Review: The Sitter

The elephant in the room, as it were, when discussing David Gordon Green’s newest comedy The Sitter is, like it or not, his star Jonah Hill’s girth. His heft, which was of minor interest at the beginning of his career placing him-fairly or not-as it did at the new end of a long line of “fat guy” comics, is thrown into sharper relief by the fact that we have all by now seen the new much smaller Jonah Hill giving interviews and hosting awards shows. Dude is normal-sized now, which is odd, as actors are not supposed to change. They’re supposed to look the same until they die, or until they stop getting hired whey they turn 34 if they’re a woman and we never have to see them again. 

Hill’s fatness in The Sitter marks it as the tail piece of the era of Fat Jonah, and it also marks the film out as… old stock, already spoiled by the date of its late release. It’s clear that the film was held back (it was originally slated to come out in the summer), and having seen it, it’s clear why: it’s a bad movie.

Fat Jonah is a fat funny guy almost completely unlike the fat funny guys who came before him. Belushi, Candy and Farley all unquestionably owned their space on screen: Belushi was graceful and dynamic, prone to scary fits of guitar-smashing violence while Farley echoed that dynamism and turned it into slapstick table-smashing, coat-ripping genius and Candy dominated his scenes with the sheer power of his affable charm. Hill has never used his size as a prop, he’s never gamboled or rolled or fallen through a piece of breakaway furniture. He’s used it as a foil for his own snarkiness: where Candy and Farley begged you to like them and Belushi posed an implicit threat, Fat Jonah was likeable because his dismissively smart wit was audacious coming from such a visibly unprepossessing source. He was a constant surprise, a physically awkward lump who could dish lines like a champ.

Fat Jonah in The Sitter, on the other hand, is all awkwardness and no wit. He’s a graceless walking apology for himself, an abased, embarrassed golem built up out of boomerang-child shame and willful lack of dignity, a lump given no one to charm. The film, supposed to be a Nasty Funky Hipped Up with Cocaine On It update of ‘80s “classic” Adventures in Babysitting of course sets itself up as a narrative through which Fat Jonah’s character can reclaim his pride and dignity. Or claim it rather than reclaim it, as it’s not clear he ever had any.

Hill plays the titular sitter Noah, a kicked-out-of-college 20-something living at home with his divorcée mother, doing nothing. He’s deluded about his relationship with his “girlfriend” (Ari Graynor) who uses him for oral sex and various errands. He’s guilted one Friday night into babysitting the three children of some family friends: the anxiety-ridden Slater (Max Records), the TMZ-obsessed Blithe (Landry Bender) and their adopted, facially-scarred pyromaniac brother Rodrigo. Of course, Noah is soon shepherding the kids across the terrors of night-time Manhattan, trying to chase down drugs for his girlfriend, and trying to run from a gay drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) he’s inadvertently angered.

 

To call it ugly would be an understatement. Its comic moments, what few there are, are borderline racist, using lazy stereotypes that seem way, way out of place in a film by a director who at least early in his career did original work. What are supposed to be clever, ironic inversions of genre conventions end up just being completely flat and occasionally offensive bits of bad filmic decision-making. Sam Rockwell’s drug dealer surrounds himself with oiled bodybuilders apparently employed as cocaine-cutters and body-oilers, who confusingly attack the kids’ minivan with hammers while Rockwell’s character makes a crack about El DeBarge. Noah takes the kids to a “black person bar” so filled with lurking Negroid menace and looming, tall rapper-types that he has to win their terrifying hearts by talking inexplicable jive and letting a woman punch him in the face. Of course, now he is in their gang and they will kick peoples’ asses for him, for some reason, which is an important, shameful plot point.

Of course the film has a few bones to throw to let us know it’s not actually racist: Noah has a black love interest (who doesn’t talk like a bad ass scary thug, though, phew), a character is revealed in a tender moment to be actually gay, which is totally normal etc. etc., and they just serve to make the rest of the film look worse, as their presence reveals that the film is the product of laziness rather than honest ignorance.

It’s baffling, a film that tries to coast by on hip snarky takes on ‘80s pop culture that at the same time is so full of lazy lazy racial and sexual stereotyping that it would have been singled out as bad filmmaking even back in the Adventures days. Fat Jonah closes the door on his fatness by being curiously inert, a moron version of the character he played in the much better Cyrus.

There’s moments in the film that remind us of why he was funny, of how he could own his space on the screen with his clever delivery: opening the door to two red-headed twins he calls back “Slater the two chicks from The Shining are here from you”, but they’re tiny brief moments of pleasure in a desert of bad jokes and lazy, cruel writing. It’s an exercise in shame, heaped out all around and in giant, fat-guy sized portions. Everyone involved has done better work, and will again soon, hopefully.