The source material for this movie is a real classified advertisement
from 1997 that received thousands of responses. It went like this:
Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll
get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.
I have only done this once before.
In the early 2000s, it became an Internet sensation when a photo of a
man with the most serious 80s mullet in the world was added to classified
advertisement. Now it is 2012 and there is a movie. Given the source material
you would probably expect a dumb action/comedy with plenty of low budget action
and at least one great mullet. And you would be completely wrong. The movie,
“Safety Not Guaranteed,” written by Derek Connolly, directed by Colin
Trevorrow, and starring Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza, has action and comedy
but also comes with several fully developed characters, a totally unpredictable
plotline, and a really sweet romance. It is a far better movie than the source
material commands or requires.
The story starts with the classified advertisement. A magazine writer
finds it and pitches writing a story about it to his boss. He gets permission
to take two intern, a nerdy Indian and the sarcastically depressed Darius,
played by Aubrey Plaza, with him on the road trip to hunt down the weirdo.
A movie like this has two storytelling traps in it that would doom the ordinary
independent movie. The first trap has to do with time travel and the fact that
it ought to be impossible. At some point in the story the writer is going to
have to give us a decent explanation as to what is going on there. The second
is the presence of a sarcastically depressed character. These people overpopulate
indie movies. They usually are underemployed artists/actors/writers/dancers who
are depressed, most of the time because they aren’t famous and successful
artists/actors/writers/dancers. The problem with this sort of character is that
they tend to be pretentious and annoying (because seriously only a pretentious
and annoying person would be depressed that they can’t be famous and successful
for doing something profoundly useless like, for instance, art.) An intern for
a small magazine seems to fit that mold pretty well.
It is a credit to this movie that both of these traps are deftly
averted. The main reason for this I believe is the movie’s treatment of the
advertiser, a middle-aged supermarket employee named Kenneth, played by Mark
Duplass. The character is one of the most weirdly endearing characters in
movies. He truly believes in his mission and is sincerely looking for a partner
to go back in time with him. In fact, it is revealed that he has been seeking
out theoretical physicists over the Internet and engaging them in discussions
about time travel. And yes, he is actually building some sort of big mechanical
thing in his garden shed.
But more importantly he also happens to be shy and protective. When the
magazine writer shows up at his door and asks to help, he flatly rejects him
because he rightly senses that the writer doesn’t really want to go back in
time. This guy may be delusional enough to believe in time travel but he can
also tell when somebody is making fun of him. Darius is more sympathetic in her
introduction and succeeds in gaining enough trust to start Kenneth’s brand of
time travel training, but it is still a long time before he feels he can trust
her enough to actually tell her the reason he is going back in time. It is a
really nice reason that I am not about to spoil it here.
How the movie portrays Kenneth avoids the traps because at some point I
started to not really care whether the time machine worked. And I did not care
because Darius starts enjoying the sincerity and enthusiasm of the strange guy
in the woods to the point where she loses much of her sarcastically depressed
persona and stops caring whether the time machine works too. The story becomes
more about a romance then about time travel. As far as plots go, that’s
ridiculously original. What’s more ridiculous is that it really works.
Now I can probably guess what you are thinking, and that might be that
what I just described is a great cliché in romantic comedies: the oft-seen and inexplicable
romance between an outlandish out-of-shape comedian and a ridiculously tolerant
supermodel. Believe me this is not the case. This romance is not inexplicable.
This is brought out by a superior performance with some very tricky material by
Aubrey Plaza. It should be mentioned that it is never suggested that her
attraction to Kenneth is a normal thing. This is even highlighted in one of the
best scenes where Plaza interviews for the article a sort of ex-girlfriend of
Kenneth, played by Kristen Bell, (who you may fondly remember as the
ex-girlfriend in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). She gives a totally
understandable explanation of why she did not get too involved with the guy and
does so without coming off as a total bitch. Instead, the attraction Darius has
to Kenneth isn’t just a foretold conclusion because the screenplay necessitates
that the guy has to get the girl in the end, but something that develops
between two fully realized imperfect personalities that just happen to be
perfect for each other. Darius has actual reasons for wanting Kenneth that make
sense. It’s a pleasure to watch a comedy go through the trouble to do that
every now and then.
I have yet to not be impressed by an Aubrey Plaza performance. Of
course, I have only seen her in this and in her small part in “Funny People,”
but I’m already at the point where I’m looking forward to seeing her in plenty
of other movies. I have finally added “Parks and Recreation” to my Netflix
queue.
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