Cast: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Keegan-Michael Key, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
Director: Elizabeth Banks
Rating: 3 stars
First-timer Elizabeth Banks’ Pitch Perfect 2 is a teen-drama with profound life-lessons and capital-t themes: characters learn to let go; or fall in love; or grow up; or discover their voices, etc., but one that is distilled through — very curiously — a late ’90s, early 2000s, Anna Faris-tone of self-reflexive, absurdist parody.
As a result, irony abounds nothing is sincere. Each scene cancels itself out, each moment of sentimentality is summarily deflated and nothing is really meant to mean much. Consider a brief moment in the final third of the film: Fat Amy (written as an obviously politically incorrect stereotype; played by Rebel Wilson) has an epiphany around nighttime campfire. She is in love with a guy who she had turned down earlier in the film, so she decides to act on the impulse. She gets up, declares her intention to be with him and begins to make a symbolic, meaningless run, which is promptly cut short when — a concealed booby trap scoops her up and leaves her suspended in mid-air. This is a perfect metaphor for the writing in the film, which organises a big, dramatic event only to eventually convert it into a gag.
To its credit, the film announces its comic strategy at the very outset: it opens with a performance by the Bellas (the college a cappella group at the centre of the film) at the Kennedy Centre. The Obamas are in attendance — this indicates the enormity of the occasion. All’s well, until Amy makes her appearance, hung from the ceiling. She tries to contort herself into a complex posture and her wardrobe malfunctions — on national television, in front of the live audience, in front of the President — a real disgrace. The a cappella commission disowns the group and disqualifies them from any further participation in national competitions. But the World Championship is coming up at Copenhagen — the Bellas figure it’s their chance at redemption. They have an incentive, but Beca (Anna Kendrick, showing us how to act in an ensemble film) has a secret: she has found a job interning at a major recording studio.
The film’s structure of a group dealing with initial, public failure and using its lessons to find later, famous success is a staple of such films, but Pitch Perfect 2 employs clichés deliberately, and with purpose. It is cleverly written, so it uses the familiar, template nature of its material to instead discuss other, unfamiliar ideas that movies of its type usually skip. Chief and the most interesting among these is its meditation on a cappella itself: it reveals the insular, smug, self-defeating nature of the form (a wonky, billionaire connoisseur declares, “we hate originals, we only love covers!”). It also questions its viability as an actual, artistic pursuit; in a significant scene, Beca’s boss (Keegan-Michael Key delivers the best performance in the whole film) puts her in her place: “Listen kid, anyone with a laptop and an ear can do mashups.”
The conflict established in the first film — a contest between the men and women on campus — carries over, in a more evolved form, into the sequel. The chief antagonist is Das Sound Machine, a German group; they are mechanical, cold, precise, colour coordinated, very masculine and sing anthems, not songs. This is placed against the Bellas, a group of confused, emotionally vulnerable teenagers who “sing from the heart”.
Such stereotypes are used to construct, ultimately, a film about other films. There is subtle genre-commentary, a consistently unreliable tone and an open attempt to salvage the team-film from its inherently manly, very masculine nature (“men on a mission”) and forge a version of it told by a woman. All of this makes for a film that is less orderly but smarter, erratic but intricate, and obnoxious, but, ultimately, funny.
The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society
