Sitter a Hysterical Babysitting Adventure
In order for his mother (Jessica Hecht) to have a night out on the town, college-aged slacker son Noah Griffith (Jonah Hill) agrees to babysit Pedulla kids Slater (Max Records), Blithe (Landry Bender) and the recently adopted Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez) even though he knows he’s far from qualified to do so. When his selfish girlfriend Marissa (Ari Graynor) offering sex if he’ll pick her up a few ‘party favors’ and meet her at a downtown New York shindig, Noah packs the kids into the minivan and heads into the city, exactly what he was told not to do by the trio’s parents.
Jonah Hill (front right) in The Sitter © 20th Century Fox
From there things spiral more and more out of control as the minivan gets stolen, a kiddie clothing store clerk mistakes him for a pedophile, Rodrigo starts blowing up restaurant bathrooms with cherry bombs, Slater is having anxiety (and sexual identity) issues and Blithe keeps wanting to tart herself up like a pre-pubescent prostitute. Worse, the group has engendered the ire of bodybuilding drug dealer Karl (Sam Rockwell), and if they can’t come up with $10,000 the last thing any of them are going to have to worry about is Mrs. Pedulla (Erin Daniels) being angry about the kids staying up past their collective bedtimes.
Make no mistake, even though it’s not given any credit and I doubt director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, George Washington) or screenwriters Brian Gatewood or Alessandro Tanaka would admit to it, the R-rated descent into New York darkness comedy The Sitter is nothing more than a remake of the 1987 cult favorite Adventures in Babysitting. It more or less follows the exact same template, and while there aren’t any ‘Thor’ references, no one has to sing the Blues and no one is dangling off a building during the climax, by and large it’s pretty much the same. The beats are similar, the progressions are similar and the ultimate destination is almost identical, and other than the fact this one is a heck of a lot more foul-mouthed, racy and sexually suggestive to say there aren’t any parallels between one to the other would be an outright lie.
With that being said, The Sitter is shockingly successful at crafting laughs and engendering sympathies, mixing up the ribald and the emotional in a way that is far more effective than I’d ever have imagined it would have been before entering the theatre. Green rebounds from the disaster of Your Highness soundly while Gatewood and Tanaka’s script is surprisingly solid and endearing in all the ways that matter. The movie is funny right from the start, tells its story economically and never comes close to wearing out its welcome. I had a great time watching it, and much like Hill’s Get Him to the Greek I imagine it’s going to hold up on repeat viewings pretty darn well.
What’s best is the line Green and company walk, the way they are able to straddle the limits of bad taste without ever falling into the pit transforming the film into something distasteful or disturbing. Sure this isn’t politically correct, and yes the filmmakers put their mostly pre-teen characters into situations that could potentially be disastrous, but it all kind of works rather effectively, even the more objectionable bits grounded in an emotional sensitivity that’s nicely appealing. The melodrama is never laid on too thickly, the life-lessons delivered with an unforeseen subtlety, and even when Green and company push the boundaries they do so in a way that feels grounded in reality and truthful to the characters and their respective journeys.
The movie is slight, that almost goes without saying, and it isn’t like Hill isn’t playing a character or going through motions we haven’t seen from him time and time before. But there are laughs to be found, lots of them, but on top of those there is also warmth, courage, heartache, loneliness and love. The movie moves quickly but with consistency, never giving its minivan full of protagonists the short shrift. It all works, sometimes magically, and by the time it was over I was moderately awestruck by just how entertained by it all I ultimately was.
The Sitter won’t make anyone’s list as one of 2011’s best. It is doubtful we’re going to be talking about for very long after its theatrical release has come to end and its Blu-ray due date has been announced. But that doesn’t make it bad, and it certainly doesn’t make it a misfire. Green, Hill and everyone involved has done their job and then some, and if the stars align just right and the comedy gods have their say it wouldn’t be a shock if two decades from now this one has an underground following just as big and as passionate as Adventures in Babysitting does.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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