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Film: The Benchwarmers [PG-13] 85 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $4
When 1st Seen: 8 April 2006
Where Viewed: Trans-Lux Metrolux 12, Loveland, CO
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When I was a little kid in 6th grade, a bully picked on me and picked on me for six months. When I was in junior in high school a couple of bullies put me in the hospital. To me, bullies are the scourge of the earth in whatever form they take. More egregious however, is the societal response to bullies. Generally, at worst we praise them, or at best we let them off with a comment such as my two favorites “Boys will be boys” and “The other kid was probably asking for it.” Right! Anyone who has ever been the victim of a bully knows he or she didn’t ask for it. Who would ask to have their head shoved in a toiled and swirled? And since when is pantsing a kid normal boy behavior? Unfortunately, many bullies grow up into power positions precisely because they were protected by the generation of bullies before them, and they move on to protect the next heinous batch. Hence, why, a movie about a group of adults who decide to stand up against a group of bullies to protect a bunch of victims seems like a good idea for a movie. The problem then? Well, the problem is multi-faceted and challenging to explain. It sort of goes like this…how do you decide what the children who will be victimized in the film by the other child bullies will look like and how they will behave? There are many ways you could choose to go. Disappointingly, this film options to adopt stereotypical archetypes for jocks and nerds to make their concept work.
If you have some spare time, it is sort of interesting to read the debate on the history surrounding the origin of the word ‘nerd’. It seems that, whether urban legend or not, the word first was used by Dr. Seuss in his 1950 children’s book If I Ran the Zoo in reference to a small, angry-looking, thin, little character. Some say that teens of the day adopted the word as a new word for 'square'. Differences of opinion then seem to erupt as to what happened next with some mention of a possibly unconnected story that appeared in 1957 in the Glasgow, Scotland Sunday Mail which attempted to set the Scots straight on some of the current slang being used across the ocean in America. They apparently connected the term ‘nerd’ to the term ‘square’. With ‘square’ being commonly used to mean a kid that was ‘uncool’ in some way such as being socially inept, out of the popular social circles, non-athletic, bookish, etc. In any case, while the exact etymology of the word ‘nerd’ may be debatable, once the film Revenge of the Nerds came out in 1984, the die was cast and the full-blown stereotypical nerd archetype was forever ingrained in the popular culture. Probably one of the most terribly unfortunate aspects of the nerd archetype for a nation that was already starting to see its test scores in math and science plummet was that it associated being academically strong especially in math and science with being nerdy. How many junior high and high school-aged kids shun math and science to this day because it is nerdy? How many of their parents shied away from math and science because it was nerdy and now cannot even help their children do simple Algebra homework? How many USA-born, physics majors graduate each year from American universities? Well, it’s just sad and pathetic what we have allowed to happen. Then, when you tie the idea that it’s ok for bullies to pick on nerds, well, you have just put the icing on the cake for the decline of superiority in scientific innovation in the USA. I hope I did not digress too far, for the point I was seeking to make, on top of giving a bit of history and some political commentary on this issue which I consider extremely important, was that when The Benchwarmers writers Allen (Grandma's Boy and Eight Crazy Nights) Covert and Nick (Grandma's Boy and Malibu’s Most Wanted) Swardson sat down to hammer out this screenplay, and when the director, Dennis (National Security, Saving Silverman, and Big Daddy) Duggan interpreted the screenplay and directed the film, they were the ones ultimately that decided the archetype for the victims of the bullies. They chose the nerd archetype, and this then made this a film really about archetypal jocks bullying archetypal nerds—assuming you accept either as an archetype. My beef with this is that I believe these archetypes and all other forms of stereotypical characters that reach archetypal status are very wrong; and, in fact, we should actively fight to destroy rather than further reinforce them. The longer we perpetuate them, the more damage they do.
Part of me wanted to believe that one of the reaons for the making of this film was to do just that—destroy the nerd archetype. After all, the premise is that three socially inept, adult guys stand up against a bunch of archetypal jocks to defend a baseball field that was being used by a bunch of archetypal nerds whom they also constantly bully. With the idea being that nerds could learn to stand up for themselves. Unfortunately, two of the adult guys Clark (Jon “Napoleon Dynamite” Heder) and Richie (David “Just Shoot Me” Spade) push the nerd archetype to new heights of social ineptitude. The third member of the trio, Gus (Rob “The SNL Copy Guy” Schneider), meanwhile plays a ‘rare’ hybrid jock/nerd with a devastating secret past which creates one of the important plot twists in the film. Sadly, in the end, the film turns out to be more about:
- learning to accept that if you are a nerd, you are stuck with it, but you might as well be happy about it,
- perpetuating the stereotype that nerds are not athletic,
- demonstrating that some nerds grow up to be very rich and others grow up to still live at home with their mom and their morning paper route,
- reinforcing that jocks are generally going to be bullies that pick on nerds even when they grow up; and, finally,
- showing that being a nerd is ok.
All right, I have some friends who will say that I’m entirely over-analyzing this film. It was not meant to win Academy Awards®, it was just meant to be some harmless fun and some good laughs along the lines of Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Dodgeball, etc. Well, I comprehend that the green-light and $35,000,000 are given routinely to people to make movies that do not strive to win awards. I am willing to accept that it is ‘ok’ to make movies that are just fun for the sake of fun and aren’t trying to change the world. When it comes to The Benchwarmers, however, I would argue that the insistence upon using a brand of constant one-up-manship gross-out humor common in today’s juvenile comedies, including jokes and scenes that make fun or perpetuate negative stereotypes of the elderly, physically challenged, or foreigners; and, lastly, basing the core of the film on detrimental archetypes, automatically preclude this film from the ‘fun’ category. The film does have some funny parts that would not fall into these categories. The difficulty is that they are so few and far between as to make it nearly impossible to distinguish them even by the most sophisticated of viewers. It is all too easy to get sucked into this mind-numbing altered state where you just feel part of the gang, and boy is everything just so funny. Not knowing this first hand as I have never been a bully, I can only imagine though that this is the same trap they fall into when they are in a group of bullies and really working over a kid. It just seems too funny at the time. The problem is that making fun of people, stereotyping people, creating archetypes for people, isn’t funny. It’s cruel. These are talented writers and talented actors. I believe they had a better story in them and in this concept if only they had worked a harder to get it out. Wow, and maybe if they had, they might have created a film that would have been award-worthy, who knows? All, I can say when I see a movie like this, is that it makes me very sad. It is a sad statement on our society, and especially when there are people that will see this movie and actually think it has a good message. Whatever good its message might have had originally is so masked in all the wrong messages as to be unable to escape.
Finally, I would strongly urge parents and guardians not to encourage their children to see this film nor to be persuaded that this is an ok film for kids due to the [PG-13] rating or that half the cast is made of kids. There is a lot of sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle stuff in the film (included in the name of comedy I guess) which made me very queasy and uncomfortable. For example, there is one entire baseball game in the film that involves The Benchwarmers’s opponents becoming convinced to take a 21+ year-old ringer, alcoholic baseball player from the Dominican Republic onto their team to try to beat the Benchwarmers. In retaliation, members of The Benchwarmers organization supply him mid-game with two six-packs of beer and a fifth of tequila which he then happily consumes openly the rest of the game until he becomes too inebriated to function and costs them the win. In another part of the film, Jon Lovitz’s billionaire nerd character brings in his childhood buddy, Reggie Jackson, to coach The Benchwamers. The trio then set out on a path of doing things Reggie supposedly did as a kid to improve his baseball skills. This includes ringing doorbells and running away, playing hot potato for real, and smashing mailboxes from the back of a pick up truck with a baseball bat. There is simply nothing about these two parts of the film and there are a few others as well, to which I would want children in my care to be exposed. Generally, I would say there’s just nothing to be gained by people under the age of 18 in seeing this film.
Obviously, as I am a decent-sized fan of Jon Heder, Rob Schneider, Jon Lovitz, and David Spade, it has given me no pleasure to pan their film. I believe these fine gentleman and their Director had good intentions. I just cannot recommend very highly the outcome of their work this time around. It will in no way preclude me for seeing their next projects. I just hope that Adam Sandler’s production company, Happy Madison, barely recoups costs on this one so as to force them to be more judicious and thoughtful when making films in the future.
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