filmland / By John J. Bennett and Devan King

You’ve Been Warned

Sitter brings the sex, drugs and chuckles, but New Year’s Eve is simply awful

(Dec. 15, 2011)   

THE SITTER. If you’re among the David Gordon Green faithful, and are therefore holding out some germ of hope that he’ll make a return to the ruminative, atmospheric style of his early work (George Washington, All The Real Girls), you will likely be disappointed by The Sitter.

The Sitter

GALLERY >

If instead you’re the kind of person who might get a kick out of Adventures in Babysitting reimagined as a Jonah Hill vehicle, complete with oral sex, cocaine and exploding toilets, this might just be your lucky day.

Plot is fairly incidental to the proceedings; suffice it to say Hill plays Noah Griffith, a down-on-his-luck slacker who’s too nice for his own good. To help out his struggling, lonely mom he agrees to babysit her friend’s kids, a motley crew of emotional and behavioral problems. Eventually he ends up dragging the kids through Manhattan in the middle of the night at the behest of a girl who’s stringing him along. They run afoul of an insane coke dealer, the cops and almost everybody else in the process.

The Sitterrelies on Hill to carry it, and thanks to a script that plays to his comic strengths and a director willing to let him do his thing, he just about pulls it off. His brand of caustic sarcasm accented with flashes of childlike optimism has always entertained me, and this is an entirely suitable forum for it. Sam Rockwell is equally good as his foil, the weirdly huggy, psychopathic dealer with a penchant for surrounding himself with scantily clad bodybuilders and packaging his product in hand-painted dinosaur eggs. The child actors, especially Max Records (Where the Wild Things Are), also turn in convincing, layered performances.

I was pleasantly surprised at the number of laugh-out-loud moments in The Sitter, but even more so at the serious, honestly observed emotional stuff it pulls off. Without crossing over into “message movie” territory, we get some well-placed insights into childhood loss of innocence, parent-child relationships, the coarseness of contemporary media, the difficulty of burgeoning sexuality and the importance of self-respect.

But there are still exploding toilets and a 9-year-old girl in prostitot makeup singing along to 2 Live Crew, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. R. 81m. At the Broadway, Mill Creek and Fortuna.

— John J. Bennett

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