"Zack and Miri Make a Porno" Barely Makes the Grade

First, the good news: "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" is funny. Very, very, very funny.

It fails in too many other regards to be considered much of a good movie beyond that. And when we consider that this is a film by Kevin Smith, whose trademark humor has so often worked before in conjunction with intelligence, with grace, with emotion and with real understanding of life, to call this film merely very, very, very funny is to damn it with faint praise indeed.

The problems begin early. Elizabeth Banks as Miri is introduced first, and almost immediately digs in some proverbial sack for one of the criticisms most often leveled at Smith and decides to run that ball all the way to the end zone. She wakes up, stumbles out of bed in nothing but a hockey jersey--sexy. She wakes Zack (Seth Rogen) up to make sure they get to work on time--taking care of the male protagonist as if she was his mother. He shortly thereafter sees her in a state of undress. Before the opening minutes are up, we see them have a friendly conversation, and she gives a charming, throaty, near-masculine buddy-buddy chuckle.

Where this is all going is that in a matter of minutes, Smith has created a fantasy woman who is at once an attractive woman with all the right feminine qualities (physical and otherwise) who at the same time is one of the guys, indeed basically a guy with pretty blonde hair. There's nothing wrong with creating a fantasy woman who happens to be a man's best friend. The movie's problem is in making Miri essentially a male best friend who's only feminine in the ways a man enjoys having around the house. A veritable Chinese menu of a character.

Zack and Miri are supposed to have been friends since first grade, and yet the film would have us believe that they never had a proper discussion of being only "just friends" until now. This does not ring true. I believe that a man can love a woman unrequitedly and yet they can share a perfectly wonderful and rewarding friendship. But the issue doesn't just get hidden under the rug and never addressed. She would have known his feelings; he would have shown them; the conversation would have been had, a thousand times. Believe me. I've been there. More than once.

Worse yet, this lifelong friendship is not made to resonate. We can buy Zack and Miri as grown-up friends, but for whatever reason, we never quite feel the weight of a million memories good and bad. It is absolutely crucial that we have this weight; every day they spent together growing up and becoming the people they are on the day they have sex is overturned by that act. For some reason the gun doesn't feel loaded.

Imagine this. Imagine if, during their awkward videotaped copulation under the eyes of their cast and crew, we started flashing back. To the day they moved into their dirty little apartment. To high school graduation, hugging each other. To Zack watching her go out with high school football players. To their first boy-girl party. To childhood playdates. Yes, I'm really suggesting intercutting a young Zack and Miri on the swing sets with their first act of mutual lovemaking. We have to get all those emotions in, for better or for worse, to feel what they must be feeling.

Banks also doesn't quite bring her A-game acting-wise until the film reaches this, pun intended, climax. There's a flicker of her energy in that smile and laugh in the car, and she gamely plays along with a lot of the boys' silly games, but by the time she really ratchets up and comes up to Rogen's level of performance, it's too late.

The other cast members do hit the ground running, thankfully. Rogen makes for a fine center of the movie, his facial hair and spectacles shrewdly deployed to make him look an awful lot like Kevin Smith. (It's a subtle but very smart move.) Jason Mewes is in excellent form playing a slight variant on Jason Mewes, and Craig Robinson steals more than one scene. Perhaps best of all is actual porn star (apparently) Katie Morgan, who is sharp and awfully sweet and would honestly be a welcome addition to more non-pornographic films in the future.

On the matter of filmmaking, it's disappointing that after "Clerks II"--an apt and able extended metaphor for Smith's life in filmmaking that never once mentioned making movies--Smith follows up an actual story about a portly twentysomething making filthy zero-budget movies in his workplace, and yet the ring of truth is missing. Smith never quite gets across the struggles and joys and pain and discovery of making a movie, one's first movie; it's treated with the glibness of Mickey Rooney shouting "Let's put on a show!" Are the extended "Star Whores" jokes funny? Certainly, but the costumes and sets materialize out of nowhere (and are done away with just as quickly with an unbelievable and unnecessary plot twist). Smith does not allow his characters the same experience of life he himself had, and the film is poorer for it.

This isn't the first Kevin Smith film to disappoint me. That would be the similarly-titled "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back", and the reasons are the same. The building blocks for an excellent film are there, the ideas are there, but somehow the film makes lazy circles around what could be the best material. There was so much potential to make not just a funny and well-meaning movie, but a smart and passion-stirring one, about Jay and Silent Bob striking back, and about Zack and Miri making a porno. It's just that we didn't get those movies. (Say what you like about Smith's only other film outside the "View Askewniverse", "Jersey Girl", but it made the most of the potential of its genre, storyline and characters, whatever limitations those might pose.)

It's incohesive; ultimately it points to roads it doesn't quite go down, and leaves too many loose ends in both the plot and the emotions to satisfy as a film. Only as a comedy. But this isn't a porno, where you watch for exactly one reason. We were hoping for more action when we came, pun intended.

To extend, pun intended, the metaphor: yes, it'll get you hot. It'll give you a night of pleasure. But it won't stay with you in the morning, and you won't fall in love with it forever.