Zack and Miri Make a Porno Review

The film critics describe is two movies at once. One is a straightforward romantic comedy about friends who have been in love for years and needed a stupid reason to admit it, and Rogen and Elizabeth Banks play it with enough warmth to carry the whole picture. Banks gets the best notices, finding an exasperated decency that keeps her from becoming a punchline. The other movie is Kevin Smith reaching for shock, and that half draws the complaints. The scatological setpiece everyone remembers is staged as a climax rather than a gag, the raunch is frequently louder than it is funny, and the film keeps undercutting the tenderness it has just earned.

Smith's flat staging remains the criticism attached to him since the beginning, and the working class Pittsburgh texture is asserted rather than shot. What survives is the middle. When the film stops trying to be transgressive and simply lets two people realize what they have been avoiding, it is disarming, and the scene where the sex stops being a job is the best directing Smith has managed. The wrapper around that is a good deal cruder than the thing inside it.