Franchise Friday: Clerks 2 (2006)
Kevin Smith gets back behind the counter.
There’s a case to be made that Jersey Girl is the most important film Kevin Smith ever made.
Not the best, mind you. And definitely not the most beloved or enduring. But for its role in Smith’s career trajectory, it’s an important milestone.
Coming off the success of Chasing Amy and Dogma, which married his low-fi aesthetic to more serious themes, Smith was one of the most hotly watched directors in play; Esquire’s Andrew Sarris called him “the next Martin Scorsese” in 2001. The slacker aesthetic he boasted since Clerks had grown to include personal musings and ambitious set pieces, and it seemed like the next step was for Smith to finally make a leap to mainstream success and “important” filmmaking.
After giving his View Askewniverse a wacky send-off with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Smith seemed ready to step into his next phase as an auteur. And in 2004, he made his first film without the presence of Jay and Silent Bob. Jersey Girl was a fairly standard family comedy, in which a workaholic PR rep (Ben Affleck) learns to slow down and become a better father following the death of his wife (Jennifer Lopez). It was not a hit, grossing only $36 million and grossing 43% on Rotten Tomatoes.
I haven’t seen the film since its release, but my memory is that Jersey Girl is not as bad as its reputation suggests. Saccharine and predictable, sure, but no worse than any number of schmaltzy family comedies that get released (I’d rather sit through Jersey Girl again than most of Cameron Crowe’s recent output). The harsh reaction had more to do with the constant presence of Affleck and Lopez in the media, and the recent drubbing taken by Gigli, a movie that is every bit as horrendous as its reputation suggests. Even though Lopez only appears in about 10 minutes of Jersey Girl, audiences wanted no more of Bennifer 1.0, and rejected the film outright.
Smith took that personally, and retreated to the familiarity of the Askewniverse, beginning work on Clerks 2. While he’s made a few studio pictures in the aftermath, most notably the bombs Zack and Miri Make a Porno (which is good, actually) and Cop Out (which is not), he’s never waded back into the more personal and respectable waters he attempted with Jersey Girl. And while it’s a mistake to say that he went all in on resurrecting his Askewniverse characters (only two of his feature-length films since 2004 have featured Jay and Silent Bob), Clerks 2 definitely served as the first hint that Smith was accepting his place as a purveyor of raunch and juvenilia; even his horror movies (aside from Red State) have a silly streak running through them.
But was Clerks 2 a retreat to his comfort zone, or was Smith working out his own personal mission statement? A case could be made for both.
Regressing to Randal
Clerks 2 is probably a more fitting farewell to the Askewniverse than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (although, like that film, it’s not a farewell; Clerks 3 is being released later this year). It returns to the world of Dante (Brian O’ Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson), booted from the Quick Stop after it catches fire and now slinging burgers at Mooby’s, the McDonald’s surrogate created for Dogma. Randal still occupies himself by telling crass jokes and obsessing over pop culture, and this time he has a young, naïve and ultra-Christian cook named Elias (Trevor Ferhman) to harass. Dante is preparing to leave and get married to a high school crush (Smith’s wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith) but also torn between his flirtation with his manager, Becky (Rosario Dawson). Jay and Silent Bob, returned from their cartoon adventures and newly sober, still hang out at the corner to aggravate everyone.
Aside from the vibrant color, the film is exactly what you’d expect from a sequel to Clerks. Randal’s jokes are shocking, obscene and sex-obsessed, and the pop culture quips move on from Star Wars and Jaws to include Transformers and Lord of the Rings (Randal’s re-enactment of the films — which were birthed from a Smith Q & A — is one of the funniest takedowns of that trilogy I’ve seen). Dante is still in the middle of an inexplicable love triangle. And there are still digs at irate, rude customers.
Some of this is really funny. Anderson continues to deliver one of the best comedic performances in Smith’s filmography. His interplay with Fehlman leads to the film’s funniest scene (Pillowpants and Listerfiend), and a sequence where he recoils after suffering a tirade from an old high school classmate (Jason Lee) allows him to showcase a bit of a more serious side. Jason Mewes re-creating Buffalo Bill’s dance from The Silence of the Lambs will always make me chuckle, and Smith’s too precise with one-liners for some of his jokes not to hit their mark.
But there’s a creakiness to the banter, and you can feel Smith’s script straining to shock. When Smith was just coming onto the scene, only a few years removed from his own convenience store years and funding movies via credit cards, the screeds against customers and depictions of the lives of service workers crackled with crude authenticity. But more than a decade out, with box office success under his belt and what I imagine was a fairly lucrative career, the rallying cry of obsessed minimum wage workers seems a bit hollow.
It’s old hat to say this in regard to Smith’s filmography, but the sex-obsessed dialogue has aged poorly. Randal’s obsessions are lecherous and, at times, borderline criminal, and it feels gross to hear this talk coming from 30-year-olds, when at least twentysomethings had the excuse of being juvenile. I get that that’s part of the joke, but it doesn’t make it any more palatable. Smith leers over his wife, the camera ogling during her multiple makeout sessions with O’ Halloran. And the film’s rampant homophobia, while dialed down slightly from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, is still present.
Perhaps the worst offender, and the most inexplicable, is a sequence in which Randal says a racial slur in front of a Black couple and then spends a good 10 minutes defending his usage while roping in a slew of other offensive terms. Smith is making a point that Randal’s a moron, but the scene isn’t funny, traffics in shock for shock’s sake, and grinds the entire film to a fault. Perhaps a Black filmmaker could have found the humor in this situation, but in Smith’s hands, as a white director whose white characters are the center of the story, it’s just gross and unnecessary.
The film hits peaks and valleys where some jokes hit and others falter, and there’s a definite sense of trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. At times — the aforementioned Lord of the Rings diatribe, “Pillowpants,” and a few Jay and Silent Bob riffs — it’s harmless and funny. But too often, it feels like Smith trying to prove he’s still got the crass cred that brought him on the scene, and feels desperate and plodding. By the time its hits its donkey show finale — which is somehow gross, unfunny and predictable all at once — Clerks 2 has proven it’s largely just a shallow retread of a film a younger Smith did much better.
There are two exceptions to this. One is the presence of Rosario Dawson, whose Becky is a joyful and funny addition to the Askewniverse. Dawson’s adept at spitting out Smith’s R-rated language, but she has real chemistry with O’ Halloran. It’s not a mystery who Dante will end up with at the end of the day, and the plot convolutions it takes to get there are largely unnecessary, but there’s a sweet romantic comedy hiding deep within this slacker ode, which hits its apex during a totally unnecessary but very fun musical number.
The second part takes a bit more unpacking, because on rewatch and with context of Smith’s career taken into account, there are moments where he actually appears to have something to say.
A mission statement
I started out by talking about the fallout from Jersey Girl, whose failure hit Smith hard. And part of what made that film such a whiff with his fans was that Kevin Smith, whose films were soaked in Gen X irony, had moved on not to do something as equally edgy and personal as Chasing Amy, but rather a cheesy little family comedy. Now, Smith may have had very good reasons for writing and directing Jersey Girl; he’s a writer who rolls his life experiences into his movies, and being a new father probably directed his choices. But it felt to many like an obligatory bid for respectability, Smith courting the mainstream cred that he previously skewered.
It’s hard not to think about that when viewing Dante’s storyline in Clerks 2. Here’s the convenience store clerk turned burger flipper pursuing a girl who suddenly gives him the time of day and getting ready to leave his friends and old life behind to pursue a life and job and Florida he doesn’t seem particularly excited about, but is running after because it’s the path expected of him. He’s clearly happier trading dick jokes with Randal or painting Becky’s toe nails in the back of Mooby’s, but he’s pursuing a “real” job and marriage because that’s the path that seems to promise the most.
I’m not saying that’s why Smith made Jersey Girl, but for a filmmaker whose works have often nakedly captured his state of mind (which is part of his appeal), it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch. And there’s likely a case to be made that Clerks 2 isn’t so much a retreat to his comfort zone as it is Smith realizing that rather than make mainstream pabulum, he’d rather just go ahead and tell dirty jokes with his friends.
It all culminates in a climactic scene that I wish the film had spent a bit more time laying the emotional groundwork for instead of lathering on the dick and fart jokes. In a jail cell after the donkey show events, Randal finally unloads at Dante for abandoning him, and talks about how the time spent at the Quick Stop was the best of his life because he was able to hang out with his best friend all day. It’s an emotional sequence, and Smith largely keeps the jokes at bay aside from a few quips by Jay and Silent Bob. Dante realizes that his best course is not to move to Florida but to buy the Quick Stop and spend his days cracking wise with Randal and proposing to Becky. The film ends with a montage that fades to black and white, echoing the duo’s permanent status as clerks.
And it’s hard not to see that as a mission statement for Smith, who decided not to court blockbuster success and rather play with his friends throughout his career. Again, there have been a few attempts to do something a bit broader, but largely his career has focused on doing the odd comic book gig, podcasting with his friends and making weird horror movies based on the podcast. He made one more Jay and Silent Bob movie (which we’ll get to next week), attempted to bring the Mallrats crew back (it didn’t happen) and now he’s finishing Clerks 3.
I used to look at this as a failure for Smith. I saw the ending as Clerks 2 as a loss of ambition, someone finally saying they’d rather stay comfortable and make easy movies instead of pushing themselves further. And true, of the films Smith made after Clerks 2, he’s done a comedy (Zack and Miri) that I liked, another comedy (Cop Out) that I loathed, and a series of horror movies that aren’t really worth talking about (again, we’ll get to my thoughts on Jay and Silent Bob Reboot next week).
But Smith appears to be having a great time. He’s working with his friends, his wife and his daughter. He seems happy and healthy, and there is an audience that still passionately follows him. I may not love or even like everything he’s doing, but Smith owes me nothing. If this is what brings him some joy, good on him. He’s a likable dude. I tend to root for him, even if I too often come away wishing for the cleverness and personal approach of Chasing Amy or the dead-on satire of Dogma.
And maybe I’ll be surprised with Clerks 3. This one ends with a nod toward the emotional, and Smith has intimated that the trilogy-capper will be a more more openly autobiographical story. I’ll cross my fingers that another visit with Randal and Dante has something to offer.