I ‘ll watch Vince Vaughn in anything—he’s the most skillfully sardonic comic actor working today, and though he grew up in Lake Forest he’s more persuasive onscreen as a regular guy than any of his contemporaries. He carries Delivery Man, a strange and sometimes beguiling story of a man who discovers that his copious sperm donations two decades earlier have yielded more than 500 biological children. With The Dilemma (2011), Ron Howard’s ambitious comedy about loyalty and infidelity, and now this movie, Vaughn has begun to take on roles that stretch him more than his usual outings with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. In fact, Vaughn is so good that you wish Cobie Smulders, who plays the hero’s pregnant girlfriend, Emma, weren’t so flat, a bargain-basement Jennifer Connelly. Her depthless performance leaves the movie without a single significant female character, which is an odd state of affairs for a movie about childbirth.
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Delivery Man originated in Quebec as a French-language comedy called Starbuck (2011), directed by Ken Scott from a script he wrote with Martin Petit, and Scott repeated his chores on Delivery Man, essentially a scene-for-scene, line-for-line translation into vernacular English. The story works just as well transplanted to Brooklyn, where middle-aged David Wozniak (Vaughn) drives a delivery truck for his family’s meat company. An early scene shows him transferring a kiss with two fingers to a glass-framed portrait of his late mother as he arrives back at the shop, late as usual, and it soon becomes clear that he’s the family fuckup, living in a decrepit pad full of toys, records, and sports memorabilia. He’s lost $80,000 in a pyramid scheme, a loan shark is after him, and his girlfriend is so disheartened by his neglect that when she discovers that she’s pregnant, she turns him away at the door.
This is the point at which a dopey premise blooms into real tenderness. As David encounters his kids, he begins to feel all the pride, anxiety, resentment, joy, and wonder of a real father, and he’s drawn helplessly into making his children’s lives better. When he learns that young Josh (Jack Raynor), who works as a barista but wants to act, is missing the “audition of a lifetime,” David loans him his delivery truck and fills in for him at the coffee shop. When he finds his daughter Kristen (Britt Robertson) dying from an overdose (in a barely credible scene that you’d think Scott could have fixed the second time around), he drives her to a hospital, reluctantly accedes to her request that he sign her release papers, and watches from his truck outside her workplace the next morning to see whether she’ll show up as promised. In the story’s most melancholy turn, David’s son Ryan (Sebastien Rene, the only actor carried over from the French version) suffers from multiple sclerosis and lives in an assisted-living facility, where David becomes a periodic visitor and pushes him around the grounds in his wheelchair.
Of course none of that will happen unless this movie takes the world by storm, and judging from the fact that it opened in fourth place last weekend, that doesn’t seem too likely. The screening I saw, though sparsely attended, drew a fair number of couples, which suggests that the Knocked Up formula may still have some life in it. Delivery Man is definitely the week’s huggiest movie: a montage near the end shows David embracing one kid after another, and after Emma’s child is safely delivered there’s an overhead shot of dozens of them hugging David, who almost seems like the nucleus of a cell formation. Given that artificial insemination is so often portrayed as the death of fatherhood, with the American family mutating from Ozzie & Harriet to The Kids Are All Right, the phallocentric Delivery Man seems like a genuine backlash. Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether I was watching a comedy or a revenge fantasy.
Directed by Ken Scott PG-13, 103 min.
