In this Apatowian Age of the Big Baby comedy, Will Ferrell is the undisputed avatar. He plays seriously self-absorbed characters who do not have much self to absorb. He is also, obliviously, a tantrum-throwing tease. In movie after movie and, before that, on "Saturday Night Live," he bares his midriff, he displays the ringlets of his fuzzy-wuzzy chest. Can no one stop this man from mooning? From streaking?
In his new comedy, "Semi-Pro," set in the '70s when hair was big, he plays Jackie Moon, a one-hit wonder whose single, "Love Me Sexy," allows him to own, coach and play power forward for the Flint, Mich., Tropics of the American Basketball Assn. Like his recent movies, "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" and "Blades of Glory," it's slipshod slapstick punctuated by bursts of inspired nuttiness. Moon's mantra is "Everybody love everybody," but by the time the season plays out he's wrestled a bear, partaken of the latest in dumpster cuisine and chewed out a ref with unprintable spew.
All of which is typical of Ferrell. His specialty is to flip-flop between the passive and aggressive polarities of his characters. That's why he was so good as George W. Bush -- he never forgot that Mr. Mission Accomplished had once been a male cheerleader. (Ferrell, of course, played a cheerleader on "SNL.") Often Ferrell's placid cluelessness is just bubble wrap for the beast within. The default position for all men, he seems to be saying, is to behave badly. (The reason he makes so many sports movies must be because he views athletics as the caldron of blowhard masculinity). The more straight-arrow Ferrell is, the more avidly we crave his fits. His ordinariness, his sweatered, middle-class whiteness, is a setup. You can be sure that, soon enough, he'll bawl -- or hurl.
And yet there's an innate sweetness to Ferrell even when he's on the rampage, and this is what separates him from, say, John Belushi or Bill Murray, two earlier "SNL" alumni who tilled the same scorched earth. Those guys meant business, hostility was their root and branch, but the anger in Ferrell's characters is like a fever that flares and then, just as mysteriously, lifts. The reason he's so good as the elf in "Elf" is because he didn't need to fake the innocence. When he downs a gallon of Coke in one swig and lets out an interminable, industrial-strength burp, he's no slobbo, just a big kid.
Ferrell captures the fatuousness that is every man's downfall. His most memorable characters on "Saturday Night Live" were the ones that gave that fatuity free rein. Playing along with Chris Kattan as one half of the party-hopping, body-jerking Butabi brothers -- a role he later revisited with mixed results in his first starring-role movie, "A Night at the Roxbury" -- he was like a Bizarro Planet version of John Travolta's Tony Manero from "Saturday Night Fever." With his thatched hair parted up the middle and his bright, white teeth and blank Roswell alien eyes, he seemed pole-axed by hottie overload.
His hot-tubbing, sangria-sipping swinger on "SNL" looked like a debauched apostle. His Robert Goulet behaved as if all the world was his lounge. As James Lipton, the host of "Inside the Actors Studio," Ferrell looked like the second stage of the Wolfman. (He is often at his most deranged when he sports a fake beard or mustache; it brings out the Paleolithic in him.) He nails Lipton's oleaginous persona, his sepulchral, Master Thespian intonations. We are made to understand that, no matter the wattage of the guest, Lipton is the true star.
Throwing himself into his work
Ferrell is also a marvelous physical comic, another reason, perhaps, why so many of his movies center on sports. He's not wonderful in the way that, say, Steve Martin is or Jim Carrey is. Martin at his best has a gyroscopic aplomb; he finesses gravity. Carrey is a human Slinky. Ferrell's virtuosity is clunkier. While Carrey appears to have no bones, Ferrell is all torso and kneecaps and elbows. His bigness -- he's 6-foot-3 -- gives him a daffy discombobulation. Striding buck naked through the suburban streets in "Old School" (perhaps his best comedy) or Lutzing across the ice in "Blades of Glory," he moves like a mildly inebriated llama.
It's no news that comics yearn to display their inner Pagliacci, and Ferrell is no exception. In "Live From New York," the 2002 oral history of "SNL," he was interviewed after he had ended his seven-year stint. "My dream of all dreams," he said, "would be to do what Tom Hanks or Jim Carrey have been able to do -- make the transition somewhere down the line from doing comedy to dramatic parts in the movies."
