The premise of For a Good Time, Call … is awfully raunchy (parents take note: so is this review) though readers consistently tell me that I tend to overstate what they consider crude. Still, surprisingly, in this coarsened, hard culture of nil, I found something sweet and clever at the center of this otherwise explicit independent film.
We meet reserved young professional Lauren (Lauren Anne Miller) who whines when her boyfriend puts their live-in relationship on the skids and offers to perform fellatio on the spot, so we already see how today’s young people – raised on trash such as TV shows about shallow families of sluts – cheapen themselves in the first few scenes. This works out to be a prologue to the theme of the picture, which is directed by a Toronto-based filmmaker named Jamie Travis. Finding herself out of a home and struggling in the lousy Obama economy, Lauren decides to bunk in a rent-controlled Gramercy Park apartment with an overly sexualized young manicurist named Katie (Ari Graynor), with whom she’s had a past run-in during their college years, after some arm-twisting by a mutual friend (Justin Long). Soon it’s clear that Katie, also struggling in the wake of her grandmother’s death, hustles phone sex on the side to pay the bills.
The humor is a load of raunch – sex toys, vagina lines, lots of masturbation – in service of a story that plays sex for a pathway to friendship and, yes, intimacy. It’s in reverse order of course, our post-Puritanical-overcorrecting-as-hedonism-and-crude culture being what it is, but the women learn to make money from being accessible to certain male (and female) fantasies while bringing out the best in one another. Lauren loosens up, Katie’s tough exterior softens, and both learn what it means to love. With Nia Vardalos and Mimi Rogers among others in cleverly employed supporting roles, their newfound friendship faces challenges from their relationships with men and careers, self-esteem, and, above all, their emergent trust as they work to mend their issues and see themselves as whole women, not merely as means to the ends of others. For a Good Time, Call … is ultimately very girly, with pink telephones, swapped dresses and a gay best friend – with undeniable roots in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1968) and, in the pairing, shades of Beaches (1988; with Graynor bearing resemblance to Bette Midler) – and, in its own raunchy way, with a stretch on the bounds of good taste and never dealing with the issue of prostituting oneself, affirming of women’s sexual liberation and a pretty good time.