Zack and Miri Make a Porno

What can brown do to you?

Grade: B

Director: Kevin Smith

Starring: Seth Rogan, Elizabeth Banks, Jason Mewes, Craig Robinson, Traci Lords, Katie Morgan, Jeff Anderson, Brandon Routh, and Justin Long

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 41 minutes

Attend any wedding and you are likely to hear intoned 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, and I reasoned like a child. But, when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Leave it to the director of Dogma to ignore the tenets of The Good Book and attempt to marry scatology with a charming love story in his latest satirical laugh riot, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Indeed, the now 38-year-old Kevin Smith, already the mores-pushing mind behind the Clerks films, sees American society’s slowly expanding standards of decency as an invitation to further indulge his adolescent impulses.

So, Smith now adds frontal nudity and simulated sex to the usual panoply of “crude content, strong language, and drug content” that accompany his films’ predictable R-rating. Smith deserves a measure of commendation to the extent his in-your-face comedic brand is a continuing harangue against the prudish, highly subjective power the Motion Picture Association of the America wields via their movie ratings system. [Indeed, only a successful appeals board hearing spared the film from an NC-17 rating.] And, when NBC, with the urging of the NFL, excised the words “Make a Porno” from a commercial for the film that ran during the network’s Sunday Night Football telecast, Smith astutely noted that the NFL’s demand for “family-friendly” ads includes those peddling erectile dysfunction medication.

But, when full scale T&A supplants a storyline rather than complimenting it, a fictional send-up about making a porno begins to adopt the tedium of watching an actual porno. For well over 30 minutes, Smith flashes his knack for crafting engaging characters in a distinctive setting. Zack (Seth Rogan) and his longtime friend and hopelessly single housemate, Miri (Elizabeth Banks), suffer the hardscrabble economic woes of their Pittsburgh hometown. Part-time coffee shop and shopping malls gigs cannot keep the utilities running or the bills from piling high. Desperation and an offhanded joke combine to conjure inspiration as the BFFs decide to cure their cash flow problem by making and marketing a porno.

During our difficult economic times, there was apt opportunity for Smith to interject social commentary into the guilty giggles and Zack and Miri’s eventual romantic evolution. Instead, there is something a bit creepy about not merely the gleeful eagerness with which Zack and Miri embark on their illicit endeavor (presumably, neither has any immediate family within earshot, at least none we ever meet), but even more the almost perfunctory air of their casting call. A world of prospective participants beat a path to their door (including two played by (ex-)porn actresses Traci Lords and Katie Morgan), members of a hoi polloi ready to prostitute themselves at a moment’s notice. Perhaps Smith’s aim is to desensitize the stigma attached to adult entertainment, particularly in the United States. But, how much more honest and intriguing would it have been if the rest of Zack and Miri’s troupe grappled with the same crisis of (self-)conscience as their producers?

Still, Zack and Miri isn’t a movie about making a porno; it’s a movie about making movies. And, Smith clearly sees an extension of himself in Zack, whose slovenly existence only springs to life once he discovers his passion for filmmaking. Moreover, Smith’s renowned pop-cultural references abound both broad – Zack and Miri’s original project is titled Star Whores, with characters named Hung Solo, Darth Vibrator, and ICUP – and biting – when Zack’s attempt to a glean porn title from Brokeback Mountain fails, he asks, “What, too soon?”

Smith’s schizophrenic narrative almost fatally unravels, particularly about the time a bit of anal with a constipated actress spills egesta onto a cameraman lying below the coitus. Later, a tender moment between Zack and Miri is interrupted by their fully frontal buddy (Jason Lewes) and his discussion over the intricacies of a “dutch rudder.”

One person saves Zack and Miri Make a Porno: Elizabeth Banks. Wallowing for years in bit movie parts and irregular TV roles, Banks makes the most of her first legitimate shot as a headliner. Her laugh is joyful, her tears seep sincerity, and her smile lights up the screen. Smith gets away with delving so deeply in toilet humor at the expense of fully developing Zack and Miri’s budding attraction because it is inconceivable that any red-blooded man wouldn’t fall head-over-heels for Banks. She is an oasis of enchantment within a desert of vulgarity, and she gives a movie full of sex its true sex appeal.

Neil Morris