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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Bathroom humor and stoner jokes aside, this teen-pleasing, stereotype-challenging road movie has a lot to say about race in America today.
Jan 11, 2005 | When I saw Danny Leiner's "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," I knew it was good. But I didn't know how good it was until I saw James L. Brooks' "Spanglish."
"Harold & Kumar" isn't a social issues movie, as "Spanglish" is, and to treat it as one is to diminish the pure pleasure it gives as a work of unabashedly dumb stoner humor. Even when they're over the top, the gags in "Harold & Kumar" have a kind of Zen garden simplicity -- they don't demand brains or logic as much as a willingness to surrender to the corner of your brain that sometimes forgets how to spell words like "accommodate" and "likability." But Leiner ("Dude, Where's My Car?"), working with writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, also seems to be angling toward something bigger, not so much in what he says as in what he doesn't say. Race is an issue in "Harold & Kumar," but it's not the issue. Without lifting a finger to make its point, "Harold & Kumar" -- now out on DVD for those who missed it in theaters -- may have said more about race in America today than any other movie of last year.
Harold Lee (John Cho, who has appeared in "American Pie" and its two sequels, although this is his first starring role) is an analyst with a big investment firm; Kumar Patel (Kal Penn), his best friend and roommate, is brilliant enough to get into medical school without even trying very hard, but for now, he's more interested in hanging out and getting high.
By day, Harold and Kumar are your stereotypical children of Asian immigrants, bright young men who work hard (or who at least know, deep in their hearts, that someday they will work hard). But just when we've wedged them into one stereotype, they wriggle out of it and into another. By night, they're lazy potheads who slouch in front of the tube, becoming dazedly susceptible to fast-food commercials, specifically one for White Castle, in which a cascade of "sliders" and fries tumble forth seductively like a blessing from above by the Almighty Himself.
"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle"
Directed by Danny Leiner
Starring John Cho and Kal Penn
There's nothing for Harold and Kumar to do but hop into Harold's car (he brings his laptop with him, so he can get some work done along the way) and look for the nearest White Castle, which is farther away from their Somewhere, N.J., apartment complex than they think. And so "Harold & Kumar" becomes a road movie, a textbook example of that comic art form that we think of as distinctively American (although in reality its origins are probably not even necessarily Western).
The journey of Harold and Kumar, our two cannabis Candides, takes them first to the Princeton campus, where Kumar goes in search of more pot, while Harold gets roped into suffering patiently through a meeting with an Asian student group. (Even though it's just a laid-back gathering in a student common area, one of its participants insists on raising his hand, eagerly but politely, every time he wants to say something.)
Once the two are back on the road, Kumar, while making a necessary pit stop, encounters a weirdo who insists on peeing on the same bush he's chosen, and Harold is attacked by a crazed raccoon. Sometime later (and it's not giving away a whole lot to tell you this), Harold winds up in jail, where he and Kumar meet an ineffably polite African-American gentleman who has been arrested for being black; there he sits, his spectacles perched on his nose, absorbed in reading "Essays on Civil Disobedience." (At one point a group of officers storm his cell, yelling, "He's got a gun!" At which point he's forced to inform them that it's not a gun, but a book.)
"Harold & Kumar" is loaded with gross-out gags -- they begin with Kumar standing naked in front of a mirror and trimming his pubes with the fastidious Harold's manicure scissors, and progressively become more outlandishly crass: At one point two lusciously attractive Princeton women with English accents are overcome by what they call "the taco shits" and let loose in a public bathroom (conveniently, one in which Harold and Kumar are hiding from a cop) with an assortment of rip-snorters and room-clearers. There can be artistry in toilet humor, and Leiner knows how to make it work. (One of the DVD extras is a faux making-of featurette explaining how the sound designer on "Harold & Kumar" collected the menagerie of noises necessary to achieve total realism in the aforementioned "battle-shits" sequence.)
There are places where "Harold & Kumar" sinks to making cheaper shots than it should: For one thing, it's littered with a few too many one-note homophobic jokes (although, admittedly, it does recognize the lameness of those jokes by turning some of them inside-out). But elsewhere, "Harold & Kumar" stretches the boundaries of offensiveness in ways that both make us laugh and make us think.
