The Sitter (2011)

Release Date: 12/09/2011
Rating: R
Runtime: Not Yet Available
Genre: Comedy
Director: David Gordon Green
Cast: Jonah Hill, Sam Rockwell, Ari Graynor, Max Records

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What Critics Say

Sap and subversiveness intermingle awkwardly in this uneven comedy.

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By Thomas Leupp

The calibration is a bit off in The Sitter, David Gordon Green’s comedy about a young slacker (Jonah Hill) tasked with minding three unruly children over the course of one insane evening. Green aims to evoke Uncle Buck and Adventures in Babysitting – feel-good ‘80s family comedies from which the film freely borrows – while indulging in the same hard-R irreverence of his previous two films, 2008’s Pineapple Express and April’s Your Highness. But the dual impulses prove impossible to reconcile, resulting in a comedy that, while often quite funny, is also wildly uneven. Rarely have I laughed out loud and rolled my eyes so much in the same film.

Hill plays Noah, an aimless college dropout who reluctantly agrees to babysit a neighbor’s brood so that his harried single mother might enjoy a rare night on the town. Anticipating an easy evening on the couch, he quickly has his hands full with the dysfunctional trio: 13-year-old Slater (Max Records) is a heavily-medicated basket-case; 10-year-old Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez), an adopted El Salvadoran immigrant, likes to blow things up; and 9-year-old Blithe (Landry Bender), is in the midst of a “celebutante phase,” emulating her sleazy reality-show idols. Things begin to go awry for Noah when, in the first of several questionable decisions, he opts to take the kids along on a trip to score drugs for his sort-of-girlfriend (Ari Graynor).

As you might have gathered, we’ve already ventured far, far away from John Hughes-land. And yet Green doesn’t seem to recognize as much. As Hill and co. embark on a series of ever-escalating comic misadventures, there’s a strange dissonance that pervades The Sitter, which tries to intermingle moments of outrageous vulgarity with scenes of high-grad Hallmark sap. The latter eventually take on a certain comic absurdity of their own: My favorite was a third-act dialogue exchange, barely two minutes in length, in which Noah, newly enlightened by the night’s encounters with a drug dealer (an unhinged, scene-stealing Sam Rockwell), car thieves, kickboxers, steroid-pumped goons, and the like, manages to wean one of his charges off his psychiatric meds and cure him of his sexual-orientation anxiety in one fell swoop. Is Green, a former indie darling, bowing to studio dictates with such a patently artificial crock, or slyly subverting them? Either way, it's a futile endeavor.