Review: DOUCHEBAG

Aside from its provocative title, DOUCHEBAG doesn’t offer a whole lot besides the usual catalog of character quirks found in so many budgetless slacker comedies. The mumblecore-style road trip about a pair of estranged brothers, one boorish and the other just boring, is an amiable enough indie that sports some good acting but is short on laughs and long on low-key meandering. Writer-director Drake Doremus’s film has its moments but the two leads aren’t people I would want to spend time with in real life, so I can hardly recommend that anyone spend their money to see DOUCHEBAG.

DOUCHEBAG is a sort of buddy flick laced with hostility. Andrew Dickler plays Sam, the douchebag of the title, a scrawny, bushy-bearded vegetarian who thinks he’s hilarious but is really the kind of guy who never thinks before he speaks and lacks humility and self-awareness. Ben York Jones plays his opposite younger brother Tom, an aspiring artist who’s quiet and self-conscious where his older sibling is abrasive and rude. Tom, stuck in the past, can’t get over their childhood rivalries and the brothers haven’t spoken in years. Soon before Sam is due to be married, his way-out-of-his-league fiance’ Steph (Marguerite Moreau) convinces Tom to attend the wedding. After an uncomfortable reunion, Tom reminisces about a girl he loved in fifth grade, so Sam insists that that they look her up on the Internet and take a road trip to find her so she can be his date for the wedding. The next day, they begin a journey up the California coast on this wild goose chase, leaving Steph at home to worry whether the brothers will make it back for her big day.

Their excursion in DOUCHEBAG is like a shallow redo of the one undertaken in SIDEWAYS but with far less interesting characters. Though Sam has more dialogue, it’s really Tom’s story. He’s a sad-sack loser who strives to be an artist but is living off his parents and has obvious self-esteem problems. Despite the man’s party-pooping attitude, a lot of us will see something of ourselves in Tom, and it’s easy to identify with him. We can also identify with the unpleasantness of hanging around with someone like Sam who’s not just a jerk but, in the latter part of the film, reveals a hurtful moral agenda. At a brief 70 minutes DOUCHEBAG is way too undercooked to make much of a dramatic impression, and not nearly funny enough to be classified as a comedy. The problem is that, while Sam is a cad, he’s not over-the-top or remarkable in his abrasiveness. With that title, I was expecting someone nastier and meaner. The fact is we’ve all known guys even more annoying than Sam but wouldn’t want to make or see a movie about them. DOUCHEBAG also feels a bit too improvised, like the dialog may have been made up as they went along, but instead of fresh it just comes off as unpolished.

DOUCHEBAG is too short a film to be dull and it does manage to generate a couple of modest chuckles. Both lead actors are quite good and display a natural, low-key rapport. Marguerite Moreau is fine but her character is thinly developed and it’s far from clear why such an attractive and bright woman would have fallen for Sam in the first place. DOUCHEBAG has some worthwhile moments; a scene where the boys silently slam 40-ounce Miller Hi-Lifes in a hotel room has an absurdist quality worthy of Jim Jarmusch and look for a brief but biting confrontation with the always-watchable Wendy McClendon-Covey (RENO 911) who shines in her single scene as a woman mistaken for Tom’s lost love. Had the film stayed with her, it may have gone somewhere, but DOUCHEBAG is ultimately a road movie that gets sidetracked to an abrupt dead end.

2 of 5 Stars