It’s a fun conversation many couples have – If you could have a pass on stepping outside of your marriage for a tryst with one celebrity, who would that celebrity be? It’s a discussion that has often been seen as a silly way for a couple to get to know each with a highly improbable hypothetical question. But just because the situation might be highly improbable doesn’t mean that it was completely impossible. That’s the problem slightly naive Kansas hairdresser Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) finds herself in in the riotous and somewhat aptly named comedy Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass.
After having a “Celebrity Sex Pass” conversation with her fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy), Gail Daughtry finds the talk almost immediately comes back to haunt her when she catches Tom in flagrante delicto with the celebrity she had given him a pass for just a few hours earlier. Determined to even the score so she can go into their marriage with some parity, Gail uses the excuse of a hairdressers convention to journey to Los Angeles to try and track down and seduce the celebrity that Tom gave her the OK for – actor Jon Hamm. With her work friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), she travels across Los Angeles gathering a trio of misfits – a junior CAA agent (Ben Wang), a disgraced paparazzo (the film’s co-writer Ken Marino) and actor John Slattery – who all have their own reasons for helping her on her journey.
Director and co-writer David Wain got his start as part of the comedy group, The State, who formed at NYC in the early 1990s and had a short-lived, but still well regarded, sketch series on MTV. Since then the various members of the group in various combinations have gone on to create such things as the Night At The Museum films, the cult comedy classic Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models, They Came Together and TV series such as Reno911! and Children’s Hospital. If any of these have struck your funny bone, you will most likely find a lot to laugh about here.
Outside of the State, Wain has managed to build up a nice stable of funny character actor friends who frequently show up in his projects, and he has certainly recruited a number for Celebrity Sex Pass as well. The fun part is that some are playing characters, while others are spoofing their own public personas. Character actor Fred Melamed as Gail’s friendly postman also serves as the film’s ersatz narrator, a la a slightly deranged Stage Manager from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, is a particular delight. As a newcomer to Wain and company’s particular brand of comedy, Deutch neatly slides into the ensemble with ease. She portrays Gail as earnest if not very world wise and brings a bouncy charm that manages to make the character sweet but not a broad caricature.
One of the delightful surprises of the film comes when one realizes that the skeleton of the story is nothing less than the classic The Wizard Of Oz. Gail travels from Kansas to a distant land where she makes three misfit friends who join her on a fetch quest to complete in order to get the thing she wants most. It’s a fun conceit and once one notices it, it is hard to not see it as the rest of the film plays out. In fact, one starts to anticipate how Wain and Marino’s screenplay will interpret the next upcoming Wizard Of Oz story beat into their own demented version.
