Joyce Glasser reviews Dirty Grandpa
Arriving a month after Lily’s Tomlin’s triumphant return to the lime light as the cranky, weed-smoking, outspoken heroine of Grandma, Dirty Grandpa could have been a welcome companion piece for another screen icon. Unlike Tomlin, however, Robert De Niro has never been off our cinema screens for very long. He has appeared in a whopping seven feature films in 2013/2014 and four films in 2015, including Joy, in which he showed us he could still act. De Niro cannot possibly need the money, so the big mystery is why he agreed to appear in Dirty Grandpa an unpleasant and sexist pile of comedy clichés that leaves you cringing, not laughing.
As for De Niro’s talented, handsome co-star Zac Efron, The High School Musical star needs a real grandfather to put his career back on course. Efron plays Jason Kelly, a corporate lawyer, working for his materialistic, clichéd fiancée’s (Julianne Hough) father, and destined for a Stepford Husband life. He does not get along with his father, a buttoned up bore, but has always had a soft spot for his grandfather Dick Kelly (De Niro), a former military man whose grounding influence, his wife, has just passed away.
A week before Jason’s big, society wedding, Dick convinces Jason to drive him to Florida to visit an old army buddy. Jason is reluctant, but bows to the pressure of this final opportunity to spend time alone with his grandpa. Jason quickly regrets his decision, however, when he arrives to collect Dick and finds him masturbating. Yes, the 72-year-old double Academy Award winning actor has decided to this was a necessary sacrifice in the name of ‘art’.
But did we really need to see this – or Dick’s wild abandon when it comes to booze, drugs and sex with young nubile girls for that matter – to get the point of the movie?
The point of the movie is summed up in a short breakfast conversation in which Jason volunteers, rather unconvincingly, how much he loves being a corporate lawyer. Dick retorts, ‘What about your photography?’ This is the first we have heard of it.
Writer John M Phillips (whose script was up for grabs in 2011) decides that the best way to prolong this contrived road trip is to have Dick and Jason meet girls during a stopover in Daytona Beach. Man Eater Lenore (Aubrey Plaza) seduces Dick; a man old enough to be her grandfather, in a clear demonstration of wish fulfilment from the middle-aged male filmmakers and, no doubt, De Niro himself. Dick actually declares that is goal is to ‘get laid’ as many times as possible.
Unlikely as it may seem, Lenore’s pretty friend is Shadia (Zoey Deutch) a save-the-world environmentalist who, coincidentally, knows Jason from high school and remembers his great photography. You know right away how the sides are lining up. What you don’t predict, even from a film that wants to shock you with its bad taste, is that grandpa intentionally drugs Jason so that a photo of him naked and dancing at a rave will reach his fiancée via social media. Grandpa thinks the best way to get Jason out of law and into photography is to break up his engagement.
Very little of this, by the way, is funny. To be fair, there are two good laughs and two chuckles, which isn’t too surprising as Director Dan Mazer (I Give it a Year) did, after all, work with Sasha Baron Cohen on his Ali G and Borat characters.
But the gist of Dirty Grandpa is that the big cliché of a septuagenarian grandpa who prefers sex, drugs and rock and roll to matinées and tea at the National Trust is packaged with the cliché of the artistic young man forced into a straightjacket by Capitalism and the robotic humans who have entrapped him. The whole trip was designed to free Jason from his shackles and so Grandpa is not so much a dirty-old-man as a hero for whom the end justifies the means.
But what about Dick’s manipulative tactics? Is he any better than Jason’s father, father-in-law and fiancée? Where was he when Jason was going to law school? And if Jason says he enjoys law, why doesn’t Dick suggest combining his photography with a job that actually pays money? The acclaimed Brazilian photojournalist of dying tribes, war torn countries and spectacular wildlife, Sebastião Salgado took up photography while travelling as a well-paid economist for the World Bank. When his talent was recognised, and he had a plan on how to turn his obsession into a vocation, he left the World Bank to become a photographer full time.
Sure, this is a light comedy, where superficiality and clichés are par for the course, but Writer Phillips and Director Mazer have missed the point. That Dick acts like a 15-year-old on his first holiday without his parents makes him a pathetic, dirty old man. But what makes his a lousy grandpa is the limited, black and white nature of his advice to his grandson.
