“I stand by it”: the modern comedy Sam Rockwell compares to ‘Some Like It Hot’
He may be an Academy Award-winning, brilliant actor, but Sam Rockwell has always stood up for his roots in comedy.
What’s most impressive about his career is how truly chameleonic he has always managed to be, being the rare actor who can turn in a memorable performance, regardless of how many lines he has, and has an extensive history in film, television, and stage work. There’s no chance that Rockwell can be “typecast” because he can do pretty much everything, plus there is a comic charm to him that has made him particularly endearing.
Rockwell won the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which is about as dark as comedies can get, but he also started off his career being in more broadly accessible comedies, such as Galaxy Quest, Lawn Dogs, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
If Rockwell has been praised as a genius by his peers, he’s also made the effort to ensure that comedy is taken seriously as a form of art, so when asked about what recent films he had been impressed by, he made the surprising selection of Wedding Crashers starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, calling it “an amazing film”.
“I think it’s a reinvention of Some Like It Hot, and maybe that’s not a popular point of view, but I stand by it,” he claimed with conviction, “I think Vince is incredible in it. He’s like Dean Martin. So I continue to learn and hopefully steal.”
Wedding Crashers was a true word-of-mouth hit that overperformed expectations when it was released in the summer of 2005, and although it was in theatres the same time as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which is often credited as being the film that kicked off the R-rated comedy craze of the early 21st century, the former was the bigger hit.
While some would be prone to react to Rockwell’s statement like it was inflammatory, the comparisons between Wedding Crashers and Some Like It Hot aren’t entirely off-base, as both films centre a group of bickering best friends who enter into a scheme for selfish reasons, only to end up paying the consequences and becoming enlightened. Just as Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis became a prominent screen duo, Vaughn and Wilson had become dynamic co-stars after previously appearing together in Zoolander, Starsky and Hutch, and later The Internship.
That Rockwell had to defend his opinion might be indicative of how culture has changed when it comes to the film’s reputation, as the notion of two bachelors using weddings as a means of meeting women may have different connotations today when compared to how it was received in 2005, but it’s certainly not worthy of being considered problematic when other comedies of the era were far more offensive.
The zany, escalating humour of Wedding Crashers might be what’s most comparable to the style of Billy Wilder, but the film is also fairly impressive in how it fleshed out its supporting cast; for all the critiques it got for being sexist, Rachel McAdams’ performance is certainly one of the standouts, and it also contains one of the best late career performances from the great Christopher Walken, who Rockwell got the chance to work with when they both appeared in the dark comedy Seven Psychopaths.
