Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex PassMongrel/Supplied
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Directed by David Wain
Written by David Wain and Ken Marino
Starring Zoey Deutch, John Slattery and Jon Hamm
Classification N/A; 93 minutes
Opens in select theatres July 10
Critic’s Pick
The career of filmmaker David Wain recalls an oft-repeated, perhaps apocryphal quote from musician Brian Eno, who, when describing the impact of Velvet Underground, said that the rock band’s first album “only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”
That same domino effect can be felt in Wain’s singularly absurd, highly influential work, which was rooted in the MTV sketch series The State and further metastasized into his comedy troupe Stella (along with key State members Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black) and the 2001 comedy Wet Hot American Summer. That last project was a bomb upon arrival – “It was so depressing I almost started to cry,” reads the Washington Post review – but would gradually pick up a second life with audiences hip to its surreal almost Dada-esque silliness. And some of those fans just happened to be the next generation of comedy all-stars, with Wet Hot’s legacy being felt in everything from the so-stupid-it’s-smart comedy of Adam McKay (Anchorman) and nearly everything ever aired on Adult Swim (especially Tim & Eric).
The 100 best Canadian movies ever made
But while the world of modern comedy owes a debt to Wain – if not for Wet Hot then at the very least for his brilliant 2014 comedy They Came Together, a rom-com spoof that essentially erases the impact of any rom-com past or present – the industry hasn’t exactly paid him in kind.
Sure, the director has been busy on television – with Netflix giving Wain not one but two serialized Wet Hot spinoffs – but he deserves to have at least the level of success that his old Stella compatriot Showalter has secured. (Although it’s anyone’s guess what Wain thinks of Showalter’s post-2020s output, including the drippy features Spoiler Alert, The Idea of You, and Oh.What.Fun.)
So, will the new comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass – Wain’s first feature in nearly a decade – be the project to finally give the filmmaker his zeitgeist-defining dues? I mean, probably not, given that a) its title is a mouthful, b) it’s being marketed all wrong by Sony Pictures Classics, a distributor that doesn’t seem to be even close to Wain’s wavelength, and c) it’s arriving in theatres during one of the busiest weekends of the year, a possible counterprogramming strategy that seems fated to go awry.
Yet for the Wain faithful – and anyone who is desperate for a comedy that sharpens and then pushes the comedy form – Gail Daughtry is a supremely goofy delight. The kind of comedy that throws out gags with the force and speed of a batting cage gone haywire, Wain’s film is so primed to make you lose control of yourself that the odds are simply in the movie’s favour. If one visual punchline doesn’t get you, the battery of non-sequiturs to follow will. It’s not a question of whether you will laugh or not, but how often.
Audiences familiar with the cadence of Wet Hot and They Came Together will surely get the most out of Gail Daughtry, but Wain also tips his hat early, introducing us to the title character, a naive small-town hairdresser (played by Zoey Deutch) who is engaged to, as evidenced by their on-screen love-letter correspondence, an extreme dolt named Tom (Michael Cassidy).
The couple eventually concoct a “hall pass” system, in which the two agree on celebrities that they could have affairs with, would the unlikely opportunity ever come to pass. Well, it isn’t long before Tom hooks up with his hall-pass, Jennifer Aniston (a veteran of Wain’s 2012 comedy Wanderlust), who happens to be in town to read from her bare-bones cookbook, which leads Zoey to travel to L.A. to fulfill her own sexual conquest: Mad Men star Jon Hamm.
Gail’s journey is filled with the kinds of wacky ups-and-downs and whoa-there coincidences that recall Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc?, but sped up and stretched past the point of any semblance of reality. The story is peppered with dubious Hollywood power players, Italian gangsters, past-their-prime paparazzi photographers, and even Hamm’s old Mad Men co-star John Slattery, playing an extremely disheveled version of himself.
It is all delightfully nonsensical stuff, but conceived and executed with neurosurgeon-level care. Every other line of dialogue is at once ridiculous and brilliant, the sheer irrationality of the material looping back into the most perfect punchline. And Wain has once again filled out his cast with State and Wet Hot all-stars, including Joe Lo Truglio, Thomas Lennon, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Perkins, and Ken Marino, who also co-wrote the script. (Stella’s Michael Ian Black also pops up, but oddly not Showalter.)
The ultra-game Hamm – who might have, in another, slightly less handsome life, been a Saturday Night Live mainstay – makes the very most of his object-of-affection role, and does so absent any sense of vanity or pride. And if you think you already know the ending to Gail Daughtry’s story, well, Wain ensures that his sense of transgression extends from one-liners to narrative construction. Nobody is playing by the rules here, which is exactly the point.
Don’t worry if you miss Gail Daughtry in theatres, though. You’ll hear about it from someone else, someone cooler, eventually.