Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen
FIRST, AND LAST
TO GAG OR NOT TO GAG
IN FIRST FAMILY, director-writer Buck Henry has hit on a formula that he could repeat every four years just like Theodore White with his Making of the...
...The decorator touches are especially good, from the unbelievable shades of pink and yellow that Pat Kramer has painted her kitchen, to the robin's-egg blue and mint green polyester suits worn by her husband Vance (Charles Grodin...
...But as soon as Pat begins to atrophy, so do Jane Wagner's script and Joel Schumacher's direction of the film...
...To work up to six crises, you have to survive being kicked around a lot longer than Carter did...
...Screen FIRST, AND LAST TO GAG OR NOT TO GAG IN FIRST FAMILY, director-writer Buck Henry has hit on a formula that he could repeat every four years just like Theodore White with his Making of the President books...
...His comedy, like Carter's politics, is based on anti-charisma, on being understated to the point of banality...
...This is the reason the shrinking man has undergone a sex change...
...I can't imagine what the First Family of 1984 would be like, after four years of Reagan, but it certainly won't be the same movie Henry has made this time...
...As the president himself, Bob Newhart couldn't be better cast...
...In the end it is we who are shrinking, from Pat...
...On one hand, the movie pushes the idea of cultural conditioning to its ultimate extreme...
...The seeds of Wagner's script are already there, in the original version, in an implication that the hero's shrinking is some horrible side-effect of modern technology...
...It's not as a political satire that First Family succeeds, though...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...That's all the film is, really-a sit-com, Ozzie and Harriet in the White House...
...The film is funny just as a political cartoon, a sight-gag summary of Carter's two crises...
...Watching it makes your skin tingle and your teeth itch...
...When his African host offers some fertilizer that produces sixty-foot celery and two-ton tomatoes, the president eagerly accepts...
...In part the problem is that you can't be a misanthropist without being a misogynist in the bargain, and the filmmakers aren't willing to go that far...
...He just perpetuates the crude old idea that somehow the economy has to grow bigger each year...
...You want to jump up and leave the room...
...On the other hand, though, Wagner wants us to pity her and take her emotions seriously...
...Though Wagner's script may set Pat up as the goat of the joke at first, it later tries to turn her into a sheep, or rather a sacrificial lamb...
...It requires a misanthropy which Wagner, Schumacher and Tomlin all seem to lack...
...There was nothing to satirize...
...Pat is what she eats, absolutely...
...This makes her story into a kind of Gullible's Travels, an attempt at a contemporary version of Swiftian bile and malice...
...From a Lilliputian perspective, as Swift well knew, human nature has a stench that's overpowering...
...In fact, it's the kind of failure that's downright embarrassing...
...The result is that the vitriol in the movie is neutralized by the syrup...
...This message is elaborated by Shrinking Woman, whose heroine literally drowns in a sea of laundry liquids, flavor enhancers, vaginal sprays, synthetic fabrics and miracle glues...
...The family circle includes the president (Bob Newhart), his wife (Madeline Kahn), his horny daughter (Gilda Radner), and his Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum press secretaries (Jerry Hubbard and Richard Benjamin...
...These First Family condenses into a state visit to an African republic...
...Where First Family shrewdly puts its emphasis is on the domestic comedy...
...But to take advantage of it, you have to have the courage of your conceits...
...During the first five minutes, which sends up life in the consumer society, the film looks vaguely appealing...
...This kills the joke altogether...
...Unfortunately, for Carter, no such offer was made to him in time to save the election...
...She's the ideal consumer, the prime-time market for the advertising copy written by her very own husband Vance...
...At the same time that they scorn consumerism, they have a soft spot in their hearts for feminism...
...The attempt to turn the story toward pathos plunges it into bathos instead...
...Where the press secretaries are a kind of Jody Powell split in two, the daughter is Amy, Ms...
...No one could make a political satire on the Carter administration...
...Carter's crises were of course oil and hostages...
...In fact, it would be nice to have a new First Family at the end of each presidential term as a kind of antidote to White's sanctimony at the beginning...
...Lillian and Billy all rolled into one...
...This one is a comedy that could only have been made at the end of Carter's term in office...
...A Swiftian potential has always inhered in the shrinking man's story, of course...
...No matter how you think of The Incredible Shrinking Woman - as sit-com, satire or whatever - it still isn't funny...
...The point of view demands a taste forjokes that are coarse and gross...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Pat buys all this stuff at (as she puts it) "my very own shopping mall," which is conveniently located near her tract house in "Tasty Meadows...
...The president goes there because the place is rich in some element America desperately needs, but the head of state repays the president's courtesy call by taking the occasion to seize his daughter for sacrifice to the local deity...
...The film is loosely based on a novel called The Shrinking Man, which was made into The Incredible Shrinking Man, a fifties' movie that's campy now for its combination of clever special effects and scientific naivete...
...The film is funny because after four of Jimmy Carter, the American public is the perfect audience for this joke...
...True to the spirit of the Carter administration, Buck Henry's president has no new ideas about ho w to run the country...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 3
