by Nathan Rabin
Gospel Road makes its relatively brief running time feel like an eternity. It’s more home movie than Hollywood, but that’s much of its scruffy charm. It’s really the story of Cash’s faith; in its own ham-fisted fashion, it embodies the yearning for deliverance and singular combination of strength and vulnerability that made Cash such an enduring icon.
Cash took the failure of Gospel Road hard. The public that had so warmly received him during his comeback didn’t reject Gospel Road so much as ignore it, relegating Cash’s peculiar passion project to sleepy Sunday school showings in church basements. Road marked the beginning of a dark period in Cash’s life. He fell off the wagon, returned to pills and bad behavior, and entered a professional free fall that lasted until his next spectacular comeback, courtesy of Rick Rubin and the American Recordings label.
Yet I prefer Cash’s amateur-hour take on Jesus to Gibson’s far more technically accomplished version. You know, we can’t forget the fact that Cash was human. That messy, naked, raw humanity and humility makes Gospel far more moving than it has any right to be.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
Chapter 2
Calamitous Comedies
Tenacious Teen Terrors Case File #54: O.C. And Stiggs
Originally Posted July 31, 2007
Back in the days when The A.V. Club shared an office with the Onion comedy writers on the fifth floor of an office building deep in the heart of Madison’s popcorn district, I had the honor of knowing The Onion’s brilliant comedy writer Todd Hanson. I saw a lot of myself in Todd. He was, and is, a brooding, towering figure of infinite darkness, a sentient black cloud of a man responsible for pretty much every Onion article positing the universe as an unfathomably sadistic realm of bottomless cruelty.
Todd doesn’t have interests; he has obsessions that consume him body and soul. In Madison, he was famous for his epic, intricately worded monologues about the art and ephemera that fascinated him. He was obsessed with Philip K. Dick and with Robert Altman, particularly the little-loved, wildly obscure Reagan-era National Lampoon–derived Altman teen sex comedy O.C. And Stiggs. At a Madison bar called Le Tigre, he favored us one night with an hour-long dissertation on what he considers one of the most misunderstood, underrated films of all time.
Altman was one of those glorious figures who couldn’t have thrived or attained major mainstream popularity in any decade but the beautiful, crazy, endlessly generous and open-minded ’70s. In the ’70s, Altman was a cinematic colossus who churned out an endless series of masterpieces, some of which captured the zeitgeist en route to becoming huge, generation-defining hits, like 1970’s M*A*S*H. After 1980’s Popeye, however, Altman seemed intent on limiting his audience with each successive film. A giant of American cinema was marching defiantly from the mainstream to cult status to the fringes, and then to semi-obscurity. A naturalist intent on capturing the rhythms of everyday life became obsessed with fusing theater and cinema with efforts like Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Streamers, Beyond Therapy, Fool For Love, and his 1984 masterpiece Secret Honor. Altman once belonged to the masses; by the time O.C. And Stiggs came along, he belonged exclusively to obsessives like Todd.
Altman famously bent countless genres and forms to his will: musicals, comic-strip adaptations, detective movies, Hollywood satire, the political miniseries, icy psychodrama, plays, and one-man shows. But according to conventional wisdom, it was the lowly teen sex comedy that ultimately defeated Altman in O.C. And Stiggs. The film was finished in 1984 but received such disastrous test scores that it was shelved for three years, then released to vitriolic reviews and nonexistent box office.
The pairing of Robert Altman and the teen-sex-comedy genre wasn’t entirely the mismatch it might appear. A prankish, youthful irreverence courses through Altman’s films, even his non-comedies. If ’70s cinema was a lowbrow slobs-vs.-snobs comedy, Altman would be the John Belushi–esque Dionysus tossing Peter Bogdanovich in the pool, shattering his monocle, and soaking his silk ascot.
The interview with Robert Altman on the O.C. And Stiggs DVD provides a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of failure. Halfhearted defenses are offered. Actors are praised. Claims are made that critics and audiences misunderstood his project and its aims. There are weary concessions of friction and ultimately critical and commercial failure. In the most poignant part of the interview, Altman concedes that guests intermittently come over to the Altmansion and want to watch O.C. And Stiggs, sometimes to laugh with it and sometimes to laugh at it.
Altman argues that audiences and National Lampoon wanted Robert Altman’s Porky’s and were flummoxed when he delivered a satire of teen schlock instead. I think O.C. And Stiggs is a satire, but less of teen sex comedies than of the things that always enraged Altman: consumerism, hypocrisy, racism, and the general self-absorption of well-fed Caucasians. Altman occasionally comes off like the misanthropic cheap-shot artist his critics accused him of being—like all ’80s teen sex comedies, this one seems to think homosexuality is inherently hilarious—but behind the snark lies principled contempt toward the complacency and sun-baked decadence of the Reagan ’80s.
Adapted from recurring characters in National Lampoon, O.C. And Stiggs centers on a pair of bored, wildly codependent teens whose sole mission in life is to bedevil the Schwabs, a wealthy family led by Randall Schwab (Paul Dooley), an insurance kingpin whose hilariously stiff commercial concedes that his company simply won’t tolerate such abominations as “drinking” or “the continent of Africa.” The eponymous wisenheimers wage a campaign of psychological warfare against Randall for doing wrong by “Gramps” Ogilvie (Ray Walston), the crusty ex-cop granddad of either O.C. or Stiggs (damned if I can tell the difference). They call Africa on Randall’s dime. They sabotage his daughter’s wedding by getting his son, Randall Jr. (Jon Cryer), to go nuts with a machine gun.
Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry play the eponymous mischief makers with the smirking superiority of people forever enjoying a private joke at the world’s expense. Like the Van Wilders and Ferris Buellers to follow, they put invisible air quotes around everything they say and do. Yet in their own snotty way, they’re out to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They’re simultaneously smug assholes and righteous avengers.
In the film’s climax, the boys invite a wide cross-section of Arizona’s housing-free population to party at the Schwab house. As things get increasingly out of control, the title characters call in Dennis Hopper’s deranged veteran Sponson—a buddy of the boys and co-conspirator in their mischief brigade—to fly in with his helicopter and bring a little Vietnam to Casa De Schwab. As the veteran and his buddy fly over a pool-festooned suburban wasteland, they’re at a loss for which gaudy nouveau-riche house to invade. “They all look the same!” Sponson marvels in horror as he surveys one Stepford home after another, in a sly commentary on suburban conformity that rings even truer today.
All the while, a television broadcasts the inane natterings of H. Ross Perot–like demagogue Hal Phillip Walker. Introduced in Altman’s 1975 masterpiece Nashville, he riveted the nation in that film with questions like, “Have you stood on a high and windy hill and heard the acorns drop and roll?” and “Have you walked in the valley beside the brook, walked alone and remembered?” And perhaps most trenchantly, “Does Christmas smell like oranges to you?”
So when Hopper, playing a gonzo caricature of himself in full-on wild-eyed hippie-freak mode, invades the Schwabs, it’s Apocalypse Now colliding with Nashville in a suburban Arizona bomb shelter in the mid-’80s. It’s Robert Altman prankishly making one of his most reviled films into an unwitting, half-assed sequel to one of his most beloved triumphs. It’s the grand glory of ’70s cinematic ambition crashing helplessly into the soul-sick, mercenary ’80s.
O.C. And Stiggs takes a while to get going, but by the time Sponson descends on the Schwab compound, the film has whipped up a fine, frenzied madness. In the giddy climax, the boys bring the war to the Schw
abs. It’s the return of the repressed, as the titular duo force Randall to confront the poverty and drunkenness of the black underclass (represented by Melvin Van Peebles’ soulful wino and his homeless drinking buddies), the lingering scars of a disastrous war in Vietnam (Sponson), and, of course, the continent of Africa, via special guest star King Sunny Adé.
Altman’s film resonated more strongly with me the second time around, in part because I was more familiar with its satirical targets. Having spent time in suburban Arizona, where new money goes to die a pampered spiritual death among jackrabbits, javelinas, and scorpions, I could better appreciate the cultural specificity of its satire.
O.C. And Stiggs boasts a terrific supporting cast, led by Martin Mull as Pat Colletti, a wealthy lush with a seemingly painted-on beard who luxuriates happily in his own booze-sodden decadence. I enjoyed the O.C. and Stiggsmobile, a deafeningly loud lemon on stilts and speed, and Bob Uecker’s insane self-deprecating cameo as a loudmouth so intoxicated with the sound of his own voice that he never notices that no one is paying attention to anything he’s saying (including himself, apparently).
I found a lot to dig about O.C. And Stiggs, but more than anything, I love Altman’s style: the overlapping dialogue, the purposefully wandering cameras, the jittery zooms, and the long shots that suggest both sociological distance and the perspective of a bemused trickster god. Altman might not have succeeded in making a trenchant satire of teen sex comedies, but as is his nature, he twisted, contorted, and perverted his source material until it became the basis for something infinitely more wonderful and relevant: a Robert Altman movie. Then again, that’s just the minority opinion of one frothing fanboy. Oh, and for the record, Christmas always has smelled like oranges to me.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success
Woody/Not Woody Case File #57: Scenes From A Mall
Originally Posted August 9, 2007
The late ’60s Bond spoof Casino Royale and 1991’s Scenes From A Mall both offer the strange spectacle of Woody Allen acting in non–Woody Allen movies. When he made Casino Royale, Allen was still a hot young comedian and cinematic neophyte. But by the time Scenes From A Mall hit theaters, he was as much of a cultural institution as the Statue of Liberty, and nearly as immutable.
So it’s understandably jarring to see Woody Allen, the quintessential New York snob, playing a ponytail-sporting Los Angeleno perfectly comfortable with the emptiness of his existence. That ponytail goes a long way toward negating the fundamental Woodyness of Allen’s being, yet Woody remains Woody no matter how incongruous the setting. Paul Mazursky has Allen’s Nick Fifer do things the real (and reel) Allen would never do. He buys Italian suits. He totes around a surfboard. He listens to music made after World War II. He says things like, “Christ, where’s my fucking Saab?!” He seems comfortable in a mall. He goes hours without referencing Kierkegaard or Camus. Most shockingly, he has sex with a Jewish woman roughly his own age.
It’s an existential conundrum: He’s Woody, yet he isn’t Woody. The ponytail and surfboard seem to exist in a different, infinitely more crass universe than Allen’s Manhattan wonderland, yet the mannerisms, tics, and vocal inflections give him away. Even if Allen played Osama bin Laden, he’d probably still end up looking and acting suspiciously like Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer.
Bette Midler similarly tones down her trademark brassiness to play Nick’s wife, Deborah, a successful headshrinker and book-writing person (that’s fancy publishing-world speak for “author”) celebrating the 16th anniversary of their marriage with a trip to the mall before joining friends for sushi. The day begins with the Fifers in a state of far-too-perfect domestic bliss. They marvel at how their marriage has managed to outlast all their friends’ unions (this is Southern California, after all), send their kids away, and even try to engage in a little premall canoodling. The sight of an amorous, ponytailed Allen trying desperately to rip off Midler’s gray spandex leggings in a fit of carnal passion will take years of therapy to purge from my memory.
At the mall, however, the couple’s façade of matrimonial contentment begins to shatter when Nick confesses to a passionate affair with the 25-year-old wife of one of his clients. Deborah initially maintains an air of poise and restraint, but before long, she’s upsetting the narcotized calm of mall life with angry outbursts. She demands a divorce, only to admit later to an affair of her own with a loving, caring, sexually skilled doctor played by Mazursky.
Between all the confessions, breakups, and impromptu reconciliations, the couple somehow finds the time to sneak into a screening of Salaam Bombay! where Nick attempts to win his wife back by going down on her in a theater. (Incidentally, if this Case File accomplishes nothing else, I’d like it to at least introduce “seeing Salaam Bombay!” as a euphemism for cunnilingus.) Judging by Deborah’s orgasmic glow exiting the theater, it’s safe to say that Nick is the undisputed king of seeing Salaam Bombay!
For the wealthy power couples of Scenes From A Mall, drinking in the misery of street urchins from Bombay is just another consumer choice in a pop world teeming with them. As the day progresses, the tension and resentments bubbling under the surface of the Fifers’ marriage burst into plain view.
At its best, Scenes captures how the mundane details of a long-shared history can pull a couple together while simultaneously tearing them apart. Nick longs for the freedom and excitement of single life yet is reluctant to leave the security and comfort of the nest. But it ultimately doesn’t seem to matter whether these self-absorbed suburban monsters break up or stick around to torment each other for decades to come.
It’s easy to see why Scenes From A Mall failed. Its characters run the gamut from unlikeable to vaguely monstrous, and it’s hard to muster up sympathy for smug adulterers. Scenes also falls victim to the Parental-Sex Rule: Unless you’re a 17-year-old newly adopted by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, you don’t want to imagine your parents having sex, especially if they’re Woody Allen and Bette Midler. We want to imagine our parents as perfectly asexual, as devoid of genitalia or sexual impulses as Barbie and Ken.
Late in the film, Nick, his surfboard, Deborah, and Fabio all squeeze into an elevator together while a frustrated Deborah sexually violates Fabio with her eyes. In moments like this, Scenes From A Mall almost gets by on novelty value alone. And there are quiet, subtly powerful moments sprinkled throughout, as Midler’s and Allen’s faces reveal the extreme psychological and social cost of dissolving a marriage, however troubled.
Scenes never gains any traction as a comedy or drama, as an anti–Woody Allen movie or a Woody Allen movie of a different color. The couple’s dark afternoon of the soul is more like an extended shrug. Yet the film retains the same strange morbid fascination as Allen’s sad little ponytail, that telltale symptom of a man immersed in a midlife crisis. The Scenes DVD is depressingly spare, but I’d like to imagine that Mazursky shot at least one scene of Allen riding the surfboard he carries throughout the film as a visual gag. Woody Allen surfing: Now that would be funny.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
Book-Exclusive $20 Million Case File: The Cable Guy
As a child, it blew my mind that my father made something like $36,000 a year as a government bureaucrat. That worked out to almost a hundred dollars a day! To an 8-year-old, that represented an unimaginable bounty. I could barely comprehend what it would be like to have a hundred dollars for even a single day, let alone to make a hundred dollars every day, even on your days off. For that kind of money, my dad could buy six-packs of Mountain Dew and beer, a pizza, a cassette of the hottest new rock album, the latest Playboy, a Samantha Fox poster, and a stack of Mad magazines, then spend his entire day playing videogames before finishing off the night with a movie, popcorn, and soda, all without running out of money! This is how I imagined adults would live their lives if they weren’t weighed down with children and families and stupid desk jobs.
So you can imagine how impressed I was to discover that my favorite
movie stars and baseball players make a million dollars or more every year. It somehow seemed unfair that someone should be paid such inconceivable sums to play sports before adoring fans, or romance the world’s most beautiful women.
Mind-boggling salaries for athletes and artists are so commonplace these days that we’ve become jaded. But when it was announced that Jim Carrey would be making $20 million for his role in 1996’s The Cable Guy, society responded the way my 8-year-old self did upon learning that my dad made a hundred dollars a day. Twenty million dollars?
It was one thing for Harrison Ford to make that much. In his films, he saved the world repeatedly. It would be churlish to begrudge him the spoils of his make-pretend heroism. But when The Cable Guy went into production, Carrey was only a few years removed from being the white guy on In Living Color. Worse, he was Canadian. It’s bad enough that Canadians pass as Americans, have barbed penises to aid in their fiendish sexual proclivities, and plot covertly against their unsuspecting neighbors to the south. Now they looked like they were out to bankrupt our film industry with excessive salaries.
Ford at least pretended to do great things; Carrey was getting paid $20 million to behave like an ass. He was to receive the biggest up-front salary for any comic actor in history to do the kinds of things that earn fidgety, misbehaving 12-year-olds Ritalin prescriptions and one-way trips to military school.
Cable Guy began life as a Chris Farley vehicle about a hapless, awkward, but fundamentally sweet and nonviolent cable guy who accidentally played havoc with a customer’s life. Director Ben Stiller liked the basic premise but not the screenplay, so he brought in Judd Apatow—a Ben Stiller Show writer and a veteran of smart television satires like The Critic and The Larry Sanders Show—to take the script in a much darker direction.
