(Spring Breakdown, a very strange film [at least, as far as studio-financed comedies go] that premiered at Sundance earlier this year, comes out on DVD today. This is a slightly edited version of a piece I published during that festival.)

Variety’s Todd McCarthy received mixed reviews for his Sundance 2009 wrap-up piece, in which he lumped together the festival’s two biggest narrative hits, Push and An Education, as part of a trend of films espousing values “emblematic” of “the start of the Obama age.” I’m not sure our recently elected president has much to do with the themes of films that no doubt were conceived years before he clinched the nomination (especially these two films, both of which were based on long pre-existing texts), but I did notice that this year’s crop of Sundance titles seemed more interested in reflecting the times than some of their solipsistic Amerindie ancestors. I saw more films at this festival that tried, earnestly or satirically, to grapple with the state of the union’s troubled-but-hopeful psyche, than I’ve seen in any single ten day stretch in my professional life.

Even better, I saw this concern with The State of Things seep into films as disparate as the tacky, raunchy Rachel Dratch/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, and Deborah Stratman’s extremely classy, short feature-length experimental documentary feature O’er the Land –– two films which, on paper, couldn’t be more different, and yet are both heavily invested in notions of fin de siècle Americana and the peculiar ways in which Americans take advantage of our bottomless freedom. Dense, sometimes silent, always visually complex, and presented with neither binding narration nor immediately evident narrative, Land is probably the purest cinema experience I had at Sundance this year. Bizarrely, while Stratman’s film has continued to play the festival circuit, Spring Breakdown’s Sundance screenings may be the the only theatrical exposure that the studio-produced comedy is going to see.

Spring Breakdown, co-written by Rachel Dratch and starring Dratch, Parker Posey, Amy Poehler, Amber Tamblyn and a number of SNL and Arrested Development regulars in supporting roles, had been on the shelf for awhile before news broke that Warners planned to release it straight to DVD. It was a surprise, then, to see the film pop up on the Sundance Midnight line-up, and after the press screening, there were grumblings that Breakdown didn’t belong at Sundance at all. It’s always amusing when anyone tries to claim Sundance as a refuge from populist, lowbrow fare — this, the festival that launched both Saw and Super Troopers –– but it’s an especially wrong-headed way to look at this film, which rides a very fine line between total trash and intelligent provocation, mall multiplex dreck and Troma-esque satire via the grotesque.

Dratch, Posey, and Poehler play three 40-ish women who have been friends since bonding as uber-nerds in college. These are not inner beauty-full flowers who just need a Cher Horowitz to come along and give them contact lenses and a pair of Spanx; full-on social rejects, they repel everyone but each other. Nor can they be saved by men, who will never condescend to wanting them as long as there’s a single 20 year-old hardbody left on Earth. This is not the 40 Year-Old Virgin, where laughing at the loser at the center of the piece gives way to sympathizing with him, and cheering for his triumph. Unless our culture heads into a serious recalibration of values and quick, says Spring Breakdown, ladies like this will never truly triumph.

At the start of the action, Dratch catches her obviously beard-needy fiancee (Seth Meyers) getting handsy with the young Latino gardener, Poehler is rejected by a blind guy (Will Arnett — who, I’ve noticed, elicits laughs from the Sundance press corps just by showing up on screen), and Posey’s cat dies, which is bad, because she’s basically treated it like a boyfriend. Posey’s meek office girl is then bullied by her senator boss (Jane Lynch) into secretly trailing the politician’s daughter (Tamblyn) down to spring break in Texas. The three amigas go down together, and Dratch and Poehler’s characters soon find their staid lives upended by this new world of binge drinking and unabashed sluttiness. Posey tries to hold down the line for earnest appreciation of board games and ankle-length skirts, but is eventually sucked into the debauchery when the plot’s final machination demands it.

Is Spring Breakdown a “good” film? It’s debatable, but in the end what’s good about it may be, as it often is with lower budget cult films, the scope of its intended provocation, and not necessarily the package it’s wrapped in. With the production values of a Mad TV sketch and a similar tendency to telegraph every beat with shouting and wild gestures the way an insensitive person tries to communicate with a foreigner, it’s often both horrible to look at and hell to listen to. You could say that Breakdown is, like Humpday, a comedy of uncomfortability, but unlike Humpday, it can’t work as audience catharsis because no viewer would want to admit to being as socially awkward as the film’s three heroines. With one film, you squirm because you can relate; with the other, you squirm because you hope you’ll never be able to relate.

That said, I was consistently entertained, sometimes laughing (anything that gives Poehler’s hood rat persona a feature-length narrative context is fine by me), sometimes just gaping at how far the film was willing to go in order to make it clear that its heroines were total no-hopers, far exceeding the point where one imagines an audience of actual coeds actually continuing to get the joke.

I suppose it’s possible to laugh at/with Spring Breakdown as gross out comedy without taking it too seriously, but throughout I could sense there was also some really interesting stuff roiling underneath the top level, without being quite able to put my finger on it until near the end. And then I realized: Spring Breakdown is a parody of Sex and the City-style media, which depict 40-something women as image and sex-obsessed to the point where they might as well be adolescents, but the film enacts that parody by aping the Fight Club model. Having hit bottom by being “themselves,” with nothing left to lose, these three ladies embrace the fact that, in a time and place where there are no constraints, to be “normal” in America is to go to extremes, even if that means being extremely self-destructive. They dive deep into a nihilistic subculture of masochistic thrill seeking. Eventually, they realize that this is not the answer to their woes. But not until it’s too late to stop everything from exploding.

The women in Spring Breakdown look at these very American traditions, including a number of rituals (from keg stands to female salsa wrestling to “talent contests” in which 95% of the participants are there to shake barely-clad assets in synchronicity) entered into with the express purpose of excusing female objectification (if not date rape) and/or inciting promiscuity, as curious outsiders, who are torn between this new world’s obvious attractions and their nagging beliefs and morality. That it even attempts to talk about that ambiguity while occasionally being riotously funny puts it ahead of a great deal of Hollywood comedies that have no problem making it to theaters.