The House
starring Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Jason Mantzoukas, Nick Kroll, Ryan Simpkins, Allison Tolman and Jeremy Renner
written by Brendan O’Brien and Andrew J. Cohen
directed by Andrew J. Cohen
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
I watched this 2017 American comedy on an airplane returning to Tokyo from Vancouver. It’s the first time I laughed out loud at a movie on a plane in many years. Ferrell and Poehler are both Saturday Night Live alumni. Here, they play a married couple, Scott and Kate Johansen who are celebrating their daughter’s departure for college. Their daughter, Alex, has been promised a scholarship from the city. But at a City Council meeting councilman Bob Schaeffer (Nick Kroll), unexpectedly announces the cancellation of the scholarship in favor of a community swimming pool. Scott and Kate’s life expectations are immediately thrown into chaos.
“Are you guys familiar with the cliché, ‘It’s a cliché because it’s true?’ Well, that cliché about cliches being true has never been more true than right now with the cliché, ‘The house always wins.’”
And then their neighbor, Frank Theodorakis (Jason Mantzoukas) enters the picture. Frank is in a sorry state. A gambling and porn addict, his marriage has disintegrated and he is living in an empty house, waiting to be evicted. He looks like a physical shambles, too. Frank convinces Scott and Kate to seek their daughter’s college tuition at the gaming tables of Las Vegas. They go and they win, win, win, until they lose, lose, lose.
But an idea is planted. Back home, Frank converts his empty house into an underground casino, and invites Scott and Kate in on the caper. Money pressures force them into it, and they go all in, because the house always wins. So, the title “The House” takes on a double meaning from here on in. The plan is to operate an illegal casino for one month in the summer between high school’s end and university’s start, so the Johansens can raise Alex’s tuition, and Frank can raise enough money to get his life back on track.
Frank installs five small wall safes that he calculates can hold exactly $100,000 each. He knows, because he cut up paper into money-sized pieces until he had enough to fill them. It took an incredibly long time. Frank is the visionary behind the whole casino thing. He installs lights and tables, bars and a pool, massage, nail and hand-job facilities, he extends credit to their customers. He pumps pure oxygen into the house to catalyze a more euphoric and uninhibited atmosphere. He introduces fight clubs among rivals at the gaming tables. All Their customers are their suburban soccer-mom neighbors who, it turns out, are all sitting on mountains of suppressed aggression and, given the chance, are just as wild as any fast-living urban crazies.
Frank and the Johansens quickly begin imitating movie mobsters - specifically, Robert De Niro in Casino (1995, directed by Martin Scorsese), with direct references to that film. They chop off a finger of a petty crook in their shop in imitation of the famous hammering scene from that movie. Later, they kill Tommy Papouli (Jeremy Renner), a local mobster, who tries to squeeze them. They kill him through the most ridiculous series of accidents, one right after the other. Still, pretty steep for suburbanites.
It all comes to a head when City councilman Schaeffer discovers their operation, shuts them down, and (illegally) ‘confiscates’ their ill-gotten revenue. The revelation here is that Bob Schaeffer is a corrupt politician skimming money from the town budget to spend on his mistress, City treasurer Dawn Mayweather (Allison Tolman). That’s the real reason behind the cancellation of Alex’s scholarship. So, in the finale of the film, Scott and Kate’s casino is closed, but they decide to break into Bob’s Town Hall office and steal back the money he stole from them.
And they do.
Alex goes to college with four years’ tuition secured.
“We gotta lie about everything, ’cause that’s what parents do. The job of being a parent, number one job, is to keep this crazy shit from their kids. ’Cause otherwise, the kids are gonna realize that we don’t know what we’re doing!”