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Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: An Exercise in Time Forever Lost
One of my coworkers, Steve Seinfeld, once said to two loud gabbers outside his cubicle: "Here's five dollars. I want the last five minutes of my life back." After sitting through Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back last night, I had much the same reaction, except it's two hours I want back and Mirimax needs to pay me, not the other way around. I kept waiting in good faith for the movie to redeem itself and got nothing in return but a four-dollar rental bill and an overwhelming sense of wasted time as the credits began to roll.
What's so bad about this last installment of Kevin Smith's New Jersey series? Everything. Well, not quite everything. The technical aspects were fine, but in Hollywood, just about every picture has the cinematography, sound, and lighting bases covered as a matter-of-course. As Smith's early, shoestring-budget films attest, it's the creative content that really matters. And in this picture, it registers somewhere between stupid and tasteless.
The film talks the hip postmodern talk, but swaggers so inanely through the parody motions that it seems dumber, not smarter, than its targets. That's a neat trick: to make a parody of, say, Charlie's Angels that's less funny than the original. Must I point out the cardinal rule of satire for Mr. Smith? In order to spoof a subject, you have to present it within a sensibility that is hierarchically above - or at least outside of - the inane logic of the target. Otherwise, the audience won't be able to tell the difference between your mockery and the real thing and accuse you of tasteless homage.
Or, perhaps a mere definition of satire, lifted from Webster's Collegiate, will suffice: "A work in which vices, follies, stupidities, abuses, etc. are held up to ridicule and contempt." In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, nothing is held up to anything remotely resembling examination, that is, unless you count several private body parts. Rather, the whole affair sinks below the level of its basest pop cultural references.
So we watch, for an hour-and-a-half, two utterly stupid characters colliding with countless other stupid characters, going on a stupid journey, doing stupid things, and alluding to stupid shows or movies. All this without any overarching, wry sensibility to tie it all together. This film isn't Dumb and Dumber, it's Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, and Stupider. In fact, this film joins Darron Aronovsky's Pi as one of the few titles that is best expressed in mathematical, rather than English, terminology. Sadly, HTML does not support the character set required to express an infinite geometric sum of 'stupid' terms, or I could neatly re-name it in these pages. I shall leave the derivation of the series ratio as an exercise for the reader.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is all the more disappointing having come from the hands of a writer-director whose previous output included the excellent Clerks and Chasing Amy, films amazingly produced on budgets of $27,000 and $200,000, respectively. But whenever Smith goes big-time, things just seem to fall apart. His gritty bathroom humor is out of place amid the studio system gloss, a shtick that plays better within the context of independent production values. And perhaps more fundamentally, I suspect that after four Jersey films, Smith has run out of stories to tell and things to say.
Allegedly, that's what Smith originally thought after Dogma, but he was somehow persuaded to go one more with an ode to his two simpleton characters, Jay and Silent Bob. And there's actually nothing wrong with the idea. In fact, from much the same template (although with admittedly more regal starting material - Shakespeare's Hamlet), Tom Stoppard managed to draw up the brilliant Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But in order to re-frame your material around a pair of imbeciles, you must follow the rules of satire. Stoppard clearly knows this; Smith apparently doesn't.
Not that Kevin Smith is a lost cause, but maybe it's time for him to go to film school, or just take some time and read a few books in order to get a grip on the more advanced elements of narrative. He was already on the right track with Clerks and Chasing Amy, but as Jay and Silent Bob shows, the boy's in a rut and needs to grow as an artist. Given the financial success of his last two films, he can certainly afford to take time off to improve his craft. At the very least, the reduction of viewers' wasted time yielded by such an investment would be advisable on legal grounds alone.
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