Speed Freak

Track star: Race-car driver Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) in the comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Courtesy Sony Entertainment Inc.

In Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, a story about the rise and fall of a simple good ol’ boy from the American South, Will Ferrell does his Will Ferrell thing: dumb but decent but broken but loveable but dumb some more. When Ferrell, who plays a merrily crass world-famous race-car driver, attempts to make mean by narrowing his blank, chickpea eyes and blustering in his hell-yeah drawl, “I’m not gonna lie to ya,” another rich, successful Southerner who funnily fumbles his words comes to mind. W.F., meet Dubya B.? But in a Will Ferrell movie, social satire — here taking the shape of a few feeble red-state jabs — is hardly the point, and that’s completely fine. Talladega Nights delivers enough exuberant, stupid laughs that there’s no time to think about the fact that you’re not thinking, just like in that other cuddly-idiot comedy, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, also written by Ferrell and director Adam McKay.

Talladega Nights isn’t so much a movie as a series of very funny set pieces linked by some race-car footage. It has the feel of limber improvisation, and the actors frequently look like they’re trying not to laugh, which is highly unprofessional, and highly hilarious. It’s not only Ferrell’s Doritos paunch and accelerated aging that have so far prevented him from making a believable leading man (Bewitched), it’s that he is so much more comfortable pulling strangeness out of his own head than engaging with anyone else. He’s at his very best scampering off into absurdity, and in Talladega, he runs. At dinner with his family, Bobby says grace, offering thanks to an “itty-bitty baby Jesus” whom he describes as lying in his manger watching Baby Einstein DVDs. “That’s my favourite Jesus,” he explains. Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly), the requisite best buddy, backs him on every bad idea, and the two throw around several possible Jesuses they like to pray to: teen Jesus, figure-skating Jesus, Jesus who sits in with Lynyrd Skynyrd while Cal grooves along, “hammered.”

That garrulous inventiveness  — Talladega Nights is filled with more animals-in-unlikely-situations jokes than a Seán Cullen routine  — is why Will Ferrell is so much more interesting than Adam Sandler as a comedian (though the latter has actually demonstrated range as a dramatic actor, something Ferrell has yet to do). But like Sandler’s alter egos, Ricky Bobby is, in that grand SNL-graduate tradition, a man-boy who needs to grow up. Despite his stardom, he can’t get over childhood abandonment issues. Daddy Bobby (played by the hardworking, film-saving comic actor Gary Cole, still awaiting a Steve Carell-style breakout part) is a major alcoholic and a minor criminal in snakeskin boots whose beer can is bonded to his hand like Britney Spears’s mocacchino is to hers. Daddy’s motto — “If you ain’t first, you’re last” — inspires Ricky’s life’s work, and throughout, the American obsession with winning (also a theme in a very different film opening this week, Little Miss Sunshine) isn’t very attractive.

“I’m just a big, hairy, American winning machine,” trumpets Ricky, who has no idea what to do with all the money and fame, but dang, he loves it. An eager sellout, he sticks an entire Fig Newton banner across his windshield, so he can’t even see while racing (“I do love Fig Newtons!”). Still, the grotesqueries of corporate sponsorship are a dubious joke in a film choking with product placement.

Driven to win: Ricky Bobby argues with arch competitor Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen). Courtesy Sony Entertainment Inc.

Speaking of marketing, Talladega Nights at once appeals to the NASCAR set and pokes fun at conservative anxiety. Bobby’s Formula One racing nemesis is a Russian nesting doll of his own worst fears: a married, gay, jazz-loving Frenchman who sips espresso while he drives. On paper, this character is a horror show, but Jean Girard (sponsored by Perrier) is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, the English comedian best known as Ali G. Instead of going for the obvious Pepe Le Peu accent gag — Reeky Booby — Cohen invents his own threatening foreigner speech, rolling his upper lip over his top teeth like he’s storing Cheerios up there. Cohen’s portrayal of unwittingly offensive Kazakhstan telejournalist Borat on Da Ali G Show so upset the Kazakhstan government that they pleaded with him to stop; Jacques Chirac should note that “cease and desist” is “arrêt” in French.

Cohen is a marvel, a brave comedian who doesn’t mind extinguishing his own persona and even his face — what does he look like, really? — for the joke; he may be more like Peter Sellers than any other actor of his generation. He also plays with sexuality in a way that American comedians rarely dare. His gay characters aren’t just lisping and limp-wristed, inviting you to laugh from the outside; they are wholly confrontational. Girard uses actual sex talk — many, maybe too many, erection mentions — and yet lands on this side of funny, as opposed to juvenile, because he is so casual, so understated. If Ferrell seems audacious for exposing his lumpy body to comic effect, Cohen ups him by erasing his body altogether.

Not all the sketches work in Talladega Nights, and the women in these kinds of films are never permitted to be as foolish and unbounded as the men. Why couldn’t Junebug’s wonderful Amy Adams, as Bobby’s love interest, get something to do besides the obvious script direction “wear glasses”? But it’s hard to quibble with a film so anarchic in spirit. At its best, Talladega Nights suggests that Ferrell may be boning up on his Marx Brothers. If it’s not as clever as those whirligigs, it’s as buoyant — or, as Ricky Bobby, master of weird wording, says, “Precocious and full of wonderment.”

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby opens Aug. 4 across Canada.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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