Director Report Card: Barry Sonnenfeld (2006)

9. RV

Throughout the thirteen years I've been writing these Director Report Card reviews, I've found myself writing about some dire films. Occasionally, I'll find myself talking about a director who has made a handful of movies I really like, that I really want to talk about. And, sometimes, these same filmmakers have also directed a bunch of mediocre dross. I like to think that examining a director that has really high highs and abysmal lows teaches you something about the movie industry. About failure and compromise and complications. This is me looking on the bright side of Barry Sonnenfeld's ninth outing, “RV,” a wretched excuse of a family comedy. 

Once upon a time, Bob Munro was a happy family man. His daughter, Cassie, adored him. His son, Carl, looked up to him. His wife, Jamie, loved him dearly. Now Cassie is an obnoxious teenager who resents her father. Carl is a wannabe hip-hop kid who thinks his dad is lame. Jamie now believes Bob, a low-ranking executive at a soda company, works too much. That's all suppose to change on the big vacation to Hawaii the family has planned. A snag soon emerges. Bob's backbiting boss, who is plotting to replace him, insists Bob come to a potential merger with another company. Bob cancels the Hawaiian vacation and cooks up a scheme: He rents an RV and takes the family across country, a vacation that is actually a work trip in disguise. This goes horribly wrong.

Watching “RV,” I was desperate to latch onto something interesting about it. There's not a lot but one thing did stick out to me. In Sonnenfeld's “Big Trouble,” the protagonist had a teenage son who didn't respect him. By the conclusion of the movie, after going on this wacky adventure, parent and child discovered a newfound appreciation for one another. In “RV,” the protagonist has a teenage daughter who doesn't respect him. After another wacky adventure, parent and child similarly resume a close relationship. I know little about Barry Sonnenfeld's personal life. I don't even know if he's married, much less has kids. But is it possible he's inserting a pet theme, playing out some difficult parenting issues with his own offspring through these movies? Or are subplots about mediocre white guys with smart-ass teenage kids just an incredibly common element of middling studio comedies?

I'm more inclined to believe the latter. As a nineties kid who consumed a lot of forgettable family comedies in my childhood, I'm very familiar with a particular story element. Nathan Rabin calls them the “parenthood redemption comedy.” It's when a dad is focusing so much on his job, that he looses track of what matters most in life: The love of his family and especially his kids. This is such a common trope that “RV” isn't even the first Robin Williams movie to feature it. Never mind that, in real life, parents work a lot specifically so they can make sure their children are taken care of. Movies like this don't have time to actually consider the ramifications of real world responsibility. They are too busy mining real life conflicts for the laziest fictional conflicts imaginable.

What makes “RV's” supposed focus on the love between a father and his children seem especially insincere is that the Munro family is terrible to each other. From the second scene, Bob and Cassie are sniping at each other. She says hateful things to her dad and he, in turn, mutters passive-aggressive responses under his breath. The son is obsessed with rap and weight-lifting to the exclusion of everything else. Even husband and wife have a spiteful relationship, Bob lying to his wife in ridiculous ways while Jamie clearly treats her husband like he's an idiot. This is not a cute, funny family that really loves each other despite their differences. This is a band of people who greatly resent each other, who make no attempt to disguise their pure dislike for one another. 

The reason the Munro family is so toxic is because “RV's” world is one defined solely by contempt. All the characters in this movie hate each other. The movie hates all of them in turn. Every person here is terrible. Look at the Gornicke, the (seemingly) white trash family the Munros keep running into on their journey. They do shit like put people they've just met in headlocks or think shooting paintballs at a moving vehicle is a good way to get someone's attention. They are terrible but the way Bob and his family treats them in return – saying mean-spirited comments to them under his breath seconds after meeting, actively going out of their way to avoid them – seems disproportional. That's just the universe “RV” exists in, where everybody is awful to everyone all the time.

“RV' shows its seething misanthropy for all living matter in another way. On more than one occasion, the movie deploys graphic gross-out gags. The biggest of which is an absolutely vile sequence built around draining the RV's septic tank. When Bob discovers he doesn't have the right tubes for the job, a gang of redneck morons – another hateful stereotype – appear to “help” him. The joke goes on and on, more liquid shit spurting on-screen until it's literally raining from the sky. Robin Williams is splattered with poop, a sight absolutely no one should be exposed to. This is only the most notable example of “RV's” grotesque streak. There's also a joke about eating organ meat that climaxes with deer carcasses on-screen. I'm not against gross-out gags in movie but they need to be deployed with some wit or absurdity. Just tossing shit and entrails around produces nothing but repulsion. 

In some form, I suppose, “RV's” bathroom humor is indicative of a desire to be a big, wacky, live-action cartoon. There are many other jokes in this vein. Such as the RV smashing into a stone mailbox and a line of shopping carts. Or Bob riding a bicycle down a rough hillside until he smashes into a moving vehicle. This kind of humor can work, with some grace or conviction behind it, but “RV” just throws even bigger, uglier slapstick at us. Such as a scene where Bob wrestles with a group of wild raccoons in the RV, off-screen. Or the film's centerpiece, a long sequence devoted to Bob dangling off the RV as it rolls through the countryside. These jokes come off as sweaty, so desperate to make people light, so completely devoid of any intelligence. Smashing Robin William's face repeatedly into a windshield, with no meaning or timing behind it, is as bad as showering him with fecal matter. 

The only thing worst than a big, stupid “family-friendly” comedy – that just shovels shit and crappy slapstick at the viewer – is when those same films almost inevitably have a totally unearned sentimental side. Despite existing in a world that focuses on hate and humiliation, despite showing how the main characters all resent and dislike each other, “RV” tries to have it both ways. Half-way through the movie, Bob's wife and kids realize his road trip – which has been utterly hellish – actually isn't so bad. They actually start to have fun. They then start to treat each other will love and respect. Fuck you, movie. No. You can't spend 45 minutes in unrelenting horribleness and then swerve wildly in the whole other directions after that. That is insincere at most and disgustingly cynical at worst.

Since his very sad passing, Robin Williams has been re-evaluated and he's now a beloved figure for the countless laughs he gifted several generations with. But before that, in the twilight of his career, Robin Williams starred in a whole string of middling-to-terrible movies. “RV” is born of this era, this time of “License to Wed” and “Old Dogs.” These films underestimated Williams' greatest talents, his boundless energy and hyper-verbal delivery, by shackling him to boring characters and having him do big, terrible physical comedy. He tries. Like when a heart-to-heart with his son includes a mention of a “father/son extreme fighting duo.” But, too often, he's forced to do humiliating shit like rattle off a string of mangled hip-hop slang. It's depressing to watch someone so talented forced to perform material like this.

Despite its many, many flaws, “RV” is still a Barry Sonnenfeld film. So you can count on two things. The first of which is that it has a strong supporting cast. Jeff Daniels plays the patriarch of the Gornicke clan. Daniels apparently took the role due to his real life enthusiasm for recreational vehicles and banjo music. He seems visibly happy when singing and playing. Kristin Chenowith shows a similarly boundless, some might say over-the-top, comedic energy as his wife. Cheryl Hines is, if nothing else, totally believable as a spoiled suburban wife who not-so-secretly resents her husband. It's also notable that Joanna Levesque and Josh Hutcherson – otherwise known as tween pop star JoJo and the other guy from “The Hunger Games” – play the Munro kids. Neither show much in the way of charisma or comedic timing but it did amuse me how obviously Levesque was cast for her resemblance to Lindsay Lohan.

The second way you can tell this is a Barry Sonnenfeld movie is the use of the moving camera. Being a depressingly blunt movie, the director's visual style bends in a very obvious, sometimes intrusive manner. There's a long tracking shot through the interior of the RV during one key moment. On at least two other occasions, there are ugly crash-zooms on Williams' face to help convey his shock. A moment when Bob effortlessly rides a bicycle out of a lake is another example of Sonnenfeld's talent for putting absurd visuals on-screen in an unblinking matter. It's the sole laugh in the movie. 

I don't know why this director made this movie. Still having the lingering stink of “Wild Wild West” on your resume, and being happy to take whatever work you are offered, presumably had something to do with it. Perhaps the director and its star were all-too-aware of how lackluster “RV's” script. Maybe there was this hope that they could turn it into something worthwhile. I don't know. Why does any movie made by clearly talented people turn out bad? “RV” earned negative reviews but they were not scorching. Instead, most critics dismissed it as a mere mediocrity. I guess I have less tolerance for this kind of bullshit. “RV” is an absolutely hateful garbage bag of a movie that I despise fully and deeply. [Grade: F]