The central subject of “The Night Before” isn’t Christmas but drugs—or, rather, drugs and family. Each of its three protagonists—Isaac Greenberg (Seth Rogen), a lawyer; Chris Roberts (Anthony Mackie), a pro football player; and Ethan Miller (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a struggling musician—has his own little mission as they pursue, together, their collective Holy Grail: a celebrated secret party they’ve fantasized about attending for many years.
Chris, an aging athlete who has renewed his career with P.E.D.s, seeks to ingratiate himself with his team’s quarterback (Aaron Hill) by procuring a load of marijuana for him. This quest brings the trio of lifelong friends back in touch with their high-school pot dealer, Mr. Green (Michael Shannon), who is a blend of Robert Parker and Danny Torrance with a touch of another movie character who’s a spoiler best unmentioned. Isaac is married to Betsy (Jillian Bell), who is very pregnant and due imminently. He has been her “rock” throughout, and as a reward she sends him off for the evening with a little present—a pocket-sized cornucopia of drugs, in order to signify and usher out the carefree youth to which, with fatherhood, he’s definitively saying goodbye. As for Ethan, whose life is falling apart, the sex and drugs of the party are the very point—at least until he runs into his ex-girlfriend, Diana (Lizzy Caplan), and does his best to get back together with her.
Quickly, the little box of drugs becomes Isaac’s truth serum. Under the conflicting influences of its contents, he unleashes his pent-up fears and resentments about fatherhood, flings away the circumspect reserve of family and professional responsibility, reveals a strain of latent bromosexuality, and—as a Jewish man who is married to a Christian woman—vents the cultural anxieties of that papered-over difference. Rogen lends a special Catskills-crazy verve to the Jew-meets-Jesus shtick. It’s where his comic inventiveness rises to a peak of extravagance, and it’s hammered home by way of the sweater that he wears through most of the film (a present from Ethan), which is adorned with one gigantic Star of David among lots of smaller ones.
“The Night Before”—directed by Jonathan Levine, who wrote the story and also co-wrote the script with Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg—is yet another bromance, but its women have anxieties, too, notably Betsy’s single friend Sarah (Mindy Kaling), who turns up at the bar along with Diana and finds Isaac spoiling her best-laid plans. Rebecca Grinch (Ilana Glazer) is a diabolical sprite and a huge football fan, who plays Chris better than he plays her. Miley Cyrus plays herself, as a sort of angel of romance—a role prophesied early in the film via a Tarantino-esque riff by Kaling about the universal applications of “Wrecking Ball.”
The movie cannibalizes the effluvia of pop culture with a gleeful skein of movie references recent and classic, including “The Shining,” “Big,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “Die Hard.” It makes sport of the self-promotional environment in which its makers now work—alongside his athletic skills, Chris’s “social-media game is crazy,” as he and his friends keep reminding us (a sport in which Rogen himself stars, as in his own Twitter burst this week).
Yet throughout the film, from beginning to end, there’s drugs. The absolute normalcy of marijuana sits alongside the more daring pleasures of mushrooms and cocaine, though the story also shows that these pleasures pack inescapable inconveniences and hints at the risk of casual pleasures veering into degradations. Without slipping into moralizing, the movie suggests that Isaac’s adventure is innocuous, even therapeutic, precisely because it’s exceptional, a one-night-only off-ramp from his new and better life.
The story is hardly a prescription for prudence. “The Night Before” is a vision of middle-class normalcy (and, for that matter, without spoiling the ending, its very resolution involves the embrace of modest lives and livelihoods). The ubiquity of recreational drugs is a strangely central part of that normalcy. (The air of menace and sleaze that Mr. Green projects, in Shannon’s exquisite comic turn, is solely a function of the unfortunate illegality of his life’s work—put him in the daylight and he’s the friendly owner of a wine shop.) Yet that new normalcy is also a reflection of the Hollywood bubble, the assumption that, in the case of the kinds of mishaps that occur throughout the movie, such as car crashes and fistfights, having drugs would be no big deal if the police came by, and that if things went from bad to worse a confession and a stay in rehab would do the trick.
Nonetheless, the movie plays it safe; Isaac’s truths don’t stray very far from the circumspect and stepwise decency of his regular life. There’s a solid ethical strain in Rogen’s comedy that also carries over to his performances in dramatic movies, such as “Steve Jobs” and “Take This Waltz.” (It’s the opposite of the id-fuelled comedy and drama of Jonah Hill.) Isaac’s crazies don’t involve much beside ranting and moaning; his unconscious is populated by in-references and stifled empathies rather than by monsters.
“The Night Before” depicts pop-cultural effluvia as a defining force of social identification and personal experience, and contrasts it with the sentimental but flimsy commitment to the rites and doctrines of organized religion. That contrast is entirely the point. As in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “A Serious Man,” the apparently disposable trivia of mass-media entertainment plays the role of the universal solvent, the true modern American religion that preaches a gospel of hedonism and humanism and fuses the Golden Rule with the Golden Calf. (Even the title “The Night Before” omits Christmas in favor of the Beatles, fulfilling the vision of the prophet John Lennon.)
In “The Night Before,” the Coen brothers’ “new freedoms” are topped by new new freedoms, ones that have been won de facto but have yet to be enshrined de jure—as Isaac, a lawyer, would be among the first to know. The movie is a prime reflexive example of Hollywood’s vision of itself as a force for social progress, of the power to do good by doing well. That’s why the ending—regarding the humble acceptance of modest circumstances—comes off as something of a cheat.
