In The King of Staten Island, the SNL imp brings his lack of charm to a feature film.
In The King of Staten Island, the SNL imp brings his lack of charm to a feature film.
I f you’ve found Pete Davidson irritating on Saturday Night Live, you’re in for a surprise with his autobiographically tinged comedy feature The King of Staten Island: In the movie he’s irritating in a completely different way.
Childish and manic on SNL, Davidson plays a sullen depressive in the film, which repeatedly seeks to find comic mileage in scenes built around other characters trying to be nice as he responds with uncalled-for nastiness. He’s meant to be anarchically funny, but instead he’s a typical narcissistic adolescent bore. The King of Staten Island, which is being released via video on demand in lieu of a theatrical rollout, is the worst of the six films directed by Judd Apatow (who, along with Davidson, is one of the three writers of the script). Apatow’s instinct to dig into people’s life stories looking for material is a good one, but this movie is merely the dung in the bildungsroman.
Davidson plays Scott, the aimless 24-year-old son of a New York City firefighter killed in action (and named in honor of the actor’s own father Scott, himself a firefighter who died helping others on 9/11). Scott’s body is covered with tattoos that make him look like a survivor of a paintball attack, and his extremely modest goal in life is to become a tattoo artist himself, although his own efforts at design are so awful that only his dumbest friend will let Scott practice on him. A drab and rubbishy Staten Island is the objective correlative of his misery; we’re told it’s the only place New Jersey looks down on. Has anyone involved with this film heard the way New Jerseyans talk about the South, the Midwest, upper New England, the Southwest, or the Great Plains states? Staten Islanders, being New Yorkers, look down on all those places, too. S.I. and N.J. share a tendency to be cocky and aggrieved at the same time, and it’s not necessarily a winning comic attitude.
Scott still lives at home and works as a busboy at a restaurant, where his habit of spitting in people’s food is less endearing than Apatow and Davidson seem to think. As his mother (Marisa Tomei) and sister (Maude Apatow) try to nudge him to do basic human things such as put on a suit for the girl’s high-school graduation, Scott resists all helpful advice. Instead he wallows in self-pity and stumbles into an affectless affair with a local girl (Bel Powley) whose attraction to him, as he stares blankly at the nearest wall, is left a mystery. After Scott tries to put a tattoo on the arm of a nine-year-old boy, he lies and tries to shirk responsibility and is repaid by the worst development imaginable: The kid’s father (the standup comic Bill Burr, sporting a mustache the size of a hedgerow) starts dating Scott’s mother.
Given that Burr comes off as much earthier and more appealing than Davidson, the movie grows even more toxic when Scott starts raging at his mom for dating again. She hasn’t had a lover in 17 years, and this seems partly due to her son’s crankiness. Instead of appearing interestingly wounded, he comes across as gratuitously cruel, even ugly. Ugly is a fair description of the movie in general.
Scott is a sort of anti-avatar for Davidson; this, we’re meant to think, is how the comic might have turned out had he not gone into showbiz. But this is not a hypothetical that’s interesting enough to sustain a two-and-a-quarter hour film. For the first 90 minutes Scott mopes, gets into fights that he loses (my favorite bit is when he gets himself tossed into an above-ground pool), and commits crimes with his dingbat stoner pals. You could call the film’s structure episodic, but it would be generous to describe any of these desultory and rambling scenes as episodes. Apatow has gambled everything on Davidson’s charm, which turns out to be about as wise as betting on the Metropolitan Museum of Art moving from Fifth Avenue to the fifth borough. Just to make sure no one can possibly be tempted to laugh, Apatow plays long, monotonous stretches of the movie with no background music and shoots in a lighting scheme that ranges from dim to sepulchral. Dramatically under-lighting everything is the cliché of the moment for cinematographers: This film’s director of photography, the Oscar winner Robert Elswit, makes it look like a Godfather movie instead of a soulful comedy.
Scott eventually grows up a bit (there’s a scene of him lovingly folding an American flag at a firehouse, and ex-firefighter Steve Buscemi does fine work as an elder statesman of the department), so the last act of the film is an improvement. But the turn comes far too late: By the time the movie stops being a groaner, you’ll have long since gotten out your phone to look for something more interesting. In a home-theater environment, plodding lifelessness is even more unbearable than it is in theatrical release.