There’s a popular bit of Youtube film theory that’s been floating around for a few years now that goes something like this: “every movie is either the Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane” i.e., that every film is either an external hero’s journey or an internalized puzzle. (My colleague, Sammie Purcell, put a sharper point on it in a recent Letterboxd post: every movie really is the Wizard of Oz.) I think the overall theory is a touch too simplified in terms of film structure and the aims of scriptwriting, and really just a piece of provocation in general (where does a sprawling ensemble like Nashville fit in? Or a film of limited scope like 12 Angry Men?). Still, it makes for a fun critical exercise and does indeed map cleanly onto the latest effort from David Wain, he of Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models and other comedies of that specific wavelength and aughts-vintage.
To be honest, I feel a bit about Wain’s work the way I feel about Edgar Wright’s, something that I enjoyed very much – particularly Wet Hot – in my twenties and the turn of my thirties, but now am unsure how well any of it really holds up. Do I have the heart to ever revisit this stuff? Who can say? Wet Hot American Summer – First Day of Camp certainly sang out to me in that very different time, and when I balance Wain’s career trajectory against that of Michael Showalter (both alums of the sketch comedy series, The State, they co-wrote Wet Hot together), it shines a lot brighter by comparison. Still, I went into Gail Daughtry guarded, ready for another of my favorites to have not quite grown with me the way I’d hoped. The final verdict on the new adventure, one that doesn’t just echo The Wizard of Oz, but is an outright analogue of it, comes out cleanly in the wash, if a little frayed.
The idea at the heart of Gail Daughtry is so good, it makes for an excellent elevator pitch. The title character (Zoey Deutch) is a hair-stylist in a small, nondescript slice of Kansas suburbia. She and her fiance (Michael Cassidy! I love that guy!) jokingly toss off the idea of who their “celebrity sex pass” would be, and thanks to a perfectly-timed book signing, he gets to take advantage of it. Of course Gail is distraught and had no idea that her husband-to-be would take this seriously, and so she and her best pal Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) hop on a plane for Los Angeles to, among other things, help her even the score and let her take advantage of her own hall pass: Jon Hamm.
Okay Kyle, you mentioned Kansas, and Otto kinda sounds like Toto. But what does this have to do with the Wizard of Oz? Well, I’m glad you asked because you’re teeing me up for the next turn here. You see, Wain has always operated in a very heightened sense of reality, just clock Chris Pine’s character in First Day of Camp, or H. Jon Benjamin turning into a talking can of lima beans, just as examples, and in Gail Daughtry (I’m not writing the whole title again, thank you very much) this kind of broader wild-eyed, cartoon version of our world allows Wain to tool around with a Hollywood farce. Along the way, Gail and Otto get mixed up in a case of swapped brief cases, which puts them in the crosshairs of an evil criminal mastermind (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her two goons (one of which is another State alum in Joe Lo Truglio). But thankfully, their mortal peril is offset by the little found family they pull together: a CAA receptionist that doesn’t have the smarts yet to be an agent (Ben Wang), and a paparazzo that doesn’t have the heart to follow his real dreams of writing (the ever-brilliant Ken Marino, who cowrote the screenplay with Wain). Rounding things out is John Slattery, whose courage has been completely shattered post-Mad Men.
What transpires is something that toes right up to the line of its spoof inspirations like Airplane and The Naked Gun without veering full off that cliff. Wain can be a little hit and miss in terms of his overall comedic ratio, with his sincerity and bombast both occasionally getting the best of him. With Gail Daughtry, there are moments where the screenplay begins to strain just a touch, where moments like “John Slattery beating up a bunch of guys” or “Weird Al wielding a semi-automatic” probably seemed a lot more side-splitting on paper than it actually works out on screen. Still, those amusing at best turns are overshadowed by the script’s various one-liners and the cadence by which they’re delivered. At this point, Ben Wang feels increasingly like a revelation, and Tobie Windham gets the best repeating joke of the film, something the production team clearly realized as they turned it into an end-credits song.
There’s only so much one can say here of worth when it’s just a filmmaker and his cast and crew having a good laugh. I wish it looked better, as it has this ugly digital veneer that cheapens things a bit and makes you feel like you’re watching the latest Prime streaming offering rather than something worthy of one of our better comedic minds. But then Fred Melamed‘s postal worker/narrator pops in to increasingly chastize the audience in a way that started to bring me to tears, or Ben Wang says something like “this is a classic case of two guys on the ground” and all my other qualms start to recede into the ether.
A fun little trifle, but who am I to deny you that? I’d be a real flying monkey to do so.