One of more memorable images in Daddy’s Home, the 2015 family comedy/cuckold fetish video, is a child’s drawing of Will Ferrell’s character, Brad Whitaker, dead and half-buried, his torso sticking out of the ground upside down. His family stands over the grave, his wife holding Brad’s severed cock. This sets the tone for Daddy’s Home (indeed, it acts as the title card for Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg’s names). Largely overlooked as another in a stream of big box studio family comedies, this movie, and to a lesser extent its sequel, are much weirder than their reputation. Despite appearing to be middle of the road pablum, they both eagerly galumph into the culture wars, with particular interest in exploring the concept of masculinity. What is it, who has it, and how valuable is it? On paper, the plots feel akin to mean-spirited theater pieces, from the likes of David Mamet, but they think they’re being Meet the Fockers. It’s unclear, even after a few viewings, if the franchise is intentionally a subversive, cynical satire or if they’re a pair of big, blundering dummies, saying witless things about hot button topics at a child’s birthday party (which is the sort of thing that happens non-stop in the Daddy’s Home films).
The director, Sean Anders, has a resume that suggests the latter. A comedy journeyman, responsible for mediocrities like Horrible Bosses 2 and That’s My Boy. Will Ferrell, on the other hand, could go either way. Ferrell’s career is based almost entirely on stunted or out-of-control maleness. Almost all his characters, certainly the most popular ones, can be sorted into either raging Ids on an eternal hunt for dominance and poon tang (Ron Burgundy, his run of sports comedies) or stunted weaklings, comically unable to perform the basics tasks of being a man (Stepbrothers, both this year’s Downhill and Eurovision). Daddy’s Home gives Ferrell maybe his all time limpest weenie in Brad Whitaker, a sterile, spineless puddle of Beta Male retreat. Brad is the ostensible protagonist of these films, but both the script and Ferrell seem to love pushing him into such extreme positions of pathetic cowardice and stupidity that it becomes difficult to stand him at all, let alone sympathize with him.
Opposite him is Wahlberg, playing a huge asshole named Dusty. Wahlberg also has a career built on the idea of outsize masculinity, although in his case, it’s much more about presenting it as dominant, charismatic and aspirational, even when he’s playing a huge asshole, which is often. Not to mention his public image, carefully crafted to present more or less the exact same thing. He owns a burger chain! His life is the basis for Entourage! He beats people up for shitty reasons! He says he could have single-handedly prevented 9/11! This makes them ideal partners for this black-hearted little film, which utilizes both star’s personas the way a conscientious hunter uses every piece of the deer. It’s possible this material would have been better served as a psychological sex thriller with Patrick Wilson in the Ferrell role, but they made it a family comedy, and as that’s the way they wanted to go, these two are just about perfectly cast.
The plot of Daddy’s Home is a loose thing, a pretense for the gorilla dominance battle. Ferrell is married to Linda Cardellini (logging time in the movie wife salt mines) and step-father to her two children. Their long-absent biological father (Wahlberg) comes back into the scene, and they spend the next hour and a half measuring cocks, mostly through metaphor, but not entirely. The contrast between the two is as broadly drawn as you might hope, Brad drives a sensible family sedan while Dusty rides a Harley Davidson. Brad is a middle manager for a smooth jazz radio station, Dusty has a nebulous government job that sounds very Tom Cruise-ish, and moonlights as Iron Man trainer. Also, Brad’s infertility is mentioned early and often. His sperms do not work, underline, repeat. They fight comically, in escalating set pieces, for the ultimate male role, the position and title of ‘Daddy’. This word has no other implications that the movie is aware of, which is weird.
Daddy’s Home is a conga line of humiliations and failures of masculinity for Brad. Some are very Hollywood-ish, such as Dusty constructing a professional grade skateboard ramp in the backyard overnight, which Brad attempts to prove his worth on, but instead horribly injures himself. But a some of it has teeth, such as the running bit where Dusty exposes Brad’s white liberal racism (Hannibal Buress has a funny supporting role basically playing the JB Smoove role from Curb Your Enthusiasm, although his role mostly amounts to Ferrell floundering with racially charged language in front of him). Another vicious bit features Bobby Cannavale, playing a fertility doctor, manhandling their cocks and hungrily detailing the formal excellence of Wahlberg’s versus the technical insufficiencies of Ferrell’s. It’s a real ‘what the fuck am I watching?’ sequence. It quickly becomes clear that Dusty is mounting an elaborate psychological campaign to destroy Brad, a plan that rivals Ledger’s Joker in its mix of complexity and improvisation. It involves him knowing Kobe Bryant personally. The target is Brad’s masculinity, which Dusty undermines in every possible way, like a Neil LaBute villain. Brad is easily goaded into doomed head to head competitions, and his inability to see this makes him loathsome to us, the audience. We can’t help but agree with Thomas Haden Church, playing Ferrell’s boss and only friend, who admits that even he is rooting for Dusty. By making Dusty such a winner, is Daddy’s Home making us complicit in a social hierarchy that values strength over compassion? Or does it just not know what it’s doing?
When things come to a head, Brad goes too far (as Ferrell characters are wont to do), and drunkenly announces (mid-court, at a Lakers game) that even though Dusty is almost certain to supplant him as Daddy, he’s already managed to overcome his sperm problems and fuck a child into Cardellini, whom Dusty will now be forced to care for as a stepfather, the ultimate Jacobean revenge. This stuff is great! Unfortunately, this is where, in an ironic twist, the film loses its balls. Dusty, in victory, is revealed to be completely unable to manage the minutiae of the role of Daddy, succumbing to PTSD when forced to deal with the small errands and etiquette required for managing his son’s after school activities. He bails on his kids, leaving Brad to pick up the pieces. The movie’s ultimate position is that the role of Daddy involves constantly being disrespected and forced to demean yourself, which means a nebbish like Brad is a more natural fit than Dusty. But this isn’t enough, the film needs everyone to be very happy at the end, so Dusty builds a house next door with his limitless wealth (money is colored paper to the offensively rich characters in Daddy’s Home), marries, and settles down with a stepdaughter of his own. All of this negates his already unbelievable abandonment from ten minutes ago, but fuck it. He and Brad are now best friends, and Cardellini seems indifferent to whomever came out on top, as long as they’re able to perform the sacred rites of manliness and dadliness. It’s a shame, as there are two better endings, either Brad is indeed banished for his failures and weakness, or he turns the tables in some kind of overkill madness, a Scott Tenorman Must Die finale.
Ferrell and company know better than me. He attempted a film about a realistic failure of masculinity just this year, in Downhill, and it bombed and no one liked it. Daddy’s Home, on the other hand, is his most successful film, somehow. And this cutesy ending paved the way for the sequel, the cleverly titled Daddy’s Home 2. The big innovation is to add similarly broad grandpas into the mix, and the casting is just as on point here, with Mel Gibson and John Lithgow. And while the film is certainly less savage in its cartoon portrayal of maleness and life-destroying ego (part of an ongoing Fockers-ization, it seems), just having these two actors on hand contributes to making it every bit as strange and culturally loaded.
Gibson may have once been a huge action movie star, but now, he’s more famous for being a virulently racist monster person. There’s plenty of room to debate whether he should be allowed in movies at all (for the record, my opinion is probably not family comedies?), but the state of things in Daddy’s Home 2 is that he is very much present. He plays Dusty’s huge asshole father, a withholding old prick fond of dead hooker jokes, recreational hunting and absence. It’s not exactly a good performance or anything; Gibson has that slight veneer of shame and desperation that’s featured in all his recent roles, and doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself much. But seeing him on screen, participating in family comedy hijinks, does have a bit of an odd charge, one that would be unwelcome if the film itself was in any way wholesome. No going back to the good old uncomplicated days for Mel, it would seem.
Counterbalance to him is Lithgow, an actor who’s played different variations on masculinity all through his career. Equally adept at playing sitcom dads and sexually deviant murderers, he’s an incredibly savvy choice to play Ferrell’s father. And it must be said, despite Daddy’s Home 2’s various insufficiencies, Lithgow aces it. Claiming the easy majority of the film’s laughs, his John Whitaker is pure Beta Male energy that has exploded up and out, and somehow become dominant. God-tier lame dad jokes and enough hugging to shame John Lasseter, Lithgow, like Ferrell, is delighted to look like a horse’s ass, and their collective weakness easily outshines Gibson and Wahlberg’s projection of strength. As always, I’m never sure what the film wants me to think of it. There’s a big mystery of where Lithgow’s wife is during the film, and the reveal is that they’re newly divorced. This information comes in the form of a Lithgow weeping breakdown in the middle of him performing an Improv skit about cucking on stage, with everyone laughing at him. I think the movie wants me to feel bad for him too, but it’s maybe the funniest scene in the movie, in no small part due to the tiny woman’s arms Lithgow is sporting for the Improv game. Maybe it’s incidental, but I couldn’t help remember the sympathetic adulterer Lithgow played in Terms of Endearment, and wondered if the movie was having some fun with that. The cucker, cucked.
Daddy’s Home 2 needed more moments like this. In its cynical attempt to be a Fockers movie, it has taken the most desperate of Hollywood sequel moves, and fashioned itself as a Christmas film. And in the most obvious ways as well, a Christmas Vacation rip-off, similar to any number of Tim Allen films or Hallmark channel cash-ins. Every station of the Christmas Movie cross is visited, with an added flavor of masculine competition and dick-measuring, from putting up exterior lights to visiting Santa (a black Santa, so you can’t help but wonder if Mel’s gonna have anything to say about it) to sledding to cutting down a Christmas tree (not from some lame unmanly lot, but from out in the woods!). It even adds one I’d never seen, posing as a living nativity. The plot, such as it is, is that Gibson is a horrible old man who tries to incite strife and competition between Brad and Dusty, and he easily succeeds. But there’s nothing at stake other than a shitty Christmas vacation, which they all have anyway.
Because of this, any semblance of real darkness is pretty much absent from the sequel, despite Gibson. But it remains weird and mean, just itching to humiliate and emasculate its characters, and probably of more interest to smug, ironic types like myself than its intended family audience (grosses were down from the original, throwing the possibility of a capper to this trilogy into doubt). One place where it does shine is in a major subplot about the oldest son, a bespectacled little dork named Dylan. This is where Daddy’s Home 2 gets to really delve into the original’s concerns over what proper masculinity looks like, as the hardass jerk side of the family battles with the limp dweeb side for the kid’s future cocksmanship. Dylan has a crush on a girl, and wants to talk to his dads about sex. Brad strongly advocates a Friend Zone based approach, which is likely Ferrell’s finest work in the franchise. In the end, it turns out the girl Dylan has a crush on is his stepsister, adding a fine pseudo-incest wrinkle these films had been missing. This competition, determining Dylan’s future as a binary choice between raging asshole or spineless coward, is where the original’s anger lives most fully.
The movie ends with the family breaking their world’s reality and performing a series of heartfelt public speeches in a crowded movie theater lobby, all culminating in a Shrek-style dance party. The song everyone comes together to sing is the execrable ‘Do They Know Its Christmas’, the 80s super group ode the Ethiopian famine, a song you almost never hear used in earnest anymore. And with reason, it’s gross! It’s in many ways the correct choice for Daddy’s Home 2, a film attempting to be a family comedy about Christmas and Dads, but keeps choking on the bile of its internal ugliness. These self-satisfied rich suburbanites just love singing this song, and Christmas, and cock-measuring. Even Mel Gibson’s joining in the fun. There’s a Liam Neeson cameo, and even a nasty little gay joke on the way out the door. It’s got everything.
There’s an odd undercurrent of cruelty in the big box family comedies coming out of Hollywood nowadays. Maybe the Fockers series really is to blame, as everyone seems to be following in their footsteps, duplicating the Blue State dorkiness conflicting with Red State dickishness formula that made them big hits. You can see it in the Sandler Grown Ups comedies, light-hearted odes to bullying and punching down, or any number of recent angry family films (Why Him?, the James Franco/Bryan Cranston entry comes to mind). What sets the Daddy’s Home films apart is that under the pratfalls and the idiot set pieces and obscene shows of wealth, you can discern the leering grin of the satirist, reveling in this unassuming hellworld of endless gauntlets of masculine control. Keep your dick up, it says, or all you hold dear will be rightly taken from you. Not literally, though. Despite these films being a catalogue of emasculating scenarios, there somehow isn’t a single Viagra joke in either film. Not even the one about old guys. For shame, Daddy’s Home.
