'Sausage Party' Will Make You Want to Set Your Food Free

Sausage Party will make you want to set your food free—from yourself—and you may never eat dinner again without wondering if you're actually committing genocide. It's like The Muppets and Julia Child on acid. This is an animated movie for adults that portrays consumable goods—everything from hot dogs to cherry tomatoes to toilet paper to Jose Cuervo—as sentient beings, each of them brandishing skinny little arms and legs and able to communicate with each other. Every morning, as the supermarket opens, they perform a musical number hastening the arrival of “the gods” (that’s us), each of them hoping she or he will be chosen. To be chosen is to be bought, and taken to “The Great Beyond.” Nobody knows what that means, but everyone assumes it’s a good thing, a wonderful, magical, eternally blissful thing. Of course, reality, which the grocery store’s inhabitants will learn, is far more horrifying. The film’s message is clear: religion is the opiate of the masses, the thing that those in power use to control us. And the writers—Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir—have crafted a canny, lucid thesis in defense of skepticism. Sausage Party is funny— sometimes uproariously funny—and surprisingly transcendent: at times, the gags (the film is ladled with jokes like a pot roast steeped in its own gravy) and the bleakness of the film’s message (there is no god, there is only the here and now) converge into a chaos of beautiful insanity. 

But the writers’ thesis-driven approach to comedy feels far too self-satisfied. It would be like if Blazing Saddles were trying to be Roots. In Blazing Saddles, which is one of the most important anti-racism films of the 1970s, the racists were idiots, and we were free to infer for ourselves just how wrong racism really is. Sausage Party, were it made in the 1970s, might be free to let us do some thinking on our own. But sadly it’s mired in message like a kindergarten class. And while I admire the film’s honesty, what I enjoy and delight in is its insanity, and Sausage Party often cannot do both at once. 

Here’s an example of insanity: Barry (voice of Michael Cera), a sausage, narrowly avoids being boiled to death in a woman’s kitchen; he escapes and ends up in the home of a 20-something stoner with crazy curly hair who, once he’s injected himself with bath salts, can see that all his food products are living creatures. (Normally, humans cannot perceive this because their version of reality is so limited.) Later in the film, when the consumables are battling the humans at the supermarket, Barry shows up with the severed head of this bath salt-addled junkie. Barry didn’t kill the guy (that would be far too mean-spirited); it was a freak accident. But when the noggin of this blazed lug plops down on the floor, and Barry yells triumphantly, “the gods can be killed!”, it’s a moment that is equally hilarious, moving, and bonkers. That’s the kind of thing that comedies need more of. 

But when Sausage Party fixates on its message against religion, it often feels as earnest as a kid-friendly Pixar movie. (Sidenote, the afore-mentioned drugged-out lunkhead drives a beat-up old car with a bumper sticker that reads, “Dixar.”) Seth Rogen, who plays the main character, a sausage named Frank, is the one who first discovers the truth about the Great Beyond, and he becomes the film’s literal voice of reason, championing free thought over blissful ignorance. When he angers the entire supermarket with his claims that the Great Beyond is a lie, he realizes he must be “nicer.” It feels smug and disingenuous, and really beneath everything else that’s happening in Sausage Party, because so much of Sausage Party is ingeniously crazy. It happily riffs on all the politics—be they racial, gender, what-have-you—of our time: two supporting characters are a Jewish bagel named Sammy Bagel, Jr. (voice of Edward Norton) and a Middle Eastern lavash named Kareem Abdul Lavash (voice of David Krumholtz); another character, the sultry lesbian Teresa del Taco (voiced by Salma Hayek) has a crush on Brenda, the other main character, a hot dog bun who’s in love with Frank. (She’s voiced by Kristen Wiig.) There’s a Native American character, Firewater (Bill Hader) who knows the truth but pretends not to: he’s imbued with all the stereotypes of the wise old Indian distilling knowledge (and weed). And, much like Blazing Saddles erupts in an orgy of chaotic violence at the end, Sausage Party erupts in an orgy too, the old-fashioned kind. 

As delightfully reprehensible as much of Sausage Party is, it loves silliness too, and accumulates a stock of wonderful little throwaway puns. Every adage about food you can imagine (“spill the beans”, “how do you like them apples?”) is thrown into the mix; when one character says, “Okay, so…”, a jar of sticky orange cheese suddenly appears and says, “Did somebody say ‘queso’?” And then there are moments that truly feel disturbing, like when a woman is preparing dinner, and we see the food being tortured and killed: a triumphant potato, the first item she picks up, suddenly screams in horror as she begins to skin him and then tosses him into a pot of boiling water; the woman then pops two baby carrots into her mouth, and we see her teeth chomping them into bits from the inside while outside, horrifying foods wail, “She’s eating children!” So if we have to have our comedies doused in messages today, at least some filmmakers are still jolting us with the kind of nutty, irreverent insanity that makes the genre an urgently needed antidote to our own reality.

Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernan. With voices of Nick Kroll (as one of the film’s chief villains, a douche), James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, and Anders Holm. 

Juno

Watching Juno (2007)--for the first time--reminded me of all the other independent movies I saw during the first decade of the 21st century, and how they all had a kind of disaffected, ironic tone to them. This was a trendy way to make movies in the decade of the 2000s, perhaps as a reaction against Hollywood’s big dramatic escapist gestures of the 90s, like Titanic or Braveheart or Saving Private Ryan. I’m not quite sure what it is that made so many independent films between 2000 and 2009 have this quality of resistance to direct emotion, but suddenly it was not cool for movies to have feelings unless the characters were fully “aware” of what they were feeling and how they were feeling it. Moreover, all of these indie films took on a hipsterish quality, embracing everything that was aesthetically vintage, and indeed the ironic tone of which I speak is pretty hipsterish in and of itself. It made for an interesting if underwhelming spate of films such as Donnie Darko, The Life Aquatic, The Door in the Floor, Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Sideways, Junebug, The Squid and the Whale, Away We Go, and (500) Days of Summer. I hated a lot of these movies (and loved a handful of them), and now that we seem to have gotten over this period of disaffectedness in movies (I mean, last year’s The Immigrant was absolutely in touch with its emotions, and 2013’s Frances Ha, which did embody some of these qualities to a degree, wasn’t ashamed of letting you feel for its heroine), it seems like a good time to go back and take stock of them. What was going on in these films? What was it that, despite the fact that independent films are supposed to be known for their stunning originality, made them all feel like slight variations of each other? (I hope to explore more of them in the coming months, but for now I'll focus on Juno.)

Juno absolutely embodies these trendy-indie qualities. The film’s writer-director, Jason Reitman, has created a character who seems almost unreal in her self-awareness. Juno, played by Ellen Page, is a teenager who gets pregnant in high school and then decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption—to a loving, wealthy suburban couple played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. Juno waltzes through the movie with a cutting, self-deprecating sense of humor, her armor against a world that has presumably proven itself again and again to be a place of disappointment. For the first hour or so I found her incredibly grating. (Chief among my complaints was the dialogue, as Juno says a lot of stupid phrases like “do me a solid” that feel like a middle-aged person trying to write youthful dialogue and missing the mark.) 

Worse yet was the hipster-music soundtrack. Every song was precious and felt like bad folk tunes merged with bad high school band music (ala Sufjan Stevens). These songs are of the cutesy and vintage variety, and this was a particular annoyance to me, because it felt like the movie didn’t want to experience any kind of direct emotion, not even in its music. Instead of having a score that would move the audience (which might be manipulative), the music instead coats every scene in a kind of superficial self-awareness glass cage, like the Pope driving in a motorcade encased in bullet-proof glass. Juno is prickly under the weight of all this armor, and seems unable to have a real conversation without a continuous self-commentary, like someone who berates herself so as to prevent anyone else from doing so. Reitman also can’t resist having his characters (namely Ellen Page and Jason Bateman) argue about their taste in music and movies, name-dropping directors and bands. At one point, they sit down and watch a Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter movie called The Wizard of Gore (on VHS, which is so hipster). There was also the critique of suburbia that is oh so easy for movies to make. But, the movie redeems itself in that area, because Reitman humanizes his characters (most of them), and doesn’t try to make some sweeping statement about all people living in suburbia (or anywhere, for that matter).

Halfway through the movie, my attitude toward Juno shifted because of a realization I had: Despite the “indie”-ness of this film, Jason Reitman does want his characters to feel things directly, and his story is actually quite sentimental and touching. But for some reason he felt compelled to lay all this hipstery independent-movie paraphernalia on top of the story, perhaps to make it feel less like a CBS movie-of-the-week, or one of those low-budget teenage abortion dramas from the 1970s. (Also, watching Juno really improved my feelings about 2014's Obvious Child, starring Jenny Slate. I think it's probably the better film.) So Juno is a faux-clever indie comedy-drama about teenage pregnancy that, underneath all its prickles and irregularities, is a truly affecting, winning study of human drama. The individual emotional crises of all the characters are well-thought-out and proportional; the problems between the married couple feel both believable and believably resolved (or is it unresolved?) at the end of the picture (Jennifer Garner, it should be noted, gives a terrific performance), and Juno’s journey of self-awareness actually achieves something: the too-smart-for-her-own-good protagonist does feel things, and can be affected by the people in her life. (And even though some of Juno's dialogue is irritating, there are many laugh-out-loud funny lines in this movie.)

Also, Juno isn’t nearly as cynical as its top layer would have us believe. Indeed, it’s a movie that wants to hope that people can be better than they are, without cleaning up all the mess in a specious, sitcom-like finale. I liked Juno in spite of itself at times, and if I could just change the soundtrack and some of Juno's inane dialogue, I’d probably be content with it. With J.K. Simmons (as Juno’s dad), Allison Janney (as Juno’s stepmom, who delivers a few good zingers), Michael Cera (as Juno’s best friend and baby daddy), and Olivia Thirlby (as her best girlfriend).