Flak Magazine: Review of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, 08.10.04

"You might think this is just about the burgers, but this night is about the American dream," Kumar says to his best friend Harold. And just what is the American dream for Harold, a low-level Asian-American investment analyst, and Kumar, an Indian-American medical school candidate? Not to make too much of the allegorical quality of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, but the film's vision of what it really means to be a second-generation immigrant is downright sardonic.

The ingrained myth is that immigrants come to the land of opportunity to make a better life for their family, personified by Kumar's father, a successful Indian doctor who has relocated to New Jersey. But what is the long-term reality of this ideal for his family? What does "a better life" mean, exactly, in 21st century America, especially for a Westernized, MTV-bred twentysomething like Kumar? The makers of Harold and Kumar define a better life as one so easy you can spend your days slacking at work or school and your nights getting high and going to White Castle. Anyone who has spent any time anywhere near an upscale college fraternity knows this to be true for upper-middle-class white guys. But for immigrant sons like Harold and Kumar, the city on a hill their parents saw in America becomes reduced to a grandiloquently named fast food joint that sells shitty 39-cent hamburgers. In Hoboken, N.J.

The joke is that Harold and Kumar's "quest," as dumb as it is, pretty much holds the truth of what's become of most intelligent American slackers of all colors and creeds. Why should Harold and Kumar strive for some sort of greatness? Back in the sweatshops of India or Korea, you could work for several hours and perhaps not earn enough for a single belly bomber, but here in America you don't have to try at all to afford a whole damn sackful and gorge yourself without a care in the world. In America, excess is king, and his throne sits in White Castle.

This is the theme on which most of the jokes in this movie turn. Sure, they're hit-and-miss, but at least they mostly cohere around a central idea. As Harold and Kumar trek across New Jersey, the America they find is racist, paranoid and angry. There's the black man (Anthony Anderson in his funniest scene ever) working the drive-through of Burger Shack, so on-edge that he flips into riot mode with barely any provocation, turning over bun trays and screaming, "Let's burn this motherfucker down!" There's the Ivy League dork who thinks that weed alone will make him popular; he just gets beat up for his backpack, as if his lunch money from elementary school has become a dime bag at Princeton. Of course, there are the nerdy Asians who are all too willing to embrace the stereotype, worshipping the disillusioned Harold as if his crappy investment banking job is somehow the pinnacle of human achievement. Even the most persecuted people in the history of Western civilization, the Jews, are able to just kick back on the couch, toke up, check out Katie Holmes' boobs in The Gift and then drive to KFC for a bucket. And what of the faux-rage of "extreme" losers who mock Harold and Kumar ("Thank you, come again" in Apu voice) and then skateboard to the convenience store "to get some fucking Mountain Dew! Yeah!" The film also has fun combining discordant clichés into bizarre satires, such as the boil-faced psycho Christian truck driver with a gorgeous farm-girl wife and an unquenchable sexual appetite.

As is often the case in this type of movie, describing the gags doesn't necessarily convey whether or why they work. These do because the makers of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle have a clear idea, despite the veneer of disjointed wackiness, of what they're trying to say. The chief exhibit is a particularly brilliant cameo. Here's the set-up: Stoner savant Kumar indulges his lifestyle to subvert the expectations of his father, who is using his connections to get Kumar into medical school. Kumar resists this because he's perceptive and worldly enough to sense that a "good" job isn't all there is to life, yet, being a thoroughly Westernized guy, what aspirations have the American media culture that has virtually raised his generation instilled in him? Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle proposes that the cynical reality of today's American dream, as filtered through MTV, is embodied in none other than Neil Patrick Harris of "Doogie Howser M.D." Especially for Kumar, the dream isn't to be teenage prodigy doctor Doogie Howser; it's to be Neil Patrick Harris — famous enough to be recognizable in a movie cameo despite having been out of the pop cultural eye for more than a decade (except in similarly ironic roles like the pretty boy fascist in Starship Troopers or a paragon of whiteness in Undercover Brother). When the boys randomly pick up Harris hitchhiking, he steals Harold's car to speed off to a strip club; later the boys bump into him sticking up through the moon roof of a giant truck, drink in one hand, handful of giant stripper titties in the other, bent over snorting lines of coke off her ass. If you're willing to accept the premise that the movie has something to say about this generation of Americans in addition to its stoner gags, that's really funny.

There are enough real ideas in Harold and Kumar to work its wackiness into something worthwhile, and the performances themselves elevate the film to genuine hilarity. What separates John Cho's Harold and Kal Penn's Kumar from such lesser performances as Ryan Reynolds in Van Wilder or Ashton Kutcher in anything outside of Dude, Where's My Car is that they understand that the movie isn't really about them. Kutcher and Reynolds over-mug every gag and end up dominating every joke. They hog the camera and shift the movie's focus from its ridiculous plot or characters onto themselves. Cho and Penn seem to realize that the joke isn't on Harold and Kumar; it's on New Jersey. One of the funniest moments of the movie is one of the most subtle: Harris has just peeled out of a parking lot in Harold's car, hopping curbs and taking out some garbage cans. Cut to Cho and Penn, staring silently until Cho says, "Did Doogie Howser just steal my fucking car?" Penn, rather than pull a Kutcher and knee-slap and point and holler that he's been punk'd, half-turns his head, false starts at an answer twice, and then deadpans, "Yes, I believe he did." Then, the scene cuts behind Harold and Kumar, catching the garbage Harris spilled, the tread marks on the road and the sound of crickets in the background. They don't step all over the joke a la Kutcher or try too hard a la Ryan Reynolds; they play it straight and let the joke unfold naturally.

Though it sounds weird to say, this film is a real step forward for director Danny Leiner, whose first feature film was Dude, Where's My Car. Dude is impressive for the fact it didn't take the easy route, which would have been to just let Kutcher and Seann William Scott act wacky and vaguely homoerotic. That movie didn't need to bring in an alien-worshipping cult whose members wrapped themselves in tin foil and bubble wrap, or a giant alien babe crushing a miniature golf course, but it did. In the same vein of trying harder, Leiner and his screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have turned the stoner comedy into something of a cohesive satire.

Essentially, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is the American Pie version of Better Luck Tomorrow. That movie, produced by MTV, also explored the realities of being a stereotyped "smart" ethnic in America. The problem with Better Luck is that it had a little too much plot; it tried to be an epic cautionary tale, the requirements of which turned its main character into a familiar archetype, losing the specificity of his individual struggle in the middle of film. It became a little too detached from reality. Harold and Kumar, however, embraces the liberties wacky gross-out comedies afford, creating some really damn funny and effective absurdist portraits of an America in which racism is still a driving force. A cop confronts our heroes: "Kumar, what kind of name is that? What's it got, like five Os and two Us or something?" In jail, where a picture of the president hangs proudly over the chief's desk, there's a black man, who's been locked up for five years over a minor traffic violation, reading a book about civil disobedience. Knowing that that tactic will never work for people of brown skin in this country, Kumar busts Harold out of jail, wearing a shirt that reads, "I like bush — the pussy not the president." Truth to power, Kumar, truth to power.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)