Very Bad Trip (The Hangover)

When I saw the title to this one, I laughed outloud. What was it with the titles of these movies I was seeing? For a trip that began with Gomorra, and then went on to Drag Me to Hell, I was beginning to wonder if the universe was trying to tell me something.

I saw this on a hot sunny afternoon in Claira, walking along the country road through the vineyards to get to the Carrefour big box center by the highway as had become my custom. I'd learned that on Mondays and Thursdays, you only have to pay five and half euros at the Mega CGR. By this time too, I'd also learned to close my nostrils when enterring the basement men's room at the multiplex, due to the stench of the open urinal---something that would be quite unacceptable in most neon-drenched American multiplexes. I'm always amazed at the little cultural differences.

By the way, the title Very Bad Trip is correct. That is, the French title of this movie is actually a different phrase in English. Go figure. Later I learned from the father of Vero's two youngest children---a guy named "Napo" who pretends to be Napoleon, and with whom I had very long and interesting talks about the history of Europe and the United States---that "trip" in French is used, as in English, to refer to drug trips, in particular LSD.

The narrative was fairly easy to follow, although I struggled to keep up with the dubbed dialogue. The ease was somewhere in between Drag Me to Hell (easy to follow) and Transformers 2 (hard to follow).

The story is ostensibly about a bachelor party trip to Las Vegas, taken by a groom and three of his budies on the eve of his wedding in southern California. This would normally make the groom the protagonist, but in fact he disappears for most of the movie. Much of the plot revolves around the groomsmen trying to locate the groom in Las Vegas after a drunken night, the details of which they do not remember.

The narrative structure puts the wedding itself as "story A," revolving around the tension of whether the groomsmen will find the groom and return to California in time for the wedding.

The strength and novelty of the story is that the real story is "story B," which centers on Stu (Ed Helms) one of the groomsmen. Stu is the quintessential Postmodern timid weakling, married and at the mercy of an overbearing wife who keeps him on a leash.

The movie thus masquerades as a crude guy-oriented comedy, pulling out all the stops of baseness to shock and gain laughs at the same time. But in reality, it is a very cynical commentary on the state of modern American marriage, pushed the extreme in which the weak husband has been reduced to just another dependent child of a wife rendered angry by having to be the "man" of the family. She treats him like an idiot (which he accepts) and refuses him all forms of affection.

Stu's story, and his journey, form the real narrative of the film. This is illustrated by the fact its resolution forms the true climax of the movie, when he confronts his wife and dumps her during the wedding reception (after the wedding itself, which normally would have been the climax of the movie).

This was a very clever trick on the part of the screenwriters, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, whose work as a team centers on dysfunctional romantic relationships. This was their crudest work to date, and probably the funiest, but it was also the most cynical. I'm not surprised it was their most successful.

The structure of the story had plenty of good set-up-pay-off, in particular the use of a statue to foreshadow the location of the missing groom.

On a personal note, I couldn't help laugh at the fact that of four movies I had seen in Europe, two had featured Mike Tyson. Go figure. Now that feels like an acid trip.

About a week later, on July 3, I bid my friends in Claira goodbye and gave Vero a big hug, telling her I'd try to return to France as soon as possible. After a three-hour train trip, I was in Toulouse at the train station straddling the Canal du Midi. After a short bus trip, I was at the airport, and then on an Aer Lingus flight up to Dublin.

I have to admit that as far as movies were concerened, I was looking forward to being back in an English speaking country. It was fun to see Hollywood movies dubbed into French, but I sometimes felt I was missing out on some of the finer details of the story contained in the dialogue.

The irony is that I left France without actually seeing a French movie. Somehow none of them were compelling. In this regard, I was very much like the contempary French youth, who pass over the products of their native country to flock to Hollywood releases.