The Little Hours

Bawdy nuns are usually good for cinematic laughs, and that holds true in Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours, which is loosely based on a story from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. The film is a comic sex romp that feels as though it might have sprung from a Monty Python sketch, although its humor speaks in a tongue that’s a little less biting and less sharp than that belonging to those Pythonites.

The Little Hours is amusing and ambitious, although it’s awfully one-note and diffuse. Given the huge array of comic talent marshaled to appear in this production, hitting anything less than a bull’s-eye inevitably feels like a missed target.

Although set in the Middle Ages, the characters in The Little Hours speak modern English. Profanity, gossip and ill will are common traits among the sisters. “What the fuck?” is their most frequently uttered expression.

These nuns are more like characters in a salacious Pedro Almodóvar farce than a medieval Pasolini tale. Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, and Kate Micucci play bored convent nuns. (Their consistent deadpan delivery is spot on.)

Molly Shannon plays their mother superior and John C. Reilly is the priest at the convent. He has a fondness for the holy wine – as well as for the mother superior.

Dave Franco plays the servant Massetto, who flees his master (Nick Offerman) after being discovered sleeping with the nobleman’s wife (Lauren Weedman, one of the film’s standout performances).

Massetto takes refuge in the convent, where the nuns believe him to be deaf and mute, and take turns defiling him. Jemima Kirke enters the indecorous fray as one of the lesbian witches who frolic in the woods, and Fred Armisen shows up to play a bishop who is shocked, truly shocked, to learn of the sins taking place inside the convent’s walls.

Even at these heights of absurdity, as a whole, the film plays out like a series of titillating scenes rather than a blasphemous charade.

Admittedly, it’s something of a cheap blow to condemn a film for not being funnier than it is. Cheap laughs at crude jokes are still laughs, so it’s fun to watch, but The Little Hours is a farce that doesn’t really mock anything of substance. It exists as if amusing itself were its only objective. In that, this troupe may have succeeded, but I feel compelled to throw back the film’s favorite phrase: “What the fuck?”

THE LITTLE HOURS (2) Directed by Jeff Baena • Starring Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Dave Franco, Nick Offerman • Rated R • 90 min. • At Osio Theater