On Screen

All the publicity for this movie makes it sound as though it’s some
kind of stoner romp—a cross between Doc Hollywood and
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Nothing could be further
from the truth, and that might be why I enjoyed Humboldt County so damn much. Though three-quarters of the film’s characters make their
living solely from the cultivation of marijuana, there isn’t even one
fusty pot pun in the whole movie.

Unfortunately, there’s not much originality there, either. It’s the
story of hyperstraitlaced Peter (Jeremy Strong), a privileged premed
student who just… can’t… feel. But after an awkward
one-night stand with a free-spirited woman improbably named Bogart
(Fairuza Balk, who is looking more and more like post-op Michael
Jackson in every successive movie), Peter finds himself improbably
dragged to Humboldt County, California, where he learns important life
lessons from Bogart’s family of laid-back pot farmers. Improbably. It’s
all very Garden State, but Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs earn
major gold stars for not making the pot farmers caricatures. Brad
Dourif, for once, doesn’t overplay his meager acting hand as the old
hippie paterfamilias, and Chris Messina, as an ambitious young single
father trying to evade the DEA, brings impressive gravitas to what
could easily be an annoying role.

Humboldt County has its heart in the right place, but,
ultimately, that’s just not enough. The lessons that Peter learns from
his wacky new adoptive family could just as easily be picked up from a
particularly meaningful Hallmark card, and there’s never any doubt that
he’s going to learn to become a better human being by the end of the
film. As a character sketch of a tight-knit community of burned-out
hippies, the movie excels. As a drama, the whole thing goes up in
smoke.