Barry Munday (Patrick Wilson) has a goatee and tucks his shirt into his jeans. He likes boobs. He likes picking up women during happy hour at chain restaurants. He likes to watch his porn old school-style: on DVD while sitting on the couch, instead of streaming free on the internet. He really likes boobs. And soon into the film Barry Munday, an angry father assaults his crotch with a trumpet in a movie theater, because Barry is flirting with the man’s daughter. Barry wakes up in a hospital, his memory of the attack vanished along with his testicles.
What would a red-blooded American male do without his balls? That’s the probing question first-time director Chris D’Arienzo explores in this message movie masquerading as comedy. The answers it provides are sometimes enlightening, sometimes frustratingly hackneyed. The moral’s as weirdly shape-shifting as a nutsack.
Patrick Wilson’s career has been punctuated by roles that highlight sexuality but aren’t necessarily sexy. Like his closeted gay Mormon and republican in Angels in America or his sorta-pedophile in Hard Candy, his suburban everyman is complex and intriguing, even as he manages to put the pathetic in sympathetic. Before his castration, Barry was already entering into old creepster territory — it’s not that he stares at a pair of perfectly acceptable tits from across the street; it’s that he lowers his aerodynamic sunglasses and nearly drops his greasy slice of pizza into his khakis from the concentration he exerts.
Barry’s not interested in his office job, and he’s not serious about his longtime girlfriend, who he goes weeks without seeing. D’Arienzo successfully conveys how Barry is simply too old to have such relatively small twin goals in life. And now that he’s lost his jewels, even those perky handfuls no longer interest him. Thankfully, at least according to the film’s own weird logic, soon after the accident, Barry’s slapped with a paternity suit from a woman he doesn’t even remember having sex with. While Barry expresses some disbelief — Ginger (Judy Greer) isn’t his type, and the child, he thinks, looks kind of Asian — the pregnancy mostly functions as a wake-up call, since evidently breeding is the apogee of the human experience.
It’s disappointingly traditional a conclusion for a film featuring castration via wind instrument, but not altogether surprising. After all, like the vast majority of movies produced in recent years, Ginger doesn’t even for a moment consider getting an abortion, even though she initially loathes Barry and doesn’t seem to exactly have had an urge to get knocked up (she was a virgin!). Maybe, despite what they say, Hollywood is republican.
Still, though, Barry Munday has much to like. Ginger, for instance, is an incredibly compelling character, who upends the ugly duckling cliché even as she illustrates it. She gradually transitions from huge glasses to contacts, and weird bulky clothing to things with actual shapes, as she and Barry predictably move from a relationship of mutual loathing to romance. But, she reveals, both styles were acts: she enjoyed the anonymity that not being seen as a sexual object gave her and felt powerful because of it. For a movie whose Hollywood ending of coupledom extols a very traditional notion of fatherhood, it’s at least nice to have an acknowledgement that gender is simply a performance.
And speaking of, the nagging question of whether Barry can still perform? That’s one issue I’m grateful was resolved in a crowd-pleasing manner.
