But it’s just satire!
Ferrell, Hart defend Get Hard after claims of racism, gay- bashing
In the annals of film festival flops — from unexpected boos to red- carpet gaffes — the première of the Will Ferrell- Kevin Hart comedy Get Hard will go down as a doozy.
After the movie premièred last week at the South By Southwest Film Festival, during a Q& A with director Etan Cohen, an audience member voiced not so much a question as a harsh judgment. “This film seems racist,” he said, using an expletive. Another audience member also asked if the film — about a hedge fund manager ( Ferrell) who witlessly hires a law- abiding acquaintance ( Hart) to prepare him for maximum security prison after being sentenced for fraud — was perpetuating stereotypes.
That sound you might have heard was the loud cursing of marketing executives for the movie.
These atypically blunt rebukes received outsized attention, drawing headlines from The Los Angeles Times and others. The damage continued with early reviews that also question its handling of homosexuality in various scenes.
Much of the movie’s comedy rests on the Ferrell character’s fears of being raped in prison, and among his preparations is an attempt to have oral sex with a gay man in a bathroom stall. A Guardian critic wrote that future viewers “will be astonished that such a negative portrayal of homosexuality persisted in the mainstream in 2015.”
After initially seeking to avoid the controversy, the stars and producers are vigorously defending their comedy as not a representation of stereotypes but a satire of them.
“Anytime you’re going to do an R- rated comedy, you’re going to offend someone,” Ferrell says. “But that’s kind of what we do.”
Cohen wrote Get Hard with Jay Martel and Ian Roberts, writing-producers from the sketch comedy show Key and Peele. This is Co- hen’s directorial debut after writing screenplays to films including Idiocracy and Tropic Thunder, a film that memorably flirts with racially sensitive territory in Robert Downey Jr.’ s lampoon, in black face, of a Method actor run amok.
The comedy of Get Hard works similarly. Just as the humour of Downey’s character wasn’t in his favour but about his own self- obsessive, racist delusions, Ferrell’s character is a parody of the narrow perspective of the elitist one per cent. He hires Hart’s character, a family man who owns a car wash, under the presumption that he’s been to prison, that he’s “hard.”
“You’re looking at two characters that judged each other by their cover,” Hart says. “And after peeling off some of the layers to their onion, they realize that, ‘ Oh my God, this isn’t the person I thought it was from the jump.’ ”
Get Hard was conceived as a way to pair Hart and Ferrell, two of the most popular and bankable stars in comedy. Whether the movie succeeds on its own terms, it’s an attempt to comment on contemporary issues of inequality and race within the context of comedy.
Adam McKay, Ferrell’s longtime collaborator and a producer of Get Hard, says any backlash has been overinflated by “lazy journalism.”
“Given that we’re a country with runaway income inequality, more people in jail than any other country, this is what people are crowing about? Trying to in a funny way deal with these issues?” McKay says. “It really kind of got me mad. It’s just cheap is what it is.”
Others have agreed, albeit more skeptically. In Vanity Fair, Eric D. Snider says the movie wasn’t offensive to him as a homosexual. It’s just not funny enough.
“It’s not mean- spirited, and it’s panicky straight guys, not gays, who are the target,” Snider wrote. “It’s just disappointing, that’s all.”
Whether the buzz around Get Hard will affect it at the box office remains to be seen.