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Split-Level Comedy

This appeared in the February 24, 1989 issue of the Chicago Reader. –J.R.

THE ‘BURBS

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Joe Dante

Written by Dana Olsen

With Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman, Wendy Schaal, Henry Gibson, Brother Theodore, and Courtney Gains.

Director Joe Dante is the perfect refutation of the idea that popular American comedies have to be simple. His movies are never pretentious or difficult to follow, but embedded in each of them are a sophisticated understanding of popular culture and an awareness of the multiple stances and positions that are possible within the confines of supposedly simple genre movies.

Gremlins offered an ambiguous cluster of proliferating beasties to illustrate a cautionary moral fable about magic; it also managed to be an amoral satire of the same facets of the American dream exalted in the fable. Innerspace postulated the injection of a miniaturized Navy test pilot (Dennis Quaid) into the body of a hypochondriac (Martin Short), leading to simultaneous and parallel narratives as each character’s progress influenced the other’s.

A knowledgeable connoisseur of the American cartoon, Dante makes movies that take place in the kind of manic world where anything can happen. This sensibility bore particular fruit in his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (set in a universe ruled by the mind of a vindictive little boy who loved cartoons) and the climactic sequence of his Explorers (a nightmarish Mixmaster version of American TV strained through the sensibility, body, and technology of an extraterrestrial mimic); both of these segments anticipated the subversive universe that other filmmakers developed on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. In ideological and aesthetic terms, this translates into an ability to make different movies for different audiences at the same time. Expedient rather than cynical, Dante nearly always contrives to give his audience at least two movies to choose from: in Gremlins one can enter either the idealized Capra universe or the irresponsible realm of the monsters who seek to undermine it; in Innerspace one can identify with the adventures and attitudes of either the pilot or the neurotic.

In the case of The ‘Burbs, Dante’s latest fantasy-tinged comedy, the moral choices available to the viewer are even broader. The movie can be read as a satire about suburban conformists and snoops — xenophobic busybodies who can’t tolerate the presence of any sort of eccentricity in their midst. Or the movie is a cautionary tale about the dangers of insulation and ignorance — minding one’s own business and being unaware of the horrible things that are happening right next door. Or, finally, one can take the noncommittal stance assumed by the teenage characters in the movie, who are as undisturbed about the mysterious neighbors as they are amused by the xenophobic snoops trying to uncover them; the kids are simply around to enjoy the show.

By building all three seemingly contradictory attitudes into this movie, Dante and screenwriter Dana Olsen aren’t abdicating their moral responsibility. It might be more accurate to say that they’re honoring the pluralistic and democratic possibilities of their story, and doing so in such a way that the viewer doesn’t have to adopt any one of these three attitudes exclusively. The pseudomoralistic stance of an overtly preachy and hypocritical movie like Mississippi Burning, which is designed to flatter spectators while inviting them to luxuriate in a shower bath of their own moral indignation and self-righteousness, doesn’t offer the possibility of more than one angle on the action. This isn’t to say that the movie would be better if it gave the viewpoint of racists; the point is that even the film’s treatment of justice and compassion is simplistic and one-sided — it’s set up for instant emotive effects rather than for any thought or reflection. The ‘Burbs, which has no pretensions at all about “making a statement” or addressing a social issue, implicitly respects an audience’s ability to consider events rather than merely react to them, and to do so from more than a single perspective.

The plot couldn’t be simpler, and if Dante is grand enough to begin and end his movie with a shot of the spinning globe, he takes care to remind us that it’s nothing more than the Universal Pictures logo. In a suburban neighborhood — actually Colonial Street in the Universal Studios back lot, where Leave It to Beaver among other TV shows was set — Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks) is spending his vacation at home, but his peace is disturbed by the presence of a strange new family on the block, the Klopeks. His paranoid neighbor Art (the John Candy part played by Rick Ducommun) informs him that the family’s previous house burned to the ground, and that the three members of the all-male family never seem to go out except at night.

The disappearance of another neighbor starts to get Ray and Art even more hot and bothered, and they’re joined in their suspicions by Mark (Bruce Dern), a cantankerous Vietnam vet who’s even more intolerant of the Klopeks’ weirdness. At night, they witness all kinds of strange goings-on at the dilapidated Klopek house: a lightning rod on the roof causes the basement to blaze with fiery light (shades of Frankenstein), and the youngest member of the household, Hans (Courtney Gains), removes a suspicious-looking garbage bag from the trunk of his car.

Ray also learns from his son, Dave, that the Klopeks have been digging holes in their backyard at night, and a neighborhood dog retrieves a human thighbone — from the same yard. But as the plot thickens and the mystery deepens, it becomes increasingly clear that Ray, Mark, and Art are the only ones who are worried about the Klopeks, or at least worried enough to start snooping in earnest. Ordinarily one would expect the local kids to become the amateur sleuths in this sort of plot, but Ray’s son, while observant, is basically unconcerned, and Ray’s wife, Carol (Carrie Fisher), and Mark’s wife, Bonnie (Wendy Schaal), only become involved in order to placate their husbands. Ricky (Corey Feldman), the local teenager, is interested only as a passive, amused spectator. He treats the activities of his older neighbors — Klopeks and straight men alike — like a drive-in movie, going so far as to set up chairs on his porch facing the action.

Part of Dante’s wit and talent in handling this bunch of characters is to view them all from an affectionate but critical distance. Mark and Art are depicted mainly as bumbling fools, and while Tom Hanks’s Ray seems a little less silly than his fellow sleuths, the movie never asks us categorically to share his viewpoint either. When we finally get to see more of the Klopeks — Uncle Reuben (Brother Theodore) and Dr. Werner Klopek (Henry Gibson) — they basically come across as stock Old Dark House residents with a few Nazi mad-scientist trimmings. But the movie isn’t so much concerned with proving that Ray and his cohorts are either right or wrong about their suspicions (although it proves incidentally that they’re right as well as wrong) as it is in showing the comic interactions between all the people in the neighborhood. Several points of entry are offered to the audience in assessing this very anti-Spielbergian suburban hell, and all of them are equally funny.

The ‘Burbs is a small and modest entertainment rather than a broadside, so one doesn’t want to make too much of its clever strategies, which convert its three adult heroes into children, their wives into mothers, and the neighborhood kids into relatively mature grown-ups. Some of the pleasures to be found in the margins of this romp are the inside references that tend to be a Dante specialty, ranging from a box of Gremlins breakfast cereal to the name of the author of a dusty volume called The Theory and Practice of Demonology (one Dr. Julian Karswell, a character played by Niall MacGinnis in Jacques Tourneur’s classic Curse of the Demon). But I might add that by sticking exclusively to their suburban turf, and treating it frankly like a movie set, Dante and Olsen make their snug little world as wide and as varied as the Universal globe that contains it.

Painter at Work

From the Chicago Reader (February 17, 1989). I was extremely disappointed in the revised version of this film that was released about sixteen years later, which I also reviewed in the Reader, because I believe it essentially effaced or distorted many of the virtues I found in the original film. (One can find my arguments about this here.) — J.R.

GOLUB

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn.

By and large, painting and cinema have always tended to be uneasy bedfellows. To film a stationary canvas with a stationary camera is to deprive the viewer of both the movement possible in film and the movement possible to the viewer of a painting in a studio or gallery. On the other hand, to find a stationary canvas with a camera in motion is to impose an itinerary on the painting in question, thereby limiting the reading of the individual viewer.

While there are a handful of interesting and respectable art documentaries in the history of film, such as Alain Resnais’ Van Gogh (1948) and Gauguin (1950), and Sergei Paradjanov’s recent Arabesques Around a Pirosmani Theme – all three of which significantly happen to be shorts — the overall failure of film to record a painter’s work without recourse to a gliding Cook’s tour or a mincemeat dissection of the work in question has been far from encouraging. Overlooking such uneven biopics as Lust for Life, Moulin Rouge, and the more recent Frida, Wolf at the Door, and Vincent, the challenge of filming a static canvas kinetically has defeated practically everyone.

I’ve never made it all the way through Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ambitious 1956 documentary feature Le Mystère Picasso (known in English as The Picasso Mystery or The Mystery of Picasso), which is currently available on tape, but the opening of that film strikes me as being a veritable checklist of wrong moves. The film opens with an arty black-and-white shot of Picasso sitting brooding across from an easel and canvas on the other side of the room as an offscreen narrator intones, “One would give anything to know what went on in the head of Rimbaud when he was writing ‘The Drunken Boat,’ or in Mozart’s head when he was composing — to know the secret mechanism that guides that creator in his perilous adventure. Fortunately, what is impossible in poetry and music can become a reality in painting.”

This scene is eventually succeeded by the film’s main course, in color — an extended process that allows us to follow Picasso’s hand from the reverse side of the canvas, yielding a sort of animated evolution of a painting, accompanied portentously by classical music. But far from a revelation, this spectacle is only further mystification. And if we assume that the main thing that went on in Rimbaud’s head when he was writing “The Drunken Boat” was precisely “The Drunken Boat,” the implication is that Clouzot’s foray into Picasso’s methods is an equally tautological exercise.

One of the great, refreshing achievements of the 58-minute documentary Golub, which mainly concentrates on the conception, execution, and exhibition of a single painting by Leon Golub, is that it assumes at the outset that there isn’t any mystère Golub to be unveiled or penetrated. Made by the sophisticated Chicago-based collective Kartemquin, which has mainly concentrated in the past on grass-roots political struggles, the film takes on none of the hushed reverence or monumental pretension that usually accompany this culture’s alienated approach to the act of making art. Eliminating art critics entirely from its purposeful discourse, it offers as its main spokespeople Golub himself; Nancy Spero, his wife and a fellow artist; a museum director; and a number of ordinary spectators in various galleries, all of whom prove to be more than adequate to the task.

The fact that Leon Golub is a politically motivated painter is undoubtedly part of what led Kartemquin to his work, but while the film never loses sight of the political significance of Golub’s art, its treatment of Golub’s form, style, and methodology is never reductive. Golub is an artist who recalls a precursor from an earlier generation of American realist painters, Ben Shahn, in the angular sweep of his human figures and the broad stretches of space that surround them, as well as in the direct, graphic address of his social subjects. He is unusually articulate about his aims and methods, and some of the film’s strength derives from its willingness to let him talk.

This is not to imply, however, that Golub is just another talking-heads documentary. Before the painter even appears, there is a prologue (of less than three minutes) of more than two dozen shots — a remarkable sequence that manages to give us a multifaceted precis of what is to follow without providing any kind of obstacle course for the audience.

This rapid, exquisitely timed montage mainly consists of fragments of Golub paintings, gallery spectators, and TV news clips. Most of the shots feature darting camera movements (mainly pans and zooms), and all but the first are accompanied by a single, sustained, growling bass-clef chord from Tom Sivak’s highly effective and functional score; but the filmmakers arrange these elements in a logical and fluid pattern rather than a confusing jumble. The TV clips, which recur throughout the film, serve to dramatize Golub’s treatment of physiognomies, body positions, and power relationships that exist all around us in the world, but they never suggest literal or obvious duplications of the world in Golub’s work; they suggest, rather, that the faces and postures seen in the paintings and those glimpsed in Vietnam, in Nicaragua, at the Iran-contra hearings, and elsewhere belong to the same family of images.

The very first shot of Golub, an unorthodox substitute for a credit title, provides interesting insight into directors Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn’s highly compressed method. Lasting only nine seconds, the shot features an off-the-cuff camera movement that follows a woman on the street going down and then up two separate shallow flights of steps as she passes an enormous sign bearing the word “Golub” in black letters against an Indian red background. The woman begins below the sign at screen left and ends up on a parallel plane with it at screen right, which suggests a movement away from the standard hierarchy of painting over spectator to a position in which they’re accorded an equal footing, like two individuals in an eye-to-eye confrontation. The Indian red background, moveover, introduces us to the background of the Golub painting that most of the film is concerned with — a color that manages to suggest at the same time blood, earth, and violence.

Most of the remainder of the film concentrates on Golub’s production of a single large canvas. The camera follows him through a detailed series of steps, with Golub himself most often providing commentary about the various decisions involved while he works. Looking for pictures of figures in certain positions in his massive file cabinet of photographs, he comes up with two key photos — one of a man whose face is being pushed into the ground, the other of a man stooping who can be used as a model for the man who is doing the pushing. Golub tapes these two photos to different sections of a huge blank canvas on his studio wall and then begins to sketch his two figures below them in chalk, revising certain details of posture and position as he draws.

He deliberates on whether the aggressive figure should be bare chested or in a uniform, and finally settles on an undershirt; he describes the awkwardness of his drawing — not with false modesty, but as a statement of fact — and explains that he tries to exaggerate this awkwardness in creating a certain disjunction between the figures in his paintings. By this time he has decided to introduce a third figure into the painting, a man hovering over the victim with a gun, who is seen mostly from behind. He goes back to his file to select a picture of the kind of pistol he wants and then dispatches a student to purchase a toy pistol that matches the picture; eventually he gets the student to serve as a model, holding the pistol in the appropriate gesture and position while he sketches him. He also solicits a critique on the size and position of his sketched figures from his wife, Nancy Spero.

Turning next to paint, Golub mixes colors and fills in certain details with a brush. Then, with the help of students, he pastes strips of paper around the outlines of the figures, switches to larger brushes and a roller, transfers the canvas to the floor, adds a solvent, and goes through an elaborate process of blotting, scraping (with a meat cleaver), and further sketching and painting, which continues after he moves the canvas back to the wall.

This abbreviated synopsis describes only a central part of the film’s mosaic; intercut with the above are TV clips and comments from gallery spectators, with Sivak’s music and various commentaries bridging these sequences. We learn from Golub that this painting “has something to do with what we’re involved with in El Salvador” (”I once described myself as a machine for producing monsters. But my production of monsters is really minuscule compared to the real production of monsters”).

There’s never any pretense that Golub’s activity is being filmed by an invisible camera — the presence of the filmmakers is constantly felt — and there’s no attempt to challenge or provoke the audience on the part of either Golub or the film. Both are concerned with directly engaging the spectator rather than with climbing on a soapbox. Golub’s remark that his art is “a report on how things are going today” is a statement of fact that we can interpret in a variety of ways, and part of the role of the TV clips and the comments from gallery spectators is to suggest some of this variety rather than impose a single reading.

The film is concerned with hidden depths as well as flat surfaces; part of the painting process that we see is involved with covering up previous work, turning the painting into a palimpsest, and Sivak’s variable and layered score, which mainly makes use of wind instruments and percussion, often seems to build its textures according to related principles. Some of the individual comments connect up with others: a girl in a gallery says of Golub’s paintings, “They make me feel very ugly”; and Golub himself remarks later, “Another ugly item goes out into the world.” Another viewer, at a show of Golub and Spero’s work in Northern Ireland, where the central painting is finally hung, compare’s Spero’s positive images of women with Golub’s negative images of men; and still another woman says while looking at a Golub canvas, “It doesn’t seem like there’s any space in there for women at all.”

Part of what makes the Kartemquin group’s approach to this subject distinctive is that it treats the exhibition of Golub’s painting as an essential part of the production process. There’s no magical moment when the painting is proclaimed to be “complete” that exists in isolation from its engagement with an audience. Indeed, when students are finally hammering in grommets to hold up the canvas and Golub is affixing his signature to the bottom, the filmmakers take care not to show us the finished work as a whole entity before it reemerges in a social context at its gallery opening; and even there, we never see it detached or isolated from its audience.

There are a couple of minor flaws in Golub; neither can be regarded as serious, but both seem to be worth noting. While the film certainly acknowledges the presence of Nancy Spero, it never seems entirely comfortable about how to deal with her as an artist distinct from her husband; the only facets of her work that are broached are those that relate to his, and her work is treated rather reductively as a consequence. The film also isn’t entirely confident about where to end; after a stunning match cut from wall graffiti in Northern Ireland to Golub walking past wall graffiti in New York, the film continues with a brief anticlimactic section in which Golub discusses a couple of his other paintings, and brings up the question of his capacity to depict blacks in one of them. The sequence is interesting enough in its own right, but it adds nothing indispensable to what has gone before.

Otherwise, Golub strikes me as being virtually perfect, both in achieving everything that it sets out to do and in the more general political program of conceptualizing its own agenda. Perhaps because this view of the painterly process is brought to us by filmmakers whose previous concerns have been with social issues, it conveys the exhilarating sense that art is inseparable from both the world that engenders it and the world that receives it.

Tap

Gregory Hines stars as Maxwell Washington, the son of a famous hoofer, who’s torn between following in his father’s footsteps and continuing a life of crime. This 1989 dance musical, written and directed by Nick Castle, isn’t everything it might have been—the numbers tend to be disappointingly short, often promising more than they deliver—but on the whole it’s a respectable revival of a sadly neglected genre (very nicely shot by David Gribble) with a lot of lively tapping (choreographed by Henry Le Tang and Hines). Among the strong secondary cast are Suzzanne Douglas, Savion Glover, Dick Anthony Williams, “Sandman” Sims, and Bunny Briggs, and there’s an especially enjoyable turn by Sammy Davis Jr. as Max Washington’s mentor Little Mo. 110 min.

The Palm Beach Story

The all-time best Rudy Vallee performance is as a gentle, puny millionaire named Hackensacker in this brilliant, simultaneously tender and scalding 1942 screwball comedy by Preston Sturges–one of the real gems in Sturges’s hyperproductive period at Paramount. Claudette Colbert, married to an ambitious but penniless architectural engineer (Joel McCrea), takes off for Florida and winds up getting wooed by Hackensacker. When McCrea shows up she persuades him to pose as her brother. Also on hand are such indelible Sturges creations as the Weenie King (Robert Dudley), the madly destructive Ale and Quail Club, Hackensacker’s acerbic sister (Mary Astor), her European boyfriend of obscure national origins (Sig Arno), and many others. Hackensacker may be the closest thing to a self-parody in the Sturges canon, but it’s informed with such wry wisdom and humor that it transcends its personal nature (as well as its reference to such tycoons as the Rockefellers). With William Demarest, Jack Norton, Franklin Pangborn, and Jimmy Conlin; not to be missed. This screening will be accompanied by a lecture by Virginia Keller. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Tuesday, February 14, 6:00, 443-3737)

Bringing Back the Depression Musical

From the Chicago Reader (February 10, 1989). — J.R.

TAP

** (Worth seeing)

Directed and written by Nick Castle Jr.

With Gregory Hines, Suzzanne Douglas, Savion Glover, Joe Morton, Dick Anthony Williams, “Sandman” Sims, Bunny Briggs, and Sammy Davis Jr.

One of the more poignant effects of contemporary Hollywood has been the virtual extinction of at least two of the major genres that served as industry staples during the 30s, 40s, and 50s: the western and the musical. When attempts are made to resurrect these old standbys, a certain self-consciousness often makes itself felt. Such “last westerns” as Once Upon a Time in the West and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and such “last musicals” as All That Jazz and Pennies From Heaven tend to wear their obsolescence on their sleeves, representing themselves as last-ditch attempts to revivify forms that are no longer part of the present tense, but only nostalgic emblems of an earlier era.

Other recent approaches, however, have avoided such self-consciousness, and behaved as if the genres in question never really left us. Young Guns was a fairly forgettable attempt to bring back the western that populated a conventional example of the genre with several youthful male stars. Tap is a somewhat better and more equivocal effort to bring back the musical — specifically, the urban depression musical — without attempting to make any self-reflexive statements about what that form means in a contemporary context.

The traditional aspects of Tap, as a depression musical, don’t include a period setting — the film takes place in the present — but it does draw on many of the plot and musical elements that one associates with 30s musicals. One example is the sentimental, simplistic plot, in this case about a young, talented hoofer named Max Washington (Gregory Hines) who has to choose between following in the footsteps of his gifted but unsuccessful tap-dancing father and pursuing a life of crime with a gang of jewel thieves. Other traditional elements are the sense of community and camaraderie that persists in the upper rooms of the tap-dance school established by Max’s late father, a conventional romance between Max and Amy (Suzzanne Douglas), who currently runs the dance school, an equally conventional father-son relationship between Max and Amy’s son by a previous marriage, and a straightforward and unironic approach to the various dance numbers, all of which arise naturalistically in the action.

Some of the less traditional aspects of Tap as a depression musical are no less striking, even if the movie fails to make an issue out of any of them. Most of the leading characters are black, and though there are certain white characters in this milieu — including the boss of the jewel thieves, the director of a Broadway musical that Max auditions for, and a number of the tap dancers and tap-dancing students — none of them serve in any way as audience identification figures. Most of the musical numbers are pithy and often disappointingly short; there are no extended performances of the kind that one associates with the Busby Berkeley musicals of the 30s. And the movie occasionally makes use of a postmusical tradition that entails the offscreen playing of pop music over the action, a procedure familiar from such relatively recent films as Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance.

The combination of these various elements occasionally produces a few jarring gear changes: for instance, after Max and Amy perform their “black Fred and Ginger” dance routine to a record of “Cheek to Cheek” on the rooftop of the dance school, Sonny’s Side of the Street, they make love to an offscreen disco tune in one of the empty studios below, and it momentarily feels as if we’ve passed from one movie to another in a matter of minutes. The “black Fred and Ginger” number, which is suavely executed by Hines and Douglas, is the movie’s only direct reference to the 30s musicals. (It is worth adding that writer-director Nick Castle Jr. is the grandson of ballroom dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, who were portrayed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their last 30s vehicle.) As Jane Feuer points out in her sprightly academic guide The Hollywood Musical, references in musicals to earlier musicals are a standard feature of the genre.

Feuer deals with another subject in her book that has a particular relevance to Tap — the dialectic between bricolage and engineering. Bricolage, the French word for tinkering, used by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to refer to processes by which prescientific cultures made use of whatever materials happened to be at hand, in this context describes the process by which performers in musicals take over everyday objects and locations and convert them into props and theatrical settings. The process usually involves an easygoing, improvisational attitude toward one’s surroundings that masks the actual work and planning that dancers, choreographers, and set designers (among others) engage in for a musical number. Part of the pleasure that we ordinarily take in a dance number derives from its seemingly effortless and spontaneous execution, and much of the “work” of a musical is devoted to making its numbers come across as anything but work.

One of the most exciting numbers in Tap occurs when Max is asked to perform at a nightclub where his late father used to dance. Taking the audience out into the street with him, Max begins to demonstrate how his father’s inspirations were not so much the moves of other tap dancers as the everyday sounds of New York. Moving to a nearby construction site, Max proceeds to create his own form of bricolage, converting ordinary industrial sounds into vocal riffs, which are translated in turn into dance steps, and much of the audience promptly joins in.

If Tap were a more accomplished musical than it is, the number would have been filmed in relatively long takes that respected its integrity and continuity. The rapid editing employed isn’t quite as ruinous as it is, for example, in The Cotton Club and in many music videos, where flashy montage effects detract from the dancing rather than enhance it, but it does manage to leave one feeling a little unsatisfied by the number’s only partially fulfilled promises –i t finally proves to be two parts windup to one part delivery, ending before it gets a chance to work up a proper momentum.

It may ultimately have been budgetary restrictions or a certain lack of self-confidence that led Castle (or choreographer Henry Le Tang) to end most of the numbers prematurely. Fortunately, the movie has a number of other compensations. David Gribble’s cinematography, which makes a striking use of diffused lighting, gets some interesting color effects from many of the movie’s settings: the blue gray cell in Sing Sing where Max practices his tap steps at the beginning of the movie, the lemon-colored light in the practice rooms at Sonny’s Side of the Street, and some of the honey tones employed elsewhere. Sammy Davis Jr. plays Little Mo, Max’s tap-dancing mentor and a kind of surrogate father, with a cane and no effort to disguise his age; it’s a character part rather than an attempt to milk his usual show-biz persona, and he pulls it off with charming aplomb.