Last week I went to see Rams, a film about a dispute between two sibling Icelandic sheep farmers. It was great.
Last night I went to see Grimsby, Sacha Baron Cohen's film about a lairy underclass northerner, Nobby Butcher, reunited with his long-lost brother who just happens to be a spy in trouble.
Variety is the spice of life, after all.
Grimsby has been very largely panned. "Witless rubbish", wrote one critic. "Cohen comes unstuck", wrote another. "Class libel", fulminated the New Statesman. The tone of the reviews has been that the film isn't funny and that anyway it's unfair to pick on the working class. Baron Cohen did not dare to film in Grimsby itself, and the residents of the preferred location, Tilbury, are apparently outraged that their town was chosen as a convenient Grimsby-alike.
Oh my.
Grimsby is not subtle. It is broad, crude, violent, uneven and about as hit and miss in its humour as Baron Cohen's northern accent. But boy did I laugh. It takes a particularly sensitive soul not to find funny the scene (is that even the right word?) in which the two brothers take refuge in an elephant's vagina - bad enough you might think - only to discover that a line of he-elephants are lining up to take advantage of her. The (half-empty) cinema was united in its helpless distress. Other scenes are similarly difficult to watch.
I guess if you are offended by the shameless (or more plausibly Shameless) lampooning of the Northern working class it must be hard to find Grimsby that funny. But I can't help feeling that the metropolitan sophisticates united in their disdain for Baron Cohen's film would pay quite a lot of money to avoid going anywhere like Grimsby, and as for mixing socially with the working class, well surely those are the people one moves to London to avoid, darling. There's something funny in itself about people whose disdain for the provincial proletariat is matched by their desperation to be seen defending it.
It's true that the film's McGuffin - a sub-SPECTRE cabal called Maelstrom is going to wipe out the world's underclass by releasing deadly toxins at the World Cup final only to be defeated by Nobby and his Grimsby mates - is perhaps just an excuse for satirising the squalor and fecundity of the protagonist's home life. But firstly there's a measure of truth in Baron Cohen's portrait, and secondly Nobby is likeable as well as feckless, and the scenes in and around his home have a liveliness and enthusiasm which are touching as well as funny.
I hope Baron Cohen makes a shed load of money out of Grimsby and that his critics disappear up their own fundamentals. Where it would be diverting to imagine them being assailed by a herd of elephants.
