I’m going to make a bold statement: Elise and Zoey Vargas may be the most adorable human children ever captured on film or video. Jointly playing baby Stella Radner — the progeny of first-time parents Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) — in the new comedy Neighbors, the Vargas twins become generators of involuntary “awwwwwws” every time they break out a four-toothed grin or a squeal of delight. Nobody was immune at the preview screening I attended: not critics, not hulking frat guys there for the gross-out comedy, nobody.
So what conclusions should one draw from the fact that the single most memorable thing in an ostensibly raucous escalating battle of pranks is a cute baby?
That is, perhaps, unfairly dismissive of the generally funny Neighbors, directed by Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek) from a script by first-time feature writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien. It casts Rogen in a comfortable role as a genial pot-smoker and a wonderfully wild Byrne, who’s allowed to speak with her own Australian accent, as Mac and Kelly. The pair are forced to contend with the Delta Psi fraternity buying the suburban house next door to theirs. And though they initially try to play nice with the party-hearty crew led by chapter president Teddy (Zac Efron), the escalating noise levels disturbing their sleep lead them to start a conflict from which no one will escape without some sort of humiliating incident.
Neighbors actually latches on to a solid notion underlying all the mayhem: the Radners’ are ambivalent about their transition into responsible married-with-children adulthood. Their interactions with their less-encumbered friends (Carla Gallo and Ike Barinholtz) has allowed them to think they can still manage to be hip even with a mortgage and precious smile machine Stella.
There’s a great early scene in which their spontaneous plan to go to a rave with Stella in tow, requiring the gathering of mountains of baby gear, ends with them asleep in their own entryway before they ever leave the house. The couple’s initial efforts to play the cool pals to Teddy and company represent a desperate hope that they actually belong hanging out with college kids, while their refusal to buckle when the war begins provides a similar charge of edgy risk in otherwise predictable days.
And it’s perfect that they’re matched against Teddy, a senior whose quest to be worthy of the fraternity’s Wall of Honor by way of throwing a legendary party is built on his fear that nothing worthwhile awaits him after graduation. Neighbors is based on the classical foundation that the antagonists are actually more alike than they realize — in this case, people clinging to their familiar sense of what makes a happy existence, digging in their heels against growing up and moving on to the next moment in life moment.
If that sounds a little heady for a movie in which the fraternity ultimately holds a fundraiser where they sell casts of their penises as dildos, or where Mac has to manually express Kelly’s milk-engorged breasts after her pump breaks — well, yeah. Like many of the movie comedies by Judd Apatow and his disciples — Stoller was a writer for Apatow’s short-lived TV series Undeclared — Neighbors is much more concerned with jokes than structure. That allows plenty of room for rambling riffs. But it becomes hard to circle back around to anything resembling a thematic idea in the middle of a fusillade of punch lines and pratfalls.
And so we find ourselves with Neighbors settling for a collection of decent gags and set pieces, rather than something that coheres around the idea of growing up with a little bit of grace. Notwithstanding an exchange between Mac and Kelly at the end that sounds like an attempt at convincing us they’ve learned from this experience, the movie is far less a product of mature contemplation than it is a case of easily distracted joke-telling. You laugh, and then your attention wanders, and you laugh a little more, and then OH MY GOD ISN’T THAT THE CUTEST BABY YOU’VE EVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE?
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