“Casa de mi Padre,” an absurdist sendup of cheapo Spanish-language gangster melodramas, has a hall-of-mirrors weirdness to it, in which the weirdness is endlessly multiplied in all directions. Weirdness isn’t a surface gloss, or an occasional indulgence. It’s central to the movie’s ethos.
The question, then, is whether it’s funny. Oh, it’s shocking. It’s strange. It will make you scratch your head and rub your eyes in confusion. But will it make you laugh? That’s harder to say. There are certainly grins and chuckles to be had, but the movie’s weirdness is so profound, it occasionally seems designed more to provoke than entertain.
Not that it’s not also frequently amusing. Shot in grainy, yellowed film stock and performed almost entirely in Spanish, the movie offers knowing, fourth-wall-breaking sendups of bad production values and gangster movie cliches, many of which hit their targets.
Outdoor scenes are staged on obvious sets, complete with mediocre matte paintings as backgrounds. In-car conversations are shot in front of poorly synced projection screens. Much of the audio sounds as if it has been dubbed in post-production.
So there are jokes, yes, but any humor comes across as beside the point: The filmmakers appear much more interested in indulging in hazy-brained silliness, like a musical interlude that ends with all of the characters dramatically smashing bottles.
Why? Don’t ask why. This is not a movie that’s highly invested in the rational explanation of anything. There’s a plot, of sorts, but it’s even less central to the production than the straightforward satirical bits.
Armando (Will Ferrell), the stupid son of a Mexican landowner (Pedro Armendariz Jr.), gets mixed up in a web of crime and drugs when his brother Raul (Diego Luna) returns home to wed his bride, Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez). A sneering local kingpin named Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal) shows up to cause trouble. All of this is just a framework built to arrange strange scenes filled with cruddy camerawork and awkward pauses, inexplicable behavior, and the occasional mountain-lion-inspired acid trip vision sequence.
It’s pleasantly offbeat, at times playing like a goofy variant on a lost Luis Bunuel surrealist classic.
Indeed, the bizarre hijinks suggest an impenetrable experimental art project that somehow managed to snag Mr. Ferrell. Some viewers may be reminded of the Dada movement, famous for stunts such as including a toilet bowl in an exhibit.
I found myself thinking more about the Russian Futurists, whose early-20th-century shows were as much about harassing the audience as about the performance itself. Too often, “Casa de mi Padre” plays like a feature-length in-joke between the movie’s cast and crew. That’s their prerogative, but it would have been nice if they’d let the audience in on the joke.
✭✭
TITLE: “Casa de mi Padre”
CREDITS: Directed by Matt Piedmont. Written by Andrew Steele
RATING: R for violence, drug use and sexual innuendo
RUNNING TIME: 84 minutes
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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