John Cusack has been a movie star for almost thirty years, and I’m surprised to find that he’s only 45. He looks older, his face worn and molded into place. As a very young film actor he instantly made a convincing impression as a beleaguered, lovelorn hero in Better Off Dead and Say Anything…, and it’s stained our impression of him even as he portrayed (somewhat) more adept romantic protagonists into the nineties and beyond. He retained his popularity level but never made the crossover leap into prestige like his fellow 1980s heartthrobs Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp, and he’s been stuck between settling for well-paying commercial schlock like 2012 or ignored indie noise like Grace Is Gone ever since—even scoring the occasional cult hit, as with High Fidelity, seems like a fluke every time.
So when he starred in the silly, self-aware party comedy Hot Tub Time Machine in 2010, it felt like a release. He could cut loose while cathartically acknowledging his weariness of studio routine in a raunchy comedy that would boost his youth appeal. When he shows up onscreen several minutes into the thin set-up in the film—I can’t even remember what his character is supposed to be about—he looks genuinely defeated. His co-stars in the movie echo the emotion: Rob Corddry has gained cultish success but missed the bar set by his Daily Show contemporaries Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell; the young Clark Duke slowly chases the opportunity offered to his old buddy Michael Cera; Crispin Glover prolongs his weird dance with the mainstream concomitant with his off-kilter art pop persona; and Chevy Chase is, well, Chevy Chase.
Hot Tub Time Machine is, very basically, about nostalgia and missed opportunity. Its heroes find they are able to correct their mistakes via the gift of the titular device, and do so over a long, beer-soaked, boobs-showing night. During that period there are two pukings of increasingly realistic depiction, two sex scenes of increasingly graphic appeal, two musical performances of increasingly convincing quality (despite the first’s supposed depiction of an actual eighties rock behemoth, Poison). There’s also some completely sterile subplottery, including a romance between Cusack and Lizzy Caplan that seems to exist only to boost the running time to feature length. Despite the filler, this is a movie with its head in the right place. But more than that, its content seems linked to its thematic notions more integrally than any other wide-release sex comedy I can think of.
Time travel is among the more thought-provoking conceits of science fiction, at least in its “soft” layman’s category; predictably, there hasn’t been much worthwhile cinematic endeavor in the genre. The best classic is probably the old adaptation of Wells’ The Time Machine, more successful as a hippie-conscious monster movie than a conceptual mind-fuck (I don’t remember why there was a time machine but god damn it, the Morlocks scared six-year-old me). The most elaborate and sciencey time travel cinema I’ve ever seen is the 2004 Sundance favorite Primer, which also happens to be one of the cheapest features ever shot on film. I note all of this merely to express that there’s a hell of a breadth of possibility when exploring the subject. (Intrigued filmmakers: go forth and know no bounds.)
Hot Tub Time Machine, which I watched for the first time this week, obviously skews to the lighter side of the spectrum, but what surprised me was its melancholy aftertaste. The coda of the film follows the effects of Corddry’s alcoholic, suicidal character’s decision to stay in the past and fix his and his friends’ future—they all end up happy and fulfilled. But I can’t help but imagine Cusack’s experience on set as somewhat less so: success, after all, is subjective. What if he could swirl back to 1986 and push for more than his share of horndog 80s fare, strive for professional challenge and let his talent simmer rather than flex? He could have been up there with the other long-timers who put in their credits on the way to Oscar.
I view the film with my own share of regretful disbelief, namely that I can’t believe this fucking movie came out two whole years ago. 2010 was a banner year for my idiocy. I sped through my academic fronts with grim pragmatism, nastily brushing off a couple personally influential professors in the process. I failed to make productive strides during the summer, throwing away all my savings. Anxious and angry, I drank heavily and over-thought a romantic opportunity into oblivion. I go back to those days in my mind some nights, full of beer and venom like the heroes of HTTM, fixated on the tits in front of me but really staring further, into the puke-soaked beyond of the past.
Thus begins “The Year We Make Contact,” HFL’s periodic look back at cultural artifacts from the year 2010, wherein the machines gained sentience and then more or less kept things going the way they were.
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