← Back to Reviews
 

Date Night


by Yoda
posted on 5/11/10
Date Night is a triumph of execution over concept; the setup is pedestrian and most of the events are fairly contrived, so it necessarily lives or dies on the strength of its two leads (Tina Fey and Steve Carrell). It lives.

The aforementioned setup is this: a married couple (Phil and Claire Foster) is stuck in a rut, and the husband (Carrell) decides to have them pose as an absent couple to steal a dinner reservation. The reservation is at a trendy Manhattan seafood joint called "Claw," and it's the type of venue so exclusive that it's a wonder anyone's ever inside. One gets the impression that, if money were no object, the power-tripping hosts would just as soon take their exclusivity to its logical conclusion and admit no one, forcing people to look in on an empty restaurant.

As it so happens, the people the Fosters are posing as are engaged in some mafia-related intrigue, and naturally no one believes them when they insist up-and-down that they just wanted a table. If the setup is vaguely North by Northwest, what follows is vaguely After Hours. The Fosters find themselves on a whirlwind tour of the city, evading crooked cops and trying to piece together what's happening. Most of the time, they're trying to recover a missing USB key, which as anyone who has ever lost one can attest, is well-nigh impossible.

It's hard to imagine a comedy like Date Night actually being written. Modern comedy has largely abandoned the setup/punch line routine, and the result is a brand of humor that doesn't come off very well on the page. The Age of Apatow distinctly favors true-to-life conversational humor over traditional setups, and though Apatow had no hand in this effort, it often embodies the trend. The post-credit outtakes suggest that a good deal of the gags were created on the set, a perfect fit for Fey's writer-performer persona. She just might be the funniest woman alive.

The story is fairly episodic, as an escape from one location leads them right into another, but there's a little time in between each for the characters to develop. As cliché as the story may be, Fey and Carrell do a serviceable job of selling the central worries and conflicts of their marriage, and it usually goes on just long enough to establish a degree of believability without sacrificing momentum.

Though most of the screen time is devoted to the two leads, Date Night features so many noteworthy cameos and bit roles that it often feels like an ensemble. Mark Wahlberg plays an old real estate client of Claire's, William Fichtner plays a gimmicky District Attorney, and Kristen Wiig plays Claire's newly-separated friend. There are another half-dozen names tucked into the film's folds, and seeing who turns up is half the fun.

The marriage, forgive the pun, of genuinely talented leads with a genuinely forgettable concept works well, with Fey and Carrell making the film their own, and the well-tread concept broadening their appeal more often than it limits it.

There is, as the irreplaceable Roger Ebert once suggested, only one thing you can really say about a comedy: whether or not it made you laugh. Date Night made me laugh, because the people in it would be funny in anything.