I'm willing to concede that I don't completely get it, but I'm still game to think about it because Pineapple Express has a peculiar pedigree. It boasts David Gordon Green as its director and his regular DP Tim Orr is in charge of shooting the gross-out gags and stone-faced stoner riffs. The union makes the most sense if we read the film as a throwback/homage to the seventies cycle of grindhouse exploitation flicks (doobies and dismemberment), thus explaining the old-school wipes and funkadelic soundtrack, the mote-flecked cinematography, the cruel violence, and, if it's even possible, the air of reality throughout. Otherwise, the picture feels like a cynical patchwork stitching together this new comedy genre with a sensibility specifically designed to mock it. When über-stoner Saul (James Franco, in his Spicoli/The Dude breakout) runs through the dark woods, the flash I get isn't to Cheech & Chong but to the convulsive opening of Green's Undertow. And during an ending in an abandoned government research facility-turned-subterranean pot greenhouse, I couldn't shake Green's odd relationship with Asian stereotyping (remember the Feng Shui character from All the Real Girls?) in a troupe of black-clad Asian assassins clearly established as objects of derision. In truth, however, I don't know if the derision is levied at Asians or at the criticism levied against Green's perceived derision of the same.

Putting pomo justifications for Green/Orr taking a dip in the Apatow trickle aside, Pineapple Express finds lumpen process server Dale (Seth Rogan) and his drug dealer Saul on the run from bad cop Carol (Rosie Perez) and evil kingpin Ted (Gary Cole) after Dale accidentally witnesses a gangland assassination. Dale likes talk radio, weed, his 18-year-old girlfriend (Amber Heard), and dressing up in costumes--all of which sets the stage for either Fletch or The Man With One Red Shoe, though neither possibility (for a self-described master of disguise fighting crime or a Chauncey Gardener doing the same accidentally) is explored much. What happens instead is a lot of Super Troopers-grade stoner gags tied together by a performance from Franco that has the misfortune of being familiar and human in the middle of a lot of low-aspiring blarney. Yet the idea persists that the picture isn't actually low-aspiring--that there's this tipping point in the midst of all the tired gross-out/dumb-guy crap where everything falls over into queasy, self-reflexive fascination. The extreme violence recalls the Southern Gothic of Undertow; the awkward disintegration of a romantic relationship from dysfunction to disaster (in the flick's best moment) All the Real Girls; and the almost complete lack of a conventional sense of humour Green's entire oeuvre.

Whatever intrigue Pineapple Express possesses has a lot to do with that friction between the Seth Rogan/Evan Goldberg screenplay and the Green/Orr interpretation: the one slotted comfortably into now-familiar motions, the other incapable of not making a seventies picture thick with sadness. It's a difficult match to reconcile unless pot's paranoia-giving properties suggest a clearer link to the paranoia pieces of the '70s. I'm a real admirer of Green--I'm thrilled he's been tabbed to direct the Suspiria remake: Green should only be involved in films with roots in the seventies; and though he's never shown much propensity for comedy, he's making a case for himself with his surrealism, fairytale fantasy, and gore. Pineapple Express is sadistic and puerile and completely functional as the exact photonegative of what it's intended to be. It attacks Apatow comedies as the shallow constructs they are while attacking simultaneously the buddy picture and the stoner goof. Whether that's a result of intentionality or, more likely, the product of Green's inability to do any other kind of film than the David Gordon Green indie is immaterial. What remains is this odd, orphaned thing designed to squeeze cash from its hapless quarry--the title, after all, refers to a rare marijuana hybrid you buy for a few bucks and then, poof!: gone with just a dry mouth, a sense of mild anxiety, and a loss of time to show for it.-Walter Chaw

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Published: August 8, 2008