Thurber: We're The Millers (2013)

An austerity comedy hiding inside a Fourth of July comedy, We’re The Millers is about a quartet of downwardly mobile no-hopers who all live in and around the same Denver apartment block – or in one case, on the doorstop – and who decide to escape from what initially feels like a millennial version of King Vidor’s Street Scene by embarking on a road trip to transport drugs across the Mexican border. The thing is, for  petty drug dealer David Clark (Jason Sudeikis), stripper Sarah O’Reilly (Jennifer Aniston), abandoned nerd Kenny Rossmore (Will Poulter) and homeless misfit Casey Mathis (Emma Roberts), to be even remotely credible as drug traffickers, they have to pose as a stable nuclear unit, drenching themselves in so much family values that nobody would ever think to suspect them. All a hair’s-breadth away from eviction and homelessness, they have to learn to pass for white as never before – or to pass for gringos, which means being whiter than white, as they find out that the drugs in their boot are the least of their problems as their road trip balloons out into the riotous, anarchic vision of widescreen, frontier America that tends to characterise the best Fourth of July comedies. In fact, the more antagonistic and tense things get between them, the more their banter and bickering starts to feel like a real nuclear family, as they realise the middle-class fantasy they’re aping isn’t really that much less downwardly mobile than where they started off, and that pretending to be a nuclear family isn’t really all that different from simply being a nuclear family. Although all the performances are great – aided in part by a script that manages to be sharp and crude at the same time – it works particularly well for Sudeikis, who tends to be best when playing the sleazy family man who’s going through the motions but doesn’t really have his heart in it. For all their crudeness, films like Hall Pass and Horrible Bosses have tended to resist fully giving Sudeikis to that role, or at least temper it with prudent sentimentality, but We’re The Millers embraces that side of his charisma with aplomb, putting the final touch on a comedy that’s far more irreverent and unconventional that might seem at first glance.