There is a certain kind of movie you stop watching as you get older. It's not a maturity thing, it's just that your life changes and your interests aren't the same. For example, when you stop watching movies bunched up in a bedroom with your friends, there is a certain type of comedies you stop watching altogether. Lots of comedies about relationships. College movies. That kind of stuff. For a comedy, withstanding the test of time and cinema oblivion is exceptional. ROAD TRIP was missing to my culture for all these years, but it's a movie that is fondly remembered by people who went to college in early 2000s and that is still a part of many movie collections. I caught up with the phenomenon last weekend and found out ROAD TRIP is more than a good comedy, it's a good movie.
Josh (Breckin Meyer) and Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard), grew up together. They've known each other their whole life and dated for a couple of years until they went their separate way for college. They gave a shot to a long distance relationship, but the temptations of college are tough on job. One night, he gives in and has wild sex with Beth (a young and blooming Amy Smart). No big deal right? What happens in college stays in college. The problem is that kinky Beth videotaped the entire thing. After their wild night of passion, Josh placed the tape on top of another one he was going to send Tiffany and, of course, his roommate Rubin (Paulo Costanzo) ends up running the errand for Josh and sends out the wrong freakin' tape. Josh decides to undergo a road trip to Austin with Rubin, E.L (the immortal Seann William Scott) and Kyle (D.J Qualls) to intercept the tape before Tiffany sees it. They have 3 days to drive from Ithaca, New York to Austin, Texas.
ROAD TRIP is Todd Phillips' first comedy. The name might not ring a bell right away, but he's the writer and director of The Hangover series, one of the only transcendent comedies of this decade. College movies normally have this established pattern: the hero is pure, and his friends are filthy, yet kind hearted. He understands the truths of life in a way they will never do and ultimately prevails over any kind of quid pro quo that could separate him from the object of his desire. Todd Phillips is a man with his own original ideas and ROAD TRIP is a reflection of that. Simple decisions, like the selection of Breckin Meyer for lead, challenge the sterotype of this genre. Meyer does not embody purity at all, but he does look a whole lot like a realistic college kid. He state his intentions of staying loyal to Tiffany several times during the movie, but his body language is always contradicting him, the way the body langage of a horny kid would.
Seriously, ROAD TRIP is a rather progressive movie that chose a genre that's often associated with reactionary storytelling. It's an assault on the romantic myth of purity, a statement that your college experience might just be as important or even more important that whatever life you might've been promised as a child. ROAD TRIP takes a progressive stance on other social issues too. There is this incredible scene where the guys seek asylum for one night in an African-American fraternity. The obvious thing here would've been to cram as many racial jokes as possible in the scene, but Todd Phillips would just not do the obvious thing, wouldn't he? The fraternity kid play a racial joke on Josh and his friends and then party all night long with them. The movie acknowledges racism issues, but refuses to use them to create drama. That's this kind of screenwriting subtleties that put Todd Phillips on another level when it comes to comedy.
I was 15 years too late on the ROAD TRIP bandwagon, but I sure don't regret watching it. It's a movie that didn't age at all. Its humour and its quirkiness are universal. It's a deceptively progressive and intellectual movie that masquerades as your run-of-the-mill college movie because of the smoothness of Todd Phillips' screenwriting. I'm not huge on comedies, but this is as good as it gets, south of MALLRATS and THE BIG LEBOWSKI. ROAD TRIP is not a life-altering, existential experience, but it's a rare commodity in the Hollywood landscape: a comedy with a brain. It doesn't matter if you've seen ROAD TRIP a hundred times or if you're just discovering it. It's a movie that doesn't age and that will wait for new viewers until society collapses.
