Vince Vaughn talks and Will Ferrell takes his clothes off, and for long stretches that is enough. Todd Phillips has also written a plot about a dean and a zoning rule, and he cares about it no more than we do.
Todd Phillips wants Old School to be Animal House for men who have started to go bald. Mitch Martin (Luke Wilson) has been humiliated by his girlfriend and has rented a house on a campus. Frank Ricard (Will Ferrell) has been married about a week and already misses drinking. Beanie Campbell (Vince Vaughn) has a wife, a son and a business, and treats the house the way a lawyer treats a loophole. The script by Phillips and Scot Armstrong gets about forty minutes out of this before it has to find a plot, and the plot is where the film goes wrong.
Vaughn is the reason it works when it works. He talks the way other actors run, in long flat bursts of salesman’s patter, and Beanie is a man who has never lost an argument because he has never stopped to have one. He covers his small son’s ears before swearing and says “earmuffs” first, and the film gets three good laughs out of the word alone. When Phillips lets him negotiate, with the dean, with his wife, with bored undergraduates, the film moves.
Ferrell has the scene everyone remembers. Frank, a few drinks into Mitch’s party, announces that everyone is going streaking, strips, and jogs off down the road with nobody behind him. We laughed out loud: the joke is not the nakedness but the pride on Ferrell’s face, and the several seconds it takes the pride to leave. He plays Frank as a large, gentle man who has been told to grow up and cannot see the point, and when Marissa (Perrey Reeves) finds out what he has done, the hurt on both faces is real. Wilson is the straight man and is given nothing but straightness.
Mark Irwin lights everything flat and bright, so the house, the campus and the dean’s office all look like the same television set; nothing is ugly and nothing is worth looking at twice. Clark Hunter’s production design fills the house with wood panelling, borrowed mattresses and a hot tub. Nancy Fisher puts Frank in tucked-in polo shirts and khakis, the uniform of a man who has surrendered. Michael Jablow cuts the film as a string of sketches: a scene runs until the joke lands and then we are somewhere else. Theodore Shapiro’s score is sparse and the film leans on pop songs instead, a fair decision for a comedy about men who peaked at nineteen.
The plot is the trouble. Jeremy Piven’s Dean Pritchard wants the house back, and the film becomes a sequence of tests the new fraternity must pass, set pieces rather than a story. Piven plays him as a nasal whiner and nothing more. Ellen Pompeo’s Nicole is a prize to be won back from Craig Kilborn’s Mark. The taste problem arrives early: Mitch wakes up after the party next to Darcie (Elisha Cuthbert) and learns the next day that she is his boss’s daughter and still at school. Phillips plays this as a wince for Mitch. We did not laugh, and the film does not notice that it asked us to. The one who survives all this is Joseph “Blue” Pulaski (Patrick Cranshaw), an old man who pledges because nobody has ever asked him to join anything, and Cranshaw plays him with a sweetness the film around him lacks. The second half takes turns we will not describe.
Phillips made Road Trip three years earlier, and this is that film with better actors and the same nerve. Animal House came out in 1978 and did not care whether anyone approved of it; Old School cares a good deal, and by the last act has started apologising for its first. The reviews so far have been cooler than we are, and we can see why: as storytelling it barely holds together. But it runs 92 minutes, it has two clowns who know what they are doing, and it has more lines people still say to each other than most comedies manage in twice the time.
Watch it with someone who will say those lines along with it. Alone, you will notice how long the gaps between the jokes are.
