The Interview: More Than Just Poop and Fart Jokes

No motion picture could live up to its hype after the unprecedented rollercoaster ride The Interview has had. Still, The Interview is a much better film than many of the reviews would have you believe.

To be clear, the film is no contender to be a cinematic classic, but it also is a lot more serious and clever than a typical Seth Rogen-James Franco vehicle: After excavating past the obligatory poop and fart jokes, there is a funny black comedy underneath with a real plot and well-defined, although deliberately caricatured, main characters. By contrast, removing the usual Rogen-Franco inanity from, say, Pineapple Express, would leave little more than a three-minute short. The writing at times is very sharp, directed more against the American media’s preoccupation with celebrity tripe than against North Korea. The satire is so over-the-top that the film tries to follow the tone of Dr. Strangelove, and by that stratospheric standard it is a high compliment to say that it does not totally fail.

The Interview opens with hilarious appearances by celebrities Eminem and Rob Lowe using the “Skylark Tonight” talk show hosted by Franco’s character, Dave Skylark, to make sensationally prurient revelations about themselves. Rogen’s character, Aaron Rapoport, has been Skylark’s producer for 1,000 episodes over 10 years, but yearns to put his journalism education to better use by covering “serious” news. He gets his chance when, by happenstance, they learn that the reclusive dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, is a fan of their show.

North Korea and its dictator are certainly skewered in the process, but they are mostly plot devices rendered so fictitiously as to bear little resemblance to their real-life incarnations. Randall Park’s portrayal of Kim as a sociopath who is charming and pathetic rather than bombastic and arrogant is surprisingly funny. There are few cues to signal to the uninformed viewer what has a real basis – such as the bizarre claims that the godlike “Supreme Leader” can talk with dolphins or that he has mastered bodily functions so efficiently that he neither urinates nor defecates – and what is totally imaginary – such as the existence of a fleet of nuclear missiles that can be launched from North Korea to blow up California. Scenes of Kim playing pick-up basketball with Franco’s character are likewise well-deserved shots at the real-life Dennis Rodman, a former NBA star who through naivety and buffoonery allowed himself to be exploited as a public relations shill for a brutal dictator he delusionally described as his “friend for life.”

Once Kim agrees to be interviewed, the American Central Intelligence Agency recruits Skylark and Rapoport to assassinate him by administering a transdermal dose of ricin during a handshake. (Never mind that ricin has to be injected, ingested, or inhaled. Never mind that ricin actually takes a good three to five days to kill someone. Hey, there’s probably no actual pineapple in Pineapple Express, either.) One hopes that the real CIA would not put itself in the position of relying upon anyone who seems as much of a boob as Skylark, but they also wouldn’t call themselves “agents.” (The parlance for what the movie describes as an “agent” would be an “officer,” but it’s a sure bet no one at the CIA was consulted on the production of this movie.) The film is devoid of any true minimally competent tradecraft, such as assuming that all of the rooms in Kim’s palace are bugged, but of course that would bring a rapid end to the entire plot. Nor is there any acknowledgment that the CIA has been prohibited by regulation since the 1970s from using journalists as cover because it puts all journalists in danger, although there is considerable evidence that it is still done. The mythical CIA of the film alternates between amazing abilities, such as delivering an emergency replacement supply of poison via an elaborate process ending with a drone capsule dropped inside Kim’s compound, and staggering incompetence, such as recruiting Skylark in the first place. The drone capsule drop, by the way, prominently involves a tiger, which the typical American audience is unlikely to realize is the national symbol of Korea very much like the bald eagle is of the United States.

The traditional conventions of the “bromance” genre are upended by a crisis where Skylark engages in a day of male-bonding with Kim, joyriding around in an old Soviet tank that he says Stalin gave to his grandfather Kim Il-Sung, threatening Skylark’s long-standing friendship with Rapoport. (Should I even bother to note that real Soviet tanks were so cramped that the Red Army preferred left-handed gunners?) Kim and Skylark share daddy issues, a love for margaritas and Katy Perry, and a wild orgy involving topless Asian women. Eventually circumstances lead even the gullible and stupid Skylark to an epiphany that Kim is playing him for a fool, no matter how much he likes topless Asian women, which at least makes him less of a fool than Dennis Rodman.

The climax of the film, appropriately, is the interview between Skylark and Kim, telecast live to the world including the people of North Korea, and the immediate aftermath of the interview. Kim’s staff has written both the questions and the answers, and the main suspense arises from uncertainty whether Skylark will risk going off-script and having the broadcast terminated.

Understood as a black comedy, The Interview fits solidly within a tradition of political satire ranging from the aforementioned Dr. Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick in 1964 to even older precursors such as To Be or Not to Be by Ernst Lubitsch in 1942 – and Lubitsch pours more graphic and violent death into his anti-Nazi comedy than can be found in The Interview. Widely made comparisons to The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin are very strained, as that lacks cynicism and therefore is not black comedy; despite its legitimately earned status as a masterpiece, it is straightforward satirical farce intended to make the demons of 1940, Hitler and Mussolini, look ridiculous.

The prior collaboration between directorial team Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, This Is the End, is a high-concept black comedy about the Biblical Apocalypse, and although clever in its way never finds a clear target. With The Interview, they overcome that limitation: It is not intended to be a laugh riot, and it has taken some criticism because it is not, but it is by no means unfunny and it very precisely and effectively aims its ample supply of black humor at deserving targets. Long after Pineapple Express becomes a forgotten nostalgic curiosity, The Interview may be remembered as among the best of the Rogen-Franco collaborations.