But Apatow goes easier on Scott than he he did on Schumer’s character in Trainwreck—who, by the end of that film, has reformed her party-girl ways and literally dances for the pleasure of the nice guy who offers her a shot at a Real Life. Scott’s messiness is more readily forgiven, even welcomed. Which may be a sign of progress on Apatow’s part—a loosening of the stricture—or it could be that there’s still some adolescent fantasy lingering in his mind that Scott’s fuck-it apathy stokes and satisfies. Whatever the psychological mechanics, they lead to an unfulfilling movie.
The King of Staten Island is about growing and learning lessons—but not much is learned, and there’s little growth. It’s all a wash, really. We don’t get the tidy, if creaky, maturity lesson of High Apatow, nor do we get the laidback ramble of a talky, happily plotless Richard Linklater movie.
Ramble the movie does, though. It drags on and on, following plot digressions until their trail has gone cold and it’s time for another attempt, a new tack toward arriving at a point. Davidson is no match for all this listlessness. With his flat line delivery and bored mien, he just doesn’t have the magnetism to hold together something this devoid of form. He can’t even muster the energy to crack much of a joke; the most startling thing about The King of Staten Island is not how unfunny it is (and it’s really not funny), but that it seems mostly unbothered to even try for a laugh. Long stretches of the movie play out as straight-faced as a bland drama. This is a story partly about the long winter of grief, so some seriousness is to be expected. But for a movie of this length and languid patter, we should want spend time with Scott and his crew, to have fun in their company, and yet under Apatow’s direction they do little to earn our affection.
The second lead of the movie is Bill Burr, playing a firefighter who strikes up an improbable relationship with Margie. With his arrival, the movie reduces itself to two men warring over a cave and a woman, a hoary trope that Apatow tries to bless with his idiosyncratic, humanist touch. Whatever insight might have been mined from this familiar setup gets lost in all the boys’ aimless bickering. I ultimately didn’t care who won; I just wanted poor Margie to get out okay.
Tomei and Powley—whose winsome intelligence shines through a wobbly New Yawk accent—are the two star players here, and yet they are forced to orbit around all this vaguely Oedipal male rutting, popping up occasionally to give the movie a zing of life before being pushed to the sidelines once more. The King of Staten Island is a movie about a boy, interrupted that, in the case of Apatow, seems like a man, regressed. For all of Trainwreck’s faults, at least it partly yanked Apatow away from his puerile fascinations. (His more grown-up movies, Funny People and This Is 40, were still rooted in that ethos, if not directly about it.) But The King of Staten Island sees him sliding back, lured in by Davidson’s siren call. Whatever that allure was, though, Apatow doesn’t properly relay its power to us. Davidson might only be a ruler of one.
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