope before it becomes too disturbing for anyone to laugh? Or is he saying that there are no boundaries in comedy? Or is he after something much deeper? We can’t, for the most part, help when we laugh. So maybe Hill is using something incredibly disturbing as a punchline in order to get the viewer to question why they’re laughing in the first place.
I’d like to think that’s what he’s going for. But any argument to that effect is seriously undercut by the film’s ending. In it Ronnie finally catches up to the flasher who has been ‘terrorizing’ his mall and promptly shoots the man at point blank range. Then, with gallons of blood covering the floor, everyone begins to applaud. Ronnie then hauls the severely wounded man to his feet and drags him down to the police station where he is greeted with approval for his actions from the cops. By treating Ronnie ultimately as a hero for his violently disturbed behavior, Hill lets the audience completely off the hook. If the rest of the film really is an examination and critique of the man-child idiocy of most mainstream comedy (at least of the Stiller, Sandler, Ferrell variety), ending the film this way allows the audience to leave the theater without having to think much about what they were just laughing at. Since the characters within the film all end up approving of Ronnie’s behavior, the audience is invited to feel the same way about him. If the extremely unsettling things Ronnie did earlier in the film can be ignored by the other characters, then they can just as easily be ignored by the audience. And, again, I’m left wondering what the point of all this was.
An argument could be made that, just like in Taxi Driver (clearly a huge influence on this film), what the audience sees in the last ten minutes only happened that way in Ronnie’s mind. In fact, there is some textual evidence to support the theory that much of what the audience sees in the film didn’t really happen that way. (For instance, Ronnie is the only person still conscious after both the date rape scene and the scene where he severely wounds a group of drug dealers, and therefore he’s the only one who really knows what happened.) But if the ending (or even much of the film) is subjectively told from Ronnie’s perspective, it still has the same effect. The audience is still invited to ignore everything that came before it and view Ronnie as a hero.
I guess the ending could just have been an easy way for Hill to secure major studio backing for Observe & Report. If the film had ended the way it looked like it was going to (with some sort of mass murder), no one would have come near it. But the ending so undercuts everything it seemed like Hill had been trying to say with the first two thirds of the film that it leaves the distinct impression that maybe Hill wasn’t trying to say anything particularly insightful about what we find funny or who we like to laugh at. And if he wasn’t going for that, then he really was trying to get people to laugh at an extremely unbalanced individual beating up a group of teenage skateboarders, knocking out an Arab man just because his skin is brown, assaulting police officers, having sex with an unconscious woman and shooting an unarmed man. The implication that I should be laughing at any of this is probably the most disturbing thing I’ll see in a movie all year.
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