HUMPDAY is a wry and perceptive comedy that is deadly serious about intimacy, sexuality, and the peculiar zero-sum form of competition that male bonding can manifest. Beyond gender, it also examines with a compassionate, if unflinching, eye the maddening fluidity of personal identity, the not so tidy ways people slice up themselves in order to project to the world at large and to their own ego who they want to be while struggling with the nagging suspicion that who they really are might just be too obvious to mask and too dangerous to unveil entirely.
The case in point is Ben, who has happily settled into a conventional life with Anna. So conventional that as the film begins, they happily admit to one another that they are just too tired to attempt another round of baby-making and joyfully turn out the lights and into the arms of Morpheus. A good nights sleep is not to be, though. At 1:30 in the morning, the doorbell rings, a fist pounds on the door, and there with a puckish grin and a blithe disregard for convention, is Andrew, Bens best friend from college, the one who has rambled through life as an artist and is now on Bens doorstep with a carved duck and a sudden realization of how far each has drifted from each other. Delighted to see one another, there is also the realization that they have drifted apart, beautifully summarized by Andrews amazement that Ben not only has a wife and a house, but a coffee table complete with coffee table books.
What ensues to Annas growing alarm, is Bens revisiting of his younger days with Andrew via a fateful party full of arty types where Ben attempts to make his oxford shirt look cool to the people he meets, and an ovulating Anna is left home alone with her special pork chops and questions about just who it is she is married to.
The action is sharply observed with a wealth of telling details. When Ben and Andrew are first reunited, the bear hugs are administered unselfconsciously, incipient paunches compared, the physical delight in being together again palpable. The physicality continues, including a wrestling match over a pick-up basketball game that speaks to both the rising antagonism wrestling metaphorically with their genuine friendship, and culminates in that final, momentous meeting in a hotel room where they may or may not consummate both their project and their relationship. And it is there that the physicality becomes more carnal and, deliciously, more awkward. The hugs a study in heightened, uncomfortable, sensuality that renders it anything but erotic.
Dialogue is improvised, but the plot points are not. Each actor brings a palpable backstory and a depth to even the smallest gestures, from the knowing, deflated smile Joshua Leonard gives to sex partners whose adventurousness leaves him gasping, to the way the look in Deplas eyes as he slips Ben from feeling cool and confident to the awful realization that he needs to make a mid-course correction in the moment he is living in and hasnt a clue how to do it. Its Alycia Delmore, though, as Anna who faced with the most difficult role in a film full of tricky ones. he has to be the loving wife who will put an ugly duck on her mantle piece to please her husbands pal, the understanding wife who is put off with a half-hearted invite to the fateful party where the bravado gets out of hand, and the equal partner who is entitled to the truth and ticked off when she suspects subterfuge. There is a moment when Anna is drunkenly basking in Andrews praise and, in the blink of an eye, makes a discovery that rocks her world. The change of voice, from girlish to a rumble that would make a gangbanger quail is seamless.
HUMPDAY is the sort of film that provokes more than thought. It invites its audience to muddle through the same issues as the characters on screen, while withholding anything as bourgeois as a value judgment based on convention. And it wraps it all up with an ending that is as true, as unexpected, and as deliciously enigmatic as anything ever committed to the screen.
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