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'Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby'
| | | By: Elise Nakhnikian, TIMEOFF | 08/09/2006 |
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Will Ferrell plays NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
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Sure, there are funny bits in Anchorman and Elf, but once Ferrell has shown us his flabby, fish-white torso and opened his squinty eyes as wide as they'll go to broadcast that look of brain-dead enthusiasm, there's nowhere left for him to go. While the plot deteriorates into manic shtick or too-loose improv, he keeps trotting out the same tricks until I get thoroughly sick of them.
But Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby has made a convert of me. This sweet-natured spoof finds the funny in a lovingly drawn bunch of characters, in NASCAR culture, and in feel-good movies with a predictable story arc, like — well, like this.
The racecar driver of the title, Ferrell's Ricky Bobby, lives to go fast and win races. It's a pretty good life as long as he manages to do just that, with a sexy wife, two sons, and his best friend since childhood, Cal (John C. Reilly), never far away. Then he loses his nerve — and everything else — after a crash. But no sooner has he hit rock bottom than the father who abandoned him when he was an infant, leaving him with major daddy issues, shows up to coach him back into the driver's seat.
Sound familiar? It should, but the plot's just a device to hang jokes on, and the jokes are good. The laughs come steadily, and frequently hard, thanks to countless little throwaway bits, like the red-eye-ridden shots of Ricky's wedding to Carley and the nacho fountain Cal brags about having had at his wedding.
Ferrell and screenwriting partner Adam McCay, who also directed, construct scenes that just keep getting funnier, like the one where a mealtime blessing at Ricky's house degenerates into an argument over whether to pray to the baby or the adult Jesus, followed by a shout-out to one of Ricky's sponsors, since his contract stipulates that he "mention Powerade at every grace."
There are also some entertaining meta-observations, like when slow-motion stretches out one crash for so long that one commentator remarks on how long it is and cuts to a commercial (the cars are still crashing when they return).
Ferrell has always been generous about sharing the screen with brilliant, funny actors like Steve Carell, whose career got a significant boost from Anchorman. But the Talladega Nights cast may be his best yet, starting with Reilly, who shows a surprising gift for comedy. Short on brains but long on loyalty, Reilly's Cal is positively brimming with enthusiastic ignorance. "When you say psychosomatic," he asks a doctor after Ricky's crash, "you mean, like, he could start a fire with his head?"
Leslie Bibb is wonderfully narcissistic as Ricky's golddigger wife, Carley, and Molly Shannon shines in her cameo as the drunken wife of the owner of Ricky's racing team. Also outstanding is Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Ricky's nemesis. A comic actor in the tradition of Peter Sellers, Cohen is best known for his Ali G. and Borat characters, whom he brought from his native England to HBO. He adds another fractured foreign accent to his repertoire as Jean Girard, the Formula One driving ace who switches to NASCAR in order to challenge Ricky on his home turf. Girard is French (he calls Ricky "Ricky Booby"). Even more perplexing to his colleagues in the world of stock car racing is the fact that he's gay.
But Girard's relationship to his husband, Gregory (Andy Richter), is hardly the only streak of lavender running through Talladega Nights. Another running joke is the homosexual subtext of buddy movies like this one. The moment Ricky enters a slump, Carley dumps him for Cal. We don't waste any time wondering whether Ricky will get back together with his wife, since he's so much better off without her. The question is whether he'll get back with Cal.
It's fine to have fun with the happy endings and conventions we've come to expect in movies like this, but you still need to respect them. Its apparently effortless balance struck between satisfying our need for familiar setups and tidy resolutions and gently mocking them makes Talladega Nights such a delight.
Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language, drug references and brief comic violence.
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©PACKETONLINE News Classifieds Entertainment Business - Princeton and Central New Jersey 2006
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