The Talkies/Summer Flicks
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES SUMMER FLICKS by Bruce Bawer W hen it comes to your typical summer movie, the question is not whether the filmmakers have come up with a new idea, but whether they've managed to do...
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...it doesn't seem to occur to him not to have Andy or Elizabeth do something funny (e.g., hit a dog over the head with a frying pan) simply because it would be out of character...
...Simply by spitting out a single word'Eurotrash!'!---Bette Midler can make one laugh uproariously...
...Superficially it may resemble Vice Versa and the like, but it has a deeper affinity to such strange and affecting fairy tales as Charly and Being There...
...But there are several practical problems with it here...
...His performance is at once tender and hilarious, full of perfect small touches (e.g., the tentative way he peeks into his underpants after looking in the bathroom mirror and seeing a grown-up...
...a befuddled nurse switches two of the infants, so that each mother unwittingly goes home with one baby that's hers and one that isn't...
...If Colman played two roles in The Prisoner of Zenda, it was only because there was no conceivable alternative...
...But Big Business is never as amusing or clever as one would like it to be...
...Since then the trend has escalated...
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...And among the most gently moving, too...
...her meek, friendly "sister" Rose (Lily Tomlin), who's never felt quite at home in New York or in the corporate world, is more interested in collecting stray dogs than in her role as the firm's v.p...
...The climactic recognition scene, moreover, is utterly disappointing...
...but from the beginning this film is creaky and clumsy, which appears to be rather less the fault of the uneven script by Dori Pierson and Marc Rubel than of Jim Abraham's consistently uninspired, and sometimes even inept, direction...
...T ike Funny Farm, Big Business tries La to find humor in the contrast between city and country...
...But no way...
...The late actor Ronald Colman knewthis...
...the natural world that appeared so beautiful shows itself to be dangerous and uncomfortable...
...Jeffrey Boam's screenplay, then, is exceedingly derivative...
...that's why he insisted that the producer David Selznick not give him both the Charles Darnay and the Sydney Carton roles in A Tale of Tyr) Cities, even though the two characters were supposed to resemble one another...
...but she can't do that here, because her two Roses must be similar enough to be mistaken for each other...
...To be fair, some of Boam's inventions (e.g., a scene involving an order of lamb fries) would likely be amusing even in the hands of a Carl Reiner...
...although it is proceeding slowly, with difficulty, and many mistakes have already been made along the way, with more probably yet to come, nonetheless, as Gorbachev has said, there is nowhere for us to retreat...
...They also make us care about Susan (Elizabeth Perkins), a jaded young businesswoman who, during the course of a most peculiar affair with Josh, gradually learns to be vulnerable, to trust, and to love...
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...But then Perkins should probably be grateful for Brooks's decision, because Big is unquestionably superior to Broadcast News...
...And this makes it difficult to apportion one's sympathy in the way the filmmakers would like...
...In order to get the fun under way, however, the film must first ask us to swallow a rather dubious complication: namely, that even though Moramax's corporate headquarters are in New BOOKMINE OLD 6? RARE BOOKS Bought • Sold • Searched Daily 11-5 1015 2nd Street Steve Mauer Old Sacramento, California 95814 (916) 441-4609 Indiana University Press is d prop to announce a publishing event major York, the stockholders' meeting is held at the Plaza Hotel, and the Sheltons (who live in Manhattan) spend the night before the meeting in a Plaza suite...
...Try to follow this: forty-odd years ago, in Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia, a dirt-poor local woman named Ratliff and a rich Manhattanite named Shelton are both delivered of twin daughters named Rose and Sadie...
...an actress of rare expressiveness, she lets us see Susan open up, step by subtle step, like a mimosa leaf, lets us watch her various reactions to Josh—curiosity, perplexity, wariness, amusement, ardor, wonderment—playing across her face, vying for control...
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...This revelation only reinforces one's already low opinion of Brooks's taste: Hunter is an arresting if narrow performer, a grating sitcom type...
...Another problem here is that at times the film seems to be endorsing certain unpleasant stereotypes...
...Aside from Sadie Shelton, indeed, none of the film's protagonists seems perfectly in focus...
...To be sure, apportionment of sympathy is always a problem when you have an actor playing multiple roles...
...Throughout the movie, you can feel the wit of the director working its magic upon the witless material...
...The two-pairs-of-identical-twins gimmick has an honorable lineage, of course, leading back to Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (and back beyond that to Plautus...
...It's impossible, by the way, to isolate one of these four as the film's heroine...
...Big Business has precisely this problem: simply stated, it's hard to feel too emotionally involved when one Sadie knocks the other Sadie down and locks her in a closet...
...As for Bette Midler, she's best at playing herself—or, more specifically, at playing loud, vulgar, wisecracking, swaggering, street-smart Mae West-type know-it-alls—which works perfectly for Sadie Shelton...
...and the humor of the final sequence depends altogether too much on the fact that Sadie Ratliff watches "Dynasty"--and it seems ill-advised for a film as thin and cartoonish as this one to refer to (and incorporate a snippet or two from) a TV series which, compared to the film itself, looks realistic and profound...
...Perkins is incomparably finer, an actress of subtler effects, wider range, lovelier presence...
...it's clear in retrospect that we're supposed to have recognized all along that the two Sadies are born "New Yorkers," in the middle-American "code" sense of the term (meaning, of course, that whenever some middle Americans want to say unpleasant things about Jews without being explicitly anti-Semitic, they speak not about "Jews" but about "New Yorkers...
...We've had films in which fathers and sons exchange bodies (Vice Versa, Like Father, Like Son), and even one (18 Again) in which a grandfather and grandson change places...
...Surprisingly, however, the film proves to be one of the most delightful comedies in recent memory...
...Though our heroes, this time around, are played by the ever-genial Chevy Chase and by an oddly lackluster actress named Madolyn Smith, Funny Farm is pretty much a "Green Acres" retread...
...10001 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 41 cast...
...their simple, goodhearted country neighbors are revealed to be morons, hucksters, and screwballs...
...one can't believe in all four of these women...
...As Selznick later said, "I'm glad now that he held out for that, because I think a great deal of the illusion of the picture might have been lost had Colman rescued Colman and had Colman gone to the guillotine so that Colman could go away with Lucy...
...Perkins is smart, funny, and often astonishingly touching in this role...
...If the center of the story keeps shifting, moreover, it's apparently for no other reason than that Boam, at various junctures, happened to come up with boffo plot twists that had little or nothing to do with the direction the story happened to be taking theretofore...
...THE TALKIES SUMMER FLICKS by Bruce Bawer W hen it comes to your typical summer movie, the question is not whether the filmmakers have come up with a new idea, but whether they've managed to do anything interesting with an old one...
...Plot doesn't count for much here, nor does character: Boam takes the Farmers and their feelings no Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...There are laughs, to be sure, but they're scattered, and most of them are occasioned not by terrific mistaken-identity situations but by the two lead actresses' talent for making a great deal out of very little...
...And there's no question but that Funny Farm makes use of one of the most ancient and wheezy of story ideas: an urban couple, eager to escape the rat race and get acquainted with nature, move to the countryside, only to discover that (in the words of the current movie's ad copy) life in the country isn't all it's cracked up to be...
...but the majority of them (e.g., the world's one-millionth Dutch-door gag) are funny and memorable primarily because of the way Hill visualizes and times them...
...Like Big Business, to be sure, this is a one-joke film...
...more seriously than the writer of a Road Runner cartoon takes a fall from a cliff by Wile E. Coyote...
...The purpose of these sequences, needless to say, is as simple as the sequences themselves are complicated: to place twin Lilys and twin Bettes in adjoining hotel suites, unaware of each other's existence, and set them loose on an increasingly confused supporting AUTHORS WANTED BY NEW YORK PUBLISHER Leading subsidy book publisher seeks manuscripts of all types: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly and juvenile works, etc...
...For a while, one suspects that the story will conclude with the revelation that, appearances to the contrary, the two Sadies are—surprise—the real Ratliffs, and the two Roses are the real Sheltons...
...Given the extreme familiarity of its concept—and the fact that it was co-written by Steven Spielberg's sister Anne (with Gary Ross), produced by the insipid James Brooks (of TV comedy and Broadcast News fame), and directed by Penny ("Laverne and Shirley") Marshall (most of the members of whose family know more about churning out vapid sitcoms than about making films)—one could be forgiven for not expecting much from Big...
...A year ago or so, I remarked in this space upon the profusion of recent comedy-fantasies—such as All of Me and Oh Heavenly Dog—in which characters found themselves inhabiting bodies other than their own...
...Since Hollowmade is the burg's chief industry, Rose Ratliff is deeply concerned about Moramax's plans...
...the difference here is that the joke keeps building, that it builds with wit and perception and sensitivity, and that (for all its ridiculousness) it is on some level taken perfectly seriously: Marshall and company make us believe in, and care about, this character precisely because they believe and care about him...
...If Funny Farm nonetheless has its moments—inspired, original, wonderfully loony moments—the main reason may be stated in three words: George Roy Hill...
...with Sadie in tow, she travels to New York on the eve of Moramax's big stockholders' meeting to seek assurances that Hollowmade will not be closed down following the sale...
...In fact, this film is something of a textbook lesson in the difference that a top-notch director can make to a basically feeble screenplay...
...Both the script and the direction are first-rate, and Tom Hanks, whose talents have rarely seemed more than modest, does an absolutely extraordinary job of convincing one that he is a boy in a man's body...
...but Midler must also play the naive, wide-eyed country girl Sadie Ratliff, a character that doesn't really come off at all...
...Cut to the present: in Manhattan, Sadie Shelton (Bette Midler) is the brassy, obnoxious chief executive offi cer of her family's huge conglomerate, the Moramax Corporation...
...New authors welcomed...
...Sadie's opportunity comes when her urban namesake decides to sell off one of Moramax's smaller holdings, the Hollowmade Furniture Company in Jupiter Hollow...
...Even the broadest of movie farces generally operates by stricter rules than this...
...Of course, the director of The World According to Garp shouldn't be wasting his time on such mediocre fare in the first place—but that's another story...
...To begin with, Lily Tomlin is celebrated for her ability to transform herself into very different characters...
...Things are the other way around down in Jupiter Hollow: there Rose Ratliff (Lily Tomlin) is a take-charge type, at harmony with her surroundings, while her "sister" Sadie Ratliff (Bette Midler) feels out of place and aches to see the big city...
...What's more, it's very episodic, moving from gag to gag with all the shamelessness of a Henny Youngman...
...One thing must be said: it's good to see a movie starring two funny women...
...Yet they would have been well advised, this time around, to have junked the far too elaborate premise of Big Business—salvaging, perhaps, the delicious character of Sadie Shelton—and found some other script more worthy of their gifts...
...Neither the complexity of the set-up nor the unbelievability of the complications would matter much, of course, if the ensuing sequences were brilliant...
...And now there's Big, in which thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin (David Moscow) wakes up one morning to discover that he's been transformed into a twenty-years-older version of himself (Tom Hanks...
...Now, if you've seen a few episodes of the Eddie Albert-Eva Gabor sitcom "Green Acres" (or the old movie The Egg and I), you know that this story idea comes equipped with a less-thaninfinite number of comic complications, to wit: the charming house that our couple move into proves to be in astonishingly primitive condition...
...Midler and Tomlin are a considerably more promising pair than Midler and Shelley Long (in last year's Outrageous Fortune), and one would very much like to see them together again...
...at every turn, the awkwardness, exuberance, and innocence of this boy-man feel exactly on target, never overdone or sentimentalized...
...In order to be maximally effective, a mistaken-identity comedy must build steadily, sharply, and smoothly...
...perestroika is revolutionary in character and its full realization will alter and renew our whole society...
...If Manhattan-lawyerturned-gentleman-farmer Eddie Albert had to climb up a telephone pole every time he wanted to place a call from his Hooterville hovel, so Chevy Chase—in the role of Andy Farmer, a sometime Upper West Side sportswriter who has retired to the countryside with his wife, Elizabeth, to write his first novel—must get used to feeding quarters into the public phone which has inexplicably been installed in his kitchen...
...It is reported that Perkins was James Brooks's original choice for the Holly Hunter role in Broadcast News, and that when he took that part away from her he gave her Big as a consolation prize...
...If the opening sequences sound cumbersomely expository, they are...
Vol. 21 • August 1988 • No. 8
