Somewhere in the middle of Humpday, between the fuzzy, documentary-style footage and the deadpanning conversation, it becomes clear that this doesn’t have a damn thing to do with porn.
Which is surprising, I’ll say, because the central premise, the concept from which this flight of fancy seems born, is that two straight dudes, best friends from college, are going to make a porn video. One where they have sex together.
Instead, Humpday is an incisive look into the ennui of early middle age, about the ways in which we define ourselves and, especially, the way men define themselves.
See, Ben and Andrew have spent their lives creating their mythos, almost in opposition to each other. Ben is a transportation planner in Seattle, married, thinking about kids and has a cute little house in a charming little neighborhood. Andrew has traveled the world as an “artist” who works on “projects” while generally scraping by on whatever kindness he can find.
At the film’s beginning, he shows up for an unannounced 2 a.m. door pounding at Ben’s house. They’re elated to see each other, but Ben’s wife, Anna, seems to know better. She shoots Ben a look, quite reasonably, that screams: “Who does this?” Ben’s response is a shrug and a whispered apology.
This nonverbal exchange defines the movie. There’s an intimacy between the cast, bred from strong characterization, that is refreshingly real.
The next day, Ben follows Andrew to a house of earthy, hippie-ish “art” people. (Y’know the type. Sometimes you end up at their house on Alberta Street, sitting on the floor, surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags and listening to really bad poetry about trees.)
During discussion at said house, Humpfest comes up. It’s an amateur porn festival put on by the local alt weekly. While drunk and high, Andrew and Ben decided that they will “go beyond gay,” and make a film together. This drunken egg eventually hatches into a full-blown macho contest, which delicately and sweetly picks at the nature of the male ego.
It is to director Lynn Shelton’s eternal credit that this is not a cruel or insubstantial critique. Us people with penises can be easy targets of ridicule, especially when it comes to how we want our masculinity to be shown.
The word “bromance” has been thrown around a lot in our culture recently. Usually it comes out when describing the sort of quasi-sexual tension that happens between two straight men when they’re really good friends.
Of course, what it’s really getting at is the idea of intimacy, and at this moment in our culture we’re sort of redefining what, and how, that intimacy between straight men works. Humpday throws the sex out of the equation: These two men decide to do it, but first they have to work out how that’s going to happen.
I won’t ruin the simple narrative arc of the movie, even if the tension doesn’t really lie in the “will they or won’t they” question. I’ll just say that for my generation of overly neurotic, educated men, this film has deep insight.
And in case you were wondering, Humpday is also very funny. Not in the gross-out gay panic kind of way, just in the way that real people are actually funny and weird.
All of the actors here do a great job inhabiting their characters, though I have to believe that these Seattle-based indie filmmakers live similar lives. The real revelation, however, is Alycia Delmore as Anna. Her frank portrayal of the wife who wants to understand just what the hell is going through his head is the tender comic heart of the film.
What Shelton has crafted here, through her lo-fi aesthetic and focused emotionalism, is a film that is perfect for our times. In an era of confusion, I fondly hope that Humpday is remembered for thoughtful conversation.