The Overnight
It feels strange to report that The Overnight, a small-premise marital sketch stretched into a long-seeming 78-minute sex farce, doesn’t have enough dick jokes, but there it is. Cheerfully juvenile double entendres that telegraph the plot in the early going, yes, but nowhere close to the correct tally of cock-centric lines and looks for a comedy this dependent on male length and girth.
Then again, The Overnight doesn’t skimp on key visuals. Adam Scott and Jason Schwartzman, playing the husbands in a pair of newly acquainted couples, have been outfitted with prostheses that are, for different reasons, hard to turn away from. Whatever else here merits the R rating — the swearing, the those-really-aren’t-O’Keeffe paintings, a hand job that wouldn’t look out of place in Eyes Wide Shut — there is what the MPAA might classify as “mild windmilling.” The half-gasp that it induces comes back out as a half-laugh — a reaction that writer-director Patrick Brice earns less often than he intends.
Alex and Emily (Scott and Taylor Schilling, both exactly right) are Seattle transplants a bit bewildered by their new middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood. At a nearby park with their little boy, they’re eagerly befriended by fellow playground parent Kurt (Schwartzman, cranking up his self-awareness all the way). He invites them to his family’s home for dinner, where they meet Kurt’s French-born wife, Charlotte (Judith Godrèche, appropriately airy), and are hypnotized by the attractive couple’s higher standard of living and easy rapport. Kurt and Charlotte exude sexualized acquisitiveness — in the glow of their alluring smugness, you expect them to confess that they have a standing invitation to fuck on the display furniture at Viesso. If they seem to be flirting with Alex and Emily, well, that’s just the blush of new friendship. Until (amusingly) it’s a little more. And then (less amusingly) a lot more.
Like other recent raunch-charged movies in the Age of Apatow, The Overnight is too good-natured (and too charmingly performed) for one to object very hard, even as its emotional formula is worth flagging. Brice’s characters are essentially kind when we meet them, and his condom-thin story asks them to sustain sunny honesty as the awkwardness mounts — and then demands that they become magically more sunny and more honest. Scott and Schwartzman have played dicks in other movies. You wish that they were allowed to do more than just wear or look at dicks in this one.
