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Humpday is a comedy about male intimacy.
It's really sad.
A hit at Sundance, Humpday is about two lifelong friends whose adult lives have gone in very different directions. Ben (Mark Duplass, who, with his brother Jay, is also the mumblecore filmmaker behind Baghead) is married to Anna (Alycia Delmore) and is leading a settled life.
He and Anna own a house and they both work, and their new project is baby-making. Ovulation figures big in their sex schedule.
Andrew (Joshua Leonard) is Ben's best friend, and a total free spirit. He lives in Mexico but turns up one night at Ben and Anna's house and decides to stay with them for a while. Andrew seems to lead a life of endless adventure, and Ben is happy to tag along. The men wind up at a house party with a hippie vibe; that's the director, Lynn Shelton, in the role of the bisexual hostess. The party is a love-in, really, and when someone mentions the upcoming local porn festival, all the partygoers decide they should make art films and take part.
While Anna fumes at home, wondering what has made Ben and Andrew so late for a special dinner she has prepared, the guys continue to party. They decide that a movie of two straight guys having sex -- themselves -- would be the perfect art film for the porn festival.
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That would be beyond gay, Ben reckons. That would be art, they figure.
Then the next day they get sober.
Ben and Andrew's plan to have sex occupies the next hour of the movie, and occupies it with talking. There's a hotel room to be booked, a wife to be told, a dare to be acted upon. Both men seem uncomfortable with their decision to have sex with each other, but for different reasons, and neither seems capable of expressing what's on his mind.
Ben seems like an easy-going guy who doesn't really want to make any sudden moves in life, lest he upset the apple cart. Andrew appears to be less enamoured of his footloose life than he's letting on, but he's still interested in rescuing Ben from the staid life he has constructed with Anna. Neither stance -- the regular guy or the Peter Pan boy who'll never grow up -- is particularly attractive.
Or interesting. One of the big problems in Humpday for this viewer is the characters, none of whom really engages a viewer's imagination or emotion. Andrew and Ben seem like regular dull guys, generally sweet-natured and inexperienced at life. As for their sexual insularity and their inability to express -- or even to think about -- anything outside a strict heterosexual norm, that's just sad-making. Each man seems incapable of looking too closely at the identity he has created for himself.
Oh, well. Humpday has its moments, and can stand as a good-natured meditation on male friendship. Otherwise, it's a dull 90 minutes in the theatre. Are the rules of straight male life that ironclad?
(This film is rated 18-A)