If “Get Him to the Greek” and “Iron Man 2” share a message, it’s this: “Forget what you’ve heard. Drugs save lives.”
If there’s a second message in common, though, it’s: “But, wait, man, just so you know, there might be a couple hard days in there as you’re turning your life around. While using drugs.”
Not exactly the strongest anti-drug theme, but then, PSAs don’t sell out theaters quite like celebrity casts and movies based on successful prequels (“Iron Man,” obviously, and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” sort of). Both films feature a protagonist – Aaron Green (Jonah Hill, “How to Train Your Dragon”) in “Get Him to the Greek” and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., “Sherlock Holmes”) in “Iron Man 2” – struggling to find meaning beyond the ordinary life. Both then find that goal disrupted and illuminated by a hurdle higher than they bargained for.
Of course, the stakes are slightly higher for Stark. The world will probably survive without a comeback concert from washed-up rock star Aldous Snow (Russel Brand, “Despicable Me,”). But that’s only because Aaron Green’s everyday life doesn’t involve jet packing into a sold out combination stockholder’s meeting/dance party wearing a miraculous metal suit of his own design.
In short order, both heroes are given reason to doubt their current track in life – self-destructive playboy genius or frumpy loveless Diddy minion – and embark on quests (save the world from a rogue Russian genius with anarchistic tendencies and corporate backing or get a famous person to his concert without having him kill you just for being so unbearably sycophantic) which might just help them overcome their errant pasts.
There are, as I count them, three ways that movies and television handle drug use by their protagonists.
First, there’s the “Harold and Kumar” approach. Drugs are fun! Sometimes bad, but mostly fun! Count low-budget teen comedies, “Dude Where’s My Car”?, pretty much any movie with Dave Chappelle, “Pineapple Express” and “That 70s Show,” among its recent adherents. Remember the scene where the giant bag of weed moves in with Kumar and they begin a wonderful life together only to see their beautiful dream devolve into an abusive relationship, but then Kumar snaps out of it and Harold breaks him out of jail? Of course you don’t. You were in the other room searching for some pretzels or fiddling with your piece, daydreaming about a bong that looks like one of those Swiss Alps trumpets from the Ricola commercials. But the point is it’s an unintended metaphor for this entire genre of movie, and “Get Him to the Greek” fits right in.
Like most movies of this kind, “Greek” runs down the resin-speckled checklist: Comically high characters? Yep – Aaron trashes the Today Show set after speed-smoking a joint. Ridiculous hallucinations? Try one disembodied-Diddy-head munching on another. A mythical drug treated as if it’s some sort of intoxicatory Holy Grail? Well, there’s the Jeffrey, which, in Aldous’s words is “weed, mostly […] a bit of opium in it, some heroin. Crunched up e’s. Clorox. Methodone. Subutex. Morphine. Peyote. Some other stuff that’s unidentifiable, and I think a little bit of angel dust.”
There’s one more item on that list: temporary regret. This is where “Get Him to the Greek” excels. Thanks to its excellent cast, “Greek” is able to transcend the category’s typical emotionlessness and find, like a drug-faded pop-rocker coming down off a six-day binge, that it can just somehow manage to feel its face. Figuratively.
The next method is the “Scarface” school: Drugs are a fickle seductress. Drugs cometh before the fall. Think “Blow,” “American Gangster” or the show “Weeds.” Here, drugs lead to success beyond what the hero is prepared for and before long he’s obscured behind a tall, white, mountain of shame, his personal relationships as damaged as his septum. Drugs are a stand-in in these movies for greed and self-absorption. There’s usually the sense that if only our boy would have kept his nose a little cleaner, he would have been okay. But the temptations of extravagance win out, and that moral failing, ironically, is something by which Hollywood simply cannot abide. So comeuppance is inevitable.
Finally, there’s the “American Beauty”/”Requiem for a Dream” discipline. This may seem like a weird pairing, but it’s the widest category of the three. In both of these, and others like them (and I’m counting movies about alcoholism here, too), drugs simply are what they are. They can open your mind and enable escape from suburban drudgery, or they can lead you to steal your widowed mother’s television and sell it at a boardwalk pawnshop as you try to scrape together cash for your next hit.
Unfortunately, “Iron Man 2” gets stuck between those last two, starting out as a cautionary tale but ending in celebration rather than disgrace. The writer’s intentions are clear: Tony realizes that the suit’s core (embedded in his chest, keeping him alive), is gradually poisoning him. The absolute psychological and physical dependence on the suit, his furtive sips of formaldehyde to counteract the poison, the walls he constructs to conceal his pain are as tell-tale as it gets; at one point in the movie, there’s even a quasi-intervention. “Iron Man 2” nails the selfish behavior required of the second approach – Tony is lascivious and obstreperous without fail – but ultimately the conceit falls apart.
What’s the point in punishment for doing drugs when it’s the drugs that are keeping you alive?
Lin Weeks is a junior majoring in Finance and Marketing. Upset with his omission of the DVD you were most excited about renting this week? Vent at [email protected].
