Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
Directed by: Kevin Smith
Premise: Zack and Miri (Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks) a pair of platonic roommates find themselves down on their luck and at risk of being evicted from their apartment. The two decide to make a pornographic film together to sell and make money. In the process, sex, love, and friendship get conflated in ways neither of them intended.
What Works: Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a comedy that manages to be both hysterically funny and also very intelligent and emotionally honest. The appeal of Kevin Smith’s films, beyond the immediate satisfaction of the wit and colorful characters, has been Smith’s ability to deal with the challenges of everyday grownup life, especially in regards to sexuality and adult responsibilities. Zack and Miri puts these topics on display unlike any other Smith film. The style of Zack and Miri is a fusion of his last two pictures, the underrated Jersey Girl and the overproduced Clerks II. The technical quality and cinematic craft of the film is much better than most of Smith’s other work but it does not go overboard either like the major musical sequence in Clerks II. His characters in Zack and Miri are much more human and less cartoonish than the pictures of the Jersey Chronicles, even those played by adult film stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan, but at the same time Smith strikes a balance of sentimentality with humor, hitting the dramatic notes with a little more restraint than Jersey Girl. The film is very well cast, especially Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks who manage to sell both the dramatic material and the comedic material and transition easily between both. Zack and Miri is an unapologetically adult comedy and recently audiences have been lucky to get a number of these from filmmakers like Judd Apatow. This film has its share of fecal humor but underneath that the film does get to some rather penetrating issues regarding love, friendship, and sex and the complex relationship between them and the relations between men and women.
What Doesn’t: The plot of Zack and Miri Make a Porno has one glaring hole: the money issue that got the characters into this situation in the first place is never resolved. It nags at the viewer and is a pretty significant gap in the story. Ultimately the money is a McGuffin for the real conflict in the story, the relationship between Zack and Miri. But even the McGuffin should be resolved in some way and the film does not do that.
Bottom Line: Zack and Miri Make a Porno is one of Kevin Smith’s best films, probably his best since Dogma. Despite falling short in the ending, it does have something to say about its topic and has the right mix of comedy and drama.
Episode: #214 (November 16, 2008)