David Wain is a master of endurance cinema: How long can a joke keep going before it loses its luster? The writer and director (and sometimes actor) pushes a bit to its limits, occasionally allowing a stupid gag to become unfunny before doubling back and becoming funny all over again. In the case of his latest film, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, there’s a scene in which a character tries in vain to close a door on Gail (Zoey Deutch) and her ragtag group of friends over and over and over again. At the movie’s Sundance Film Festival premiere at the Eccles, laughter rippled across the room. It was funny, but then it kept going, and then it got funnier and funnier, the enthusiasm contagious. Wain’s films not only deserve that kind of reception from an audience, they need it.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a rollicking travelogue and desperately silly take on The Wizard of Oz. It shares DNA with They Came Together and Wet Hot American Summer, irreverent parodies of preexisting genres and story tropes that audiences know by now. Wain’s latest — which he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Ken Marino — tells the story of Gail, a doe-eyed and simple woman from Kansas who goes on a whirlwind journey to Los Angeles to fulfill her dream of sleeping with Jon Hamm ahead of her wedding. She travels alongside her best friend and co-worker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), a hapless CAA agent (Ben Wang), a down-on-his-luck paparazzo (Marino), and John Slattery (playing himself). Like all of Wain’s best work, Gail Daughtry is full-tilt silliness, the type that may lose whatever magic it has if relegated to a streaming service and denied the collective audience experience.
Sitting in the Eccles theater the night of Gail Daughtry’s premiere, I was reminded of the chuckles that circulated during screenings of Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun reboot last August — only to realize it had been over a decade since a Wain movie enjoyed a theatrical release. His last effort was the 2018 National Lampoon biographical film A Futile and Stupid Gesture, which went from Sundance to Netflix. Wain has seen a great deal of success on the streaming platform, spinning off Wet Hot American Summer into not one but two different television series. Still, something like Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass deserves the kind of run Role Models and They Came Together once had. It’s not that the film is so complicated as to require intense focus, but rather that trying to watch this at home, phone in hand, robs Wain’s work of its stronghold. An audience is necessary for a movie this stupid (endorsement). Half the fun of catching it with a crowd at the Eccles was hearing people register jokes at different speeds. At one point in the movie, Marino’s paparazzo casually tosses a roll of film up in the air, and laughter grew steadily as people realized the canister was not going to not fall down in the expected amount of time.
There’s an inherent joy to spending a night on YouTube looking up scenes from various Wain movies — here’s a favorite — but there’s nothing quite as good as experiencing all the jokes in real time. Having the opportunity to celebrate humor in this way, and not like Elijah Wood in I Love LA, is rare and worthwhile. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass merits the kind of reception the film got at its premiere, maybe in the type of movie theater that has nachos or Icees, where you can recline in your seat, and not one where high schoolers will be putting on Into the Woods in a matter of weeks. With the first week of Sundance winding down and whispers of purchases starting to circulate, distributors ought to take advantage of one of the film world’s best comedy directors returning to form. As people filed out of the Eccles, I watched as a woman tapped the arm of a man wiping away tears of laughter. “I know how you feel,” she said, because they’d seen the movie together.
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