With an Aug. 31 release date, “For A Good Time, Call…” directed by Jamie Travis and written by Lauren Miller with Katie Anne Naylon, celebrates good old-fashioned American ingenuity. Of course, it celebrates good old-fashioned American ingenuity with drama and underwear and bodily fluids and icky residue left on soap, and plenty of swear words. But it celebrates the same nonetheless. “South Park” didn’t invent the concept of grossing out American audiences on the road to some shining bright lesson, some non-ironic invitation to celebrate what we have in our national character—I think “King Of The Hill” marked the powder keg, actually. But this is what we have, and if we have to swerve through grossness and plenty of female anatomy to get to a non-ironic place, that isn’t the worst possible state of affairs, although I can think of healthier states and you probably can too.
But “For A Good Time, Call…” is a raunchy comedy, and comedy, raunchy or no, often thrives on struggle, and struggle often revolves around hopefully-sympathetic folk making do with something other than what they’d do by choice. Katie Steel (Ari Graynor) and her newfound roommate Lauren Powell (Lauren Miller) have not only their work but their lives cut out for them, since they have bad history going back to the ‘90s. We know it’s the ‘90s in the flashback before verification of that appears onscreen, because “Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories comes on the car radio. “Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb and Nine Stories, according to mainstream comedy shorthand anyway, could not have plausibly appeared on the radio in any other decade.
So the name of this game is phone sex, and the two leads have to learn to like each other while delivering unmentionable kinds of filth, over the phone to strangers. To mostly strangers, that is. I’m open to correction on this point, but I’m skeptical that a phone sex operator would go so far as to meet one of her customers in the flesh. I’m even more skeptical that love and devotion would flower from this cutting. But this is mainstream comedy, and mainstream comedy is only one stall down from mainstream romantic comedy.
So the movie makes you laugh and gooses your gross-out buttons and gives you plenty of drama, underwear, etc. I wish we could speak plainly, or at least more plainly, about what we want and need, in this world we call our nation. But this is mainstream comedy, and its job is not to joust at shibboleths. This mainstream comedy entertains, and actually warms. I can forgive its forsaking the lance.
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