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Sometimes, a dick joke is just a dick joke. On the surface, writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's Sausage Party—in which a phallic hot dog (Rogen) and a strong, vaginal bun (Kristin Wiig) get the Toy Story treatment—is a straight-up dick joke. It's easy, you see, because sausages look like dicks and buns look like vaginas.
But sometimes, a dick joke can be an existential meditation on atheism butting up against organized religion, false gods and politics. It can be the basis of a talking bagel and a foul-mouthed lavash overcoming their differences in a grocery aisle standing in for Gaza.
That's where Rogen and Goldberg's Sausage Party transcends other R-rated animated provocations (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Metal) to become something more. This is a thinking person's 90-minute dick joke. And shit, if we can't ponder big issues while giggling at the sight of a talking, used condom or a sentient douchebag with the voice of Nick Kroll, maybe we've lost something in society.
Ever since Superbad—the closest thing millennials have to their own Dazed and Confused—Goldberg and Rogen have used sophomoric humor to speak to larger themes, growing more ambitious as they've reluctantly grown up. With the help of David Gordon Green, they transformed Pineapple Express into a commentary on action cinema cloaked as a stoner buddy flick, like Lethal Weapon with Riggs and Murtaugh recast as bumbling potheads. With the brilliant This Is the End, the duo refitted the concept of the apocalyptic horror flick as a lens into celebrity hubris, casting real-life celebs as exaggerated versions of themselves to comment on the inherent sins of the TMZ generation. That's to say nothing of The Interview, which caused an international incident without even trying.
With Sausage Party, the writers take on the Disney format, and the setup is essentially Pixar roulette. At night in the grocery store, food items take on lives similar to Disney characters, ranging from Inside Out's emotions to the thinking racial stereotypes of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. The horrific tropes front and center: There are fabulous fruits, bro-y sausages, randy bottles of tequila. Every stereotype is allowed to come fully to life in ways that would be offensive were it not for the film's keen awareness of exactly what it is taking down.
The catch here is that every food seeks acceptance, none more than Rogen's Frank and Wiig's Brenda, but there is something suspicious about the food's longing to be selected by the fat-assed gods that stroll the aisles and be taken to the Promised Land. All hope of paradise is dashed by a soothsaying bottle of honey mustard, which was purchased, scooped out and returned half suicidal. This throws Frank into a spiritual journey of the highest order, where he traverses grocery aisles that are each like different realms. It resembles This Is the End, but mated with Toy Story and Rogen-Goldberg's manic AMC series Preacher. It is sweet and tender one minute, bathed in filth the next.
To say more would spoil the magic that the duo has managed to wring from a one-note premise. Let it suffice to say that, between a foray into intravenous drugs and a yen for increasingly graphic violence, no nerve is left untouched.
This is a film that starts out funny and ratchets up the insanity until a bugfuck final 15 minutes of blissful depravity, with pop-culture references and visual gags littering each frame and gut-busting performances by Apatow elite like Bill Hader, Danny McBride, Jonah Hill and a fantastic Michael Cera. It's a rare comedy that gets better as it progresses. And it is proof that, sometimes, an easy dick joke can give life to a vibrant, intelligent comic master class that challenges its audiences but doesn't pull punches on the crowd-pleasing gags either.
Critic's Grade: [A-]
SEE IT: Sausage Party is rated R. It opens Friday at most Portland-area theaters.
Willamette Week