Faris might be the funniest American comic actress since Goldie Hawn. She’s almost an underground treasure—enjoyed by fans of the Scary Movie franchise where she’s simultaneously silly and touching. Faris’ new film, The House Bunny, is her first mainstream showcase, but it comes after Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face, an endearing film that got lost amidst last year’s awards hustle, yet is the peak of Faris’ career—so far.
In The House Bunny, Faris plays Shelly, an intellectually dim young woman already living at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion but who dreams of being a Playboy centerfold. When Shelly’s kicked out of the Playboy Mansion, she’s shaken out of the fairytale/whoreytale delusions that have affected young women in the post-Madonna era. The film’s gimmick makes her the housemother at a sorority of losers. Shelly’s heart, and the awkward girls’ neediness, push her into comic self-realization. But this isn’t merely about Shelly’s dawning feminism; rather than doing a 21st-century version of Gloria Steinem’s famous Bunny-waitress stunt, it follows the Legally Blonde formula of showing how modern young women innocently accept society’s sexual roles and yet struggle to assert their humanity and individuality.
The House Bunny is low comedy (pratfalls and tit jokes) produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison company, which means it prizes gags and significance equally. But Faris has the ability to balance innocent dopiness with genuine feeling giving Shelly’s post-Steinem, post-Madonna conundrum the proper foundation. The House Bunny doesn’t answer Shelly’s fairytale dreaming: It asks, How Does A Girl Maneuver Sexual Identity? When Shelly teaches the insecure, unfashionable twerps how to attract men, she isn’t merely offering counsel. She dangerously indoctrinates them into the sexpot fallacies that have victimized her own consciousness.
This slight comedy is on to something important, and Faris makes its message easy to take. Yes, she recalls Goldie Hawn’s skill, but Faris specifically revives Betty Hutton’s goofy sincerity, as when Shelly responds to the news that her 27th birthday makes her too old for the Playboy Mansion: Told “That’s 59 in bunny years,” Shelly reasons: “It’s like I’m still 26 or 58.”
Faris’ way with a disoriented thought is to stare at it in mid-air, thinking through to its common understanding. She makes the slow-burn poignant. Even when flipping over tables or wincing from leg burns after imitating Marilyn Monroe’s subway grate pose in The Seven Year Itch, she shows the trenchant price that women pay when trying to live up to our culture’s sexual ideal.
The House Bunny doesn’t take this as far as Gregg Araki did. Smiley Face was an extraordinary exploration of social change (revolution) apparent Faris’ marijuana-stoned heroine became the guardian of the Communist Manifesto—a document whose most humane principles are no longer known, or valued, in contemporary society. Similarly, the girls in The House Bunny only pursue sex appeal (“I’m naked in the center of a magazine. Unfold me!”) Faris lampoons the difficulty of self-realization.
In a perfect Hollywood, The House Bunny would have been directed by Joseph Kahn. Kahn directed the music video for The Pussycat Dolls’ “When I Grow Up,” which is heard in the movie; yet nothing in this film matches the delirium of Kahn’s flesh fair or The Pussycat Dolls’ celebration of female ambition—a sexual self-exploitation so extreme it carries its own irony. Shelly’s ambition is reflected in the pop soundtrack that credibly links The Ting Tings, Avril Lavigne and Rhianna to Langston Hughes, Baldwin and Chekhov. But The House Bunny stays simplistic just like Legally Blonde. Anna Faris deserves better.
