Like the dope its protagonists huff from a hookah, the
brilliance of Humpday is a creeper. At first glance its premise
suggests it should be filed alongside bromances like I Now Pronounce
You Chuck & Larry and I Love You, Man, but the film’s
talkative emotional authenticity and natural humor let the audience
know they’re not in Kansas anymore long before the crux of the plot
takes hold.
We are barely introduced to young married couple Ben (Mark Duplass)
and Anna (Alycia Delmore) before Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s old
college pal, shows up on their doorstep. While Ben has settled down,
Andrew is living the bohemian dream, traveling the globe, dabbling in
women and art to equally fruitless effect. Ben, clearly self-conscious
of the path he’s chosen, follows Andrew to a party, where the
conversation turns to Hump!, an amateur porn festival that not only
really exists, but is held by the Mercury‘s sister paper, The
Stranger, and if you click here, you can find out how to submit
to it. I’m even helping to jury it this year—wow, this is getting
awkward (which is entirely appropriate).
Anyway: Ben and Andrew decide to make a Hump! submission of
themselves having sex, straight man-on-straight man. “It’s not gay,”
they say. “It’s beyond gay. It’s art.” Thus the stage is set for
probably the greatest example yet of what is known as “mumblecore”
[Also see “I’m Staying Home!“]. While those associated with
the genre famously cringe from it, Humpday definitely has the
lineage. (Duplass has acted in, written, produced, and/or directed a
slew of notable mumblecore films; director Lynn Shelton acted in
original “mumblecorps” members Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg’s
Nights and Weekends; and even Leonard is best known for The
Blair Witch Project, which has been pointed to as an outlier cousin
of mumblecore movies.) And the film also contains the essential
defining, if not un-borrowed, style traits: It’s talky, relationship
driven, and improvised.
Humpday is more focused and charming than most mumblecore
films, taking the best qualities and leaving behind the characteristic
sloppiness and over-privileged naiveté. The result is a
breakthrough, and as we’re led into the inner circle of the characters’
earnest attempts to be communicative, positive, and open minded, it
slowly dawns on you how mistreated we are by the studios’
infliction of endless lashes of gender stereotype and homophobia, where
90-minute jokes are based on the supposed male aversion to talking
about their feelings. Contrast that with Humpday, where Ben and
Andrew talking about their feelings—in a directly homoerotic
context, no less—is the entire point. The fact that it’s done in
a way that is not only sincerely inquisitive but also sweetly hilarious
is a long overdue respite. Viva la independents.