Review

Train jumps the track

Class reunion comedy erratic, improbable

Oliver Lawless (James Marsden) and Dan Landsman (Jack Black) weren’t exactly friends in high school, but 20 years later, they forge a special relationship in the black comedy The D Train.
Oliver Lawless (James Marsden) and Dan Landsman (Jack Black) weren’t exactly friends in high school, but 20 years later, they forge a special relationship in the black comedy The D Train.

There's a bitter ruefulness that runs through the screenwriting team of Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel's first directorial feature The D Train, a subversive black comedy that riffs on the cinematic commonplace of high school reunion movies. Before it inevitably runs out of nerve, for a while it presents as a well-observed rumination on the pathetic dynamics of male egoism and the caste-setting function of high school. If it ultimately turns out to be more ordinary than anyone had hoped, it at least includes one potentially shocking scene that won't be mentioned here. (The curious are, as always, free to Google.)

Anyway, Dan Landsman (Jack Black) is a somewhat exaggerated example of the guy we all know from the Internet, the one who responds a little too quickly and enthusiastically to every post, who is a little too quick to allude to some half-remembered/half-invented shared history. As the self-appointed chairman of his high school alumni association, Dan is the guy the others pointedly fail to invite out for drinks, the one whose jokes fall flat -- the one whose social demeanor is so inappropriate that Mike White is trotted out as an example of relative adjustment. Dan isn't such a bad guy, and he's willing to take on a lot of the work that goes into organizing the coming 20th reunion -- which, by the way, looks like it's going to be a complete disaster -- he's just hard to be around. He's the sort of person who makes one tired.

The D Train

85 Cast: Jack Black, James Marsden, Kathryn Hahn, Mike White, Kyle Bornheimer, Henry Zebrowski, Russell Posner, Jeffrey Tambor

Directors: Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel

Rating: R, for strong sexual material, nudity, language and drug use

Running time: 97 minutes

Somehow, Dan -- who works at one of those nebulous companies that does unspecified work -- has somehow managed to accumulate a tidy little family with a patient wife (Kathryn Hahn), 14-year-old son (Russell Posner) and baby daughter. He lives in a blandly pleasant suburb and drives a subcompact. He has never been anywhere or done anything, and he overcompensates with bluster and by giving himself ridiculous nicknames. At work, he's able to keep his technophobic boss (Jeffrey Tambor) fooled, but Dan's existence is pretty negligible -- just more of this, then death.

But then one night Dan happens across a commercial on late-night TV and recognizes the spokesman for Banana Boat suntan lotion -- it's Oliver Lawless (James Marsden), who was the coolest guy in high school. And Dan figures if he can get Lawless to come back to the reunion it'll open the floodgates, and he'll be the hero who saved the event.

Trouble is, Lawless is (and was) too cool for school. He hasn't responded to any of the alumni committee's phone calls or emails. So Dan decides to track him down in Los Angeles, where Lawless is presumably pursuing a glamorous career in commercials and narrative films.

There are a few two many moving parts in Dan's scheme (adroitly dissected by Tambor's character after things fall apart) but the movie does get a surge when Lawless shows up to drag Dan around West Hollywood for a night of epic debauchery.

And, as it turns out, Dan does convince him to come home for the reunion. But not before it gets weird between them.

Marsden is an odd actor. He's like a handsome hybrid of James Franco and Ethan Hawke, but his characters heretofore have rarely made much of an impression. Here, he's terrific in a self-reflexive performance as the embodiment of seedy cool underwritten by desperation. We know immediately what Dan is too starstruck to notice -- Lawless is a loser, a marginal Hollywood type whose Banana Boat commercial will likely stand as his crowning achievement.

Black is, as always, very good at playing needy and obnoxious, the sort of thwarted weirdo who might actually make a hero of feckless Lawless. Dan discounts his own decency, and the character is realistic in his neuroses if not their outward manifestations. Tweak the character a little bit and he becomes one of those entitled monsters -- Dan is a real threat to shoot up one of those sad little alumni meetings. Black doesn't really play him for laughs, but the script is too broad to accommodate nuance. In some ways The D Train feels like a missed opportunity -- it's too quick to default to the safe homilies of glory-days buddy comedies like the 1986 Robin Williams/Kurt Russell vehicle The Best of Times to be genuinely transgressive. Black and Marsden seem up for it, but the writing simply isn't.

While Paul and Mogel -- who created Jonah Hill's animated series Allen Gregory -- don't manage to deliver a fully satisfying movie here, The D Train, despite its erratic tone and improbable plotting, registers as an intriguing if failed chemistry experiment.

MovieStyle on 05/08/2015

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