It’s a shame that critics and audiences have wrongfully assumed that Observe & Report (2009) is either Seth Rogen’s version of Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) or some Judd Apatow adjacent stoner flick when it is actually one of the most pointed indictments of toxic, frustrated masculinity produced by Hollywood in this century. Observe & Report is a really dark comedy that manages to be endurable only because of Rogen’s oddball charms. When writing and directing Observe & Report Jody Hill looked to the portraits of psychologically damaged characters by Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader then found his De Niro in Rogen.
Hill very cleverly relocated the violent portraits of thwarted masculinity by Scorsese and Schrader from the Big Apple to the “anywhere U.S.A.” suburban shopping mall. New York is a romanticized location while the mall is so familiar that the wildly delusional character that Rogen plays becomes uncomfortably familiar and threatening. And it isn’t just Rogen’s mall cop who rings true with an uncomfortable truth, but also Ray Liotta’s police detective, and Anna Faris’ shop girl. Hill doesn’t spare anyone except for born-again Collette Wolfe.
Each of these characters exhibits the socially debilitating symptoms of frustration within their humdrum lives. For Rogen and Liotta these frustrations are externalized as physical violence while Faris’ character opts for emotional violence and physical self-destruction. Hill draws the moments when these characters can no longer restrain themselves out so as to render them as grotesquely violent and ultimately hilarious. But it’s that uncomfortable comedy that hits a bit too close to home.
Observe & Report doesn’t have the gloss or veneer of a Scorsese or Schrader film so the picture takes on the disposable look of your average comedy. But most comedies don’t confront the viewer with so many disturbing observations so rapidly. It’s a kind of Trojan Horse where the viewer goes in expecting something light and raunchy then gets instead something dark and mildly disturbing. Observe & Report, oddly enough, feels more current now in many ways than it did back in 2009 when so few comedies seemed to have a bone to pick with self-entitled chauvinists on a power trip.
Like it or not, the kind of guy that Seth Rogen plays in Observe & Report is everywhere and we have all met at least one of them. They come into your life and then it isn’t long before you wish that you had never met them. Hill’s decided that the best way to cope with people like this is to laugh at Seth Rogen imitating them. It’s not a bad idea really. It certainly makes for the best mall-centric movie since Mallrats (1995) and Chopping Mall (1986) before it. It’s time to give Observe & Report another chance.
