No Ambition
Lame Slackers is full of quirks, devoid of a point
Somewhere in the world of cineastes, some otherwise intelligent person is going to love Slackers. It’s an understandable phenomenon. Hipsterdom has become infected with the idea that it’s easy to like what the tastemakers like and to hate what they hate, but that it takes a truly original thinker to find virtue in some half-assed, wannabe-anarchic vulgarity. But whatever virtues Slackers has are on the surface—easy to spot and easy to wipe off.
The film has an interesting cast. Final Destination’s Devon Sawa, Freaks and Geeks’ Jason Segel and Ameritrade shill Michael Maronna (of Nickelodeon’s cult favorite The Adventures of Pete and Pete) play three college seniors who’ve figured out every scam to coast to graduation with a minimum of studying and financial outlay. Rushmore star Jason Schwartzmann plays their intensely awkward classmate “Cool Ethan,” who has uncovered one of their schemes and threatens to notify the authorities unless the trio help him score with a bright beauty played by model James King.
The wan King aside, this is a distinctive collection of faces and personalities, and there’s some fascination in watching the dark-shaded, actively grating Schwartzmann play off the agreeably minimalist Sawa, the looming, penetrating Segel and the off-tempo Maronna. Toss in some genuine outrageousness—an orchestral version of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” a sponge bath for topless septuagenarian Mamie Van Doren, a bit of ventriloquism with a sock-covered penis, a doll made of human hair, not one but two musical performances by Schwartzmann—and it’s easy to see how someone who dug filmic perversions like Freddy Got Fingered or Pootie Tang might decide that Slackers offers wild, transgressive laughs.
But like those two only intermittently interesting misfires, Slackers gets done in by an essential laziness and rootlessness. Writer David Steinberg and director Dewey Nicks have clearly dipped their toes in the “slobs against the snobs” aesthetic of early ’80s comedies, but their heroes don’t fit in any recognizable category. They’re neither underestimated outcasts nor due-for-a-comeuppance jerks. Are they supposed to be brilliant? Misguided? Well-liked? Are we supposed to cheer their chicanery or cluck our tongues? And what is this sort of beat-the-system behavior supposed to say about the system, or the beaters?
Before we have much of a chance to determine the filmmakers’ attitude toward the characters, Slackers coasts into a low-ambition “boy deceives girl, then falls in love with girl, then loses her when she finds out about the deception, then wins her back when he shows how he’s changed” scenario—only with slightly more farting, incomprehensible star cameo dream sequences and comic gay paranoia than usual. Which leaves only Schwartzmann’s Cool Ethan to provide a note of nervy unpredictability, and some small reason to watch. Even though there are a few chuckles in moments like Cool Ethan explaining that he volunteers at a soup kitchen because “I work in food service, and I like bums,” they’re negligible chuckles. Anyone who’d champion Slackers is only validating the miniscule, the slight, the willfully underrealized.
—Noel Murray
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