CRUDE FOOD COMES TO LIFE
Foul-mouthed Sausage Party
I’d love to see what Sigmund Freud would make of Sausage Party, Seth Rogen’s foulmouthed, intermittently funny paean to sex and food. He’d have a field day, or maybe a picnic. Because while sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, never is a hotdog in this movie anything but a penis with free will and the power of speech. Buns, meanwhile, are vaginas, though they also have breasts. And don’t get me started on the tacos.
Fine, they’re also food. The film’s premise is that the comestibles in a generic supermarket (neither the store nor the products sport any recognizable brand names) live in the hope that one day “the gods” will lift them from the shelves and carry them to a new life. It’s a bit like the green aliens who live in the claw machine in Toy Story, a film that has provided Rogen and company with inspiration if not restraint.
For Frank (Rogen), Carl (Jonah Hill), Barry (Michael Cera) and the rest of the hotdogs in a package of 10, this means they’ll finally get to cosy up to Brenda (Kristen Wiig), or one of her seven sisters in a bag of Glamour Buns. Though surely I’m not the only one to realize that when you add sex to the mix, those already incompatible numbers of sausages and buns create a problem. Even Frank’s insistence on “bunogamy” doesn’t quite fix it.
But the sundries’ fantasies are shattered when a returned jar of mustard is distraught, even shelfshocked, by what it has seen on the outside. The gods may not be crazy, but the food is bananas for thinking they’re benevolent.
From here the story splits in two. One food group leaves the store and discovers firsthand the same horrible truth that Susan Cummings did in the old Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man. Frank and Brenda, meanwhile, remain in the store, figure things out by a different path — again lifted from The Twilight Zone: “It’s a cookbook!” — and must try to warn the rest of the rations.
Things stand in their way, not least a villain, voiced by Nick Kroll, who’s a douche — a word I must stress I am using as a simple noun and not an insult, much in the way one might refer to President Nixon as a Dick.
There’s also inter-nutritional squabbling. The screenplay, by a quintet of Rogen cronies, has great fun with a Woody Allenaccented bagel and an Arab flatbread who are forced to co-operate. Though my favourite was the package of grits who intones: “They call me MISTER Grits!” (Runner-up: German delicacies looking to exterminate “the juice.” Don’t expect sacred cows when your protagonist is made of processed beef.)
But there’s the problem with Sausage Party. It’s essentially a one-joke movie, and while it gets great mileage (and calories!) from the gag, it ultimately comes down to variations on the theme; really dirty variations, as if Kevin Smith had cloned himself and then made a film together.
And yet even this prudish critic wondered if there were places they could have pushed the envelope. Sure it’s fun when the soundtrack includes a number by Meat Loaf. But what about the Spice Girls, the Black Eyed Peas and the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Or Cream?
The animation is consistently superb — not easy to create food’s-eye views of lumbering humans — and the whole thing has been nicely shepherded by directors Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2, Monsters vs. Aliens, Madagascar 3) and Greg Tiernan, whose entire directing career has been at the helm of the kids’ show Thomas the Tank Engine. Not sure if he plans to return to pastoral tales of steam trains on the island of Sodor, but he’d be wise to take some time off first.
I laughed at Sausage Party more than I thought I would, yet less than I hoped. And I was impressed by the way it managed to tunnel its way out of what seemed an existential corner — that in the end, food is going to be eaten. Sex and nourishment remain two of humanity’s drives, and Sausage Party won’t let you forget either for long.