In the late 1970s, a young woman I dated a few times in high school once informed me that, should she ever get the opportunity to sleep with Robby Benson, she was taking it. She wasn’t delusional; she recognized the unlikelihood of this, and wasn’t working to bring it about. But she wanted to make it clear that if circumstances ever happened to align and the chance presented itself, it was happening, and any man in her life would just have to understand.
This, I suppose, was my first encounter with the arrangement referred to in the title Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. It’s the pre-agreed-upon celebrity, or sometimes the list of a few celebrities, with whom a person in a committed relationship is allowed to have a single tryst without fear of reproach or consequence from their partner.
It’s an interesting sociological exercise, both in the dynamic of long-term relationships and in what it says about our attitude toward celebrity; the celebrity in the equation is generally assumed to be without emotional investment, or any reality as a human being, for that matter. But while it’s normally a facetious game between lovers, it seems likely that once or twice it must have really occurred.
That’s the jumping-off point for Gail Daughtry, directed by David Wain of Wet Hot American Summer from a script he co-wrote with Ken Marino. Zoey Deutch (who scored an indie success in Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague) plays Gail, a ray-of-sunshine former cheerleader, now a hairdresser, in the small-town Midwest. She’s days away from her wedding to her high-school sweetheart (Michael Cassidy) when he actually cashes in his celebrity sex pass.
Having assumed the agreement was just a playful joke, Gail is distraught. She goes to a hairdressing conference in L.A. with her BFF Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), where she is advised that the only way she can restore equilibrium in her relationship is to hunt down and have sex with her CSP designee.
Wacky adventures ensue. Like, really wacky adventures ensue. For the first few scenes, I thought Gail Daughtry was meant as a standard, relatively realistic rom-com, and the performances seemed pitched way too high to sustain that tone. But as the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Wain and Marino are after pure, high-test silliness, and it quickly becomes hilarious.
Gail and Otto pick up a few additional allies, including John Slattery as a scruffy, prickly version of himself, Ben Wang as an ambitious CAA lackey, and cowriter Marino as a battle-seasoned paparazzo. The episodic story turns into a skewed L.A. version of The Wizard of Oz, complete with a Wicked Witch: some sort of gang boss (Sabrina Impacciatore) whose suitcase full of important papers Gail has accidentally acquired. Instead of flying monkeys, imbecilic goons.
The movie zooms off into wild, farfetched slapstick, culminating with Gail meeting her designated celebrity. Wain and Marino seem to have good connections and to have called in favors – i.e. there are some pretty big stars in this thing, some of them in substantial cameos, many playing themselves. Not every gag works, but overall GDATCSP is a blast because it’s tightly written, the pace is headlong, and the acting is terrific, especially that of the impossibly beguiling Zoe Deutch.
Among the gags that didn’t work, for me, were quite a few based on gore and splatter. Gory slapstick can work wonderfully in a true horror comedy like, say, Evil Dead 2 (1987), but in a cheery, guileless farce like Gail Daughtry, it strikes a sour note.
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