My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  Brooks plays a man so at ease with his own superficiality that I almost didn’t want him to evolve. His Silver surrogate loves the Hollywood machine. He’s the kind of wheeler-dealer who lights up like a Christmas tree when Julie Kavner’s character offers to show him where the tracking is done for upcoming movies. For Brooks’ big shot, that is the real heart of Hollywood, a wonderland of pure commerce. Brooks invites sympathy for this showbiz devil; the emotional transparency and simplicity of his character is beguiling.

  Brooks is so good that he throws off the balance of the film, as I’ll Do Anything isn’t really about Adler. It’s about what happens when Hobbs’ ex-wife reenters his life just long enough to inform him that she’s going to jail for a long time and that their six-year-old daughter Jeanne (Whittni Wright) will now be his sole responsibility.

  Jeanne is very much Beth’s child. But I’ll Do Anything posits Jeanne as such a blindingly cute moppet that she snaps up a major role in a sitcom pilot without even consciously pursuing an acting career. She simply accompanies her dad to an audition where the gods of television decide it would be a crime for her not to be grinning her way into America’s collective heart every week as an adorably racist girl who learns life lessons at a multiracial orphanage.

  I’ll Do Anything’s neurotic show-business types stop talking about their feelings just long enough to warble about their emotions in maudlin ballads and dance their feelings in splashy production numbers shot in long, involved takes that the director desperately hopes will hide his film’s lack of visual style.

  Good musicals make the inherently artificial act of people breaking spontaneously into song and dance seem natural. But there’s a fatal disconnect between I’ll Do Anything’s talky, touchy-feely chatfests and its strangely impersonal musical numbers. They seem to inhabit different universes. Even subpar Prince songs that sashay into the middle of the road with big plastic grins and jazz fingers a-flying can’t give the film soul. The musical I’ll Do Anything is the single whitest film ever made, with the possible exception of Nights In Rodanthe (which, ironically, was directed by a black man).

  A musical that sends audiences home without a song in their hearts is in serious trouble. A musical that sends audiences home with only vague memories of being inundated with a mélange of interchangeable mid-period Prince quasi-funk is fucked. True, I’ll Do Anything offers the odd spectacle of Nolte croaking a duet with Wright in a barroom rasp, but “Nolte Sings!” was an offer test audiences found easy to refuse. I’ll Do Anything ended up being a victim of the very test-screening process it limply critiques. But the process—well, that had to be heartbreaking as well.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  It Ain’t Over ’Til The Old Lady Sings Book-Exclusive Case File: Mame

  Keenen Ivory Wayans is not known as a Confucius-like purveyor of profundities. But when The A.V. Club interviewed Anna Faris, she quoted him as saying something borderline wise: “There’s no vanity in comedy.”

  Lucille Ball embodied that maxim on I Love Lucy. Ball began her career as a glamorous starlet, but in I Love Lucy, she was often a screeching, braying, flailing, desperate, lying, off-key mess. She was gloriously unencumbered by vanity. In her signature role, Ball played a big ball of misplaced ambition; she embraced looking awful and acting a fool. America loved her for it.

  By the time 1974’s Mame rolled around, Ball’s philosophy had changed to, “Comedy is all vanity.” Her involvement in the project began with the kind of pride that goeth before the fall. Ball became convinced that Rosalind Russell’s portrayal of the title character on Broadway and in 1958’s Auntie Mame owed a debt to her portrayal of Lucy Ricardo, and she was intent on collecting.

  So Ball lobbied hard for the lead role in Mame, the film version of Jerry Herman’s hit Broadway musical adaptation of Auntie Mame. Snagging that plum role proved her professional undoing. Why was Ball so surreally miscast? For starters, just about everyone other than Ball felt the role should have gone to Angela Lansbury, a musical-comedy vet who picked up a Tony Award for the part in 1966. Herman begged Warner Bros. to let the sexy, vivacious Lansbury reprise her role for the big screen. He failed.

  Lansbury was a frisky 41 when she picked up the Tony for Mame. When Ball bulldozed her way into the lead, she was 61 and recovering from a broken leg. Casting Ball in the lead role dramatically altered the show’s dynamic. With Lansbury on Broadway, Mame was about a dynamic middle-aged bohemian whose life changes course when she becomes the guardian of a towheaded moppet. With Ball in the lead, it became the story of a sexagenarian enjoying a few laughs before the sweet embrace of the grave. The proto-beatniks and freethinkers in 1958’s Auntie Mame embrace Rosalind Russell’s title character because she’s the sexy, swinging life of the party. The eccentrics of Mame gravitate toward Ball because they miss their grandmas and suspect she’s got a big silver bowl of butterscotch candies squirreled away somewhere.

  Beyond the fact that she was at least 15 years too old for the role, there was the minor concern that Ball couldn’t sing or dance. At all. In I Love Lucy, Ball’s ghastly singing was a running joke; in Mame, it was a cause for alarm. She wasn’t much better at hoofing, either. It’s never an encouraging sign when a choreographer’s main concern is his leading lady throwing out a hip.

  Mame was supposed to open in late 1973, in time for Oscar consideration, until executives took a look at the film and realized that even in a world where 1967’s Dr. Dolittle got nominated for nine Academy Awards, Mame’s Oscar chances fell somewhere between nonexistent and “are you fucking kidding me?”

  The hyperbolic trailers for Mame try to transform the film’s screaming faults into secret virtues, crowing that it’s a “multimillion-dollar production that took two years to capture on film,” as if going overbudget and overschedule were suddenly points of pride. The trailers also alternately hail Ball as “the most unique and talented actress of our time” and “the most versatile actress of all time,” in a bone-dry monotone. Then again, Ball is beloved for her portrayals of everything from a kooky housewife to a slightly older kooky housewife.

  Mame opens with Patrick (Kirby Furlong) being dispatched to live with his eccentric Auntie Mame after his parents die. The kid arrives at Mame’s palace of decadence in the midst of a wild party. The soiree finds Mame sporting a hair helmet with sideburns and wearing a lipstick-red pantsuit that looks like it was stitched together from one of Santa Claus’ discarded uniforms. Nevertheless, she’s in her element, presiding as a mother hen over a crazy coterie of artists and oddballs.

  There’s no point aiming for subtlety when you’re playing a character this flamboyant, but it’s hard to watch Ball vamp, quip, and pose, pose, pose while outfitted in a sea of head wraps, sequins, and gowns, and not see an aging transvestite. Mame caused Pauline Kael to wonder of Ball, “After 40 years in movies and TV, did she discover in herself an unfulfilled ambition to be a flaming drag queen?”

  The stock-market crash of 1929 wipes out Mame’s fortune, but her money troubles end when she’s wooed by the colorfully named Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, a wealthy, kind Southern granny chaser with a crumb-catcher mustache and Foghorn Leghorn drawl. Beauregard (played by Robert Preston) takes Mame and Patrick home to meet his mama. He tells his mother, who resembles William H. Taft in a dress, that she’ll love Mame the second they meet, perhaps because they’re the same age.

  After Mame finds happiness and security as the pampered wife of an American aristocrat, all that’s left is for Patrick to grow up to be stuffy old Bruce Davison over the course of a single song. Having grown up the pet of a fearless feminist iconoclast, Patrick rebels by becoming a reactionary bore and getting engaged to an insufferable debutante (Doria Cook-Nelson). In Auntie Mame—which I watched solely as preparation for this Case File, and not, as I worried at the time, as a way of purging the last remaining vestiges of my heterosexuality—the sequences with the adult Patrick feel stiff and theatrical. Yet the film built up such goodwill
that I didn’t particularly mind.

  But in the Lucille Ball Mame, there’s a cognitive dissonance to the third act. How did a happy little boy who flourished in the incandescent warmth of his aunt’s love grow up to be a small-minded jerk? Why are we supposed to care about a drip who wears the polka-dot tie, red carnation, and blue-and-yellow checkered suit of a sad clown?

  Patrick’s deplorable adult personality can be read as a reaction to his aunt’s wildness. After a childhood spent playing second fiddle to a cyclone of progressive ideas, Patrick gravitates to the security and safety of living and loving among bigots. If life is a banquet, as Mame’s motto contends, then Patrick has chosen to spend it consuming weak tea and watercress sandwiches. Mame’s joie de vivre has infected and inspired everyone around her but the little man who matters most.

  But mainly, these scenes exist so kooky old Auntie Mame can stick it to Patrick’s snobby would-be in-laws (Don Porter and Audrey Christie) with badly dated sass. When Mame meets the in-laws-to-be, they propose buying their children the property next door so they can simultaneously keep their loved ones close and undesirables away. This causes Mame to dip into a nearby phone booth and transform into her alter ego, Superbohemian. Putting her theatrical flair to good use, she invites the snobs to her extravagant home, where she dramatically announces that she’s purchased the estate next to theirs so she can start a home for single women.

  The bluebloods are so shocked that their metaphorical monocles shatter in horror, and Patrick sees the error of his ways. The Davison-as-jerk scenes underline just how little we know about the supporting cast. They exist to give Mame people to play off and advance the plot. It’s Auntie Mame’s world; they just live in it.

  The Jews-and-single-women-are-people-too message was somewhat anachronistic in 1958. By 1974, it was prehistoric. So much happened between ’58 and ’74: the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations, a sexual revolution, the French New Wave, Nehru suits, miniskirts, the fleeting popularity of the 1910 Fruitgum Company, tie-dye. Mame didn’t change with the times; it was done in by them. It was part of a wave of slow-moving, pea-brained, exclamation-point-crazed musical dinosaurs (including Dr. Dolittle, Star!, Hello, Dolly!, Paint Your Wagon) that acted as if the ’60s had never happened. These musicals appealed to a nostalgic yearning for a simpler age, but even squares found Mame easy to resist.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Chapter 4

  It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s A Flop! Superheroes, Science Fiction, And Action

  Lady And Gentleman, You Are Now Floating In The Floposphere Case File #46: It’s All About Love

  Originally Posted July 3, 2007

  Watching Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 breakout hit The Celebration, I experienced an intoxicating rush of discovery. I was excited about the film, but I was even more excited about Vinterberg films to come. If he could accomplish so much while adhering to the rigorous set of aesthetic strictures he helped create as one of the architects of the Dogme movement (a militantly naturalistic cinematic wave that made acolytes take a “vow of purity” and went from “bold new way of reinventing the language of cinema” to “bullshit PR stunt” in roughly 15 minutes), I could only imagine what he’d be capable of without the restrictions Dogme 95 imposed upon its filmmakers.

  After The Celebration, Vinterberg was inundated with scripts and offers from money people eager to get into the Thomas Vinterberg business, but nothing struck his fancy. The real trick is to nab geniuses before they make their masterpiece, not after. Get in bed with Michael Cimino after Deer Hunter, and you wake up the next morning with Heaven’s Gate, a pounding headache, an empty wallet, and your office cleared out when you show up for work.

  Vinterberg wilted under the pressure. He spent years working on a bizarre screenplay that seemed ripped painfully from the innermost recesses of his soul. It’s a futuristic science-fiction love story that doubles as a moody meditation on love, loss, and a world spinning out of control.

  Vinterberg’s follow-up to The Celebration, 2003’s It’s All About Love, takes place in a near future troubled by grimly whimsical “cosmic disturbances.” The world is freezing. It snows in July. Tap water turns to ice in seconds during cryptic freeze-storms. Ugandans begin magically levitating. People start dying en masse from lack of love, littering the streets with corpses whose hearts simply cease beatingas much from a dearth of affection as lack of oxygen. Evil scientists repeatedly clone heroin-addled superstar figure skater Elena (Claire Danes, who’s saddled with a shaky Polish accent that makes her sound vaguely vampiric).

  It must have looked like an unholy mess on the page, but the producers probably figured that the man behind The Celebration could transform his script’s fuzzy mélange of intriguing but half-baked ideas, lifeless characters, and cryptic social commentary into a satisfying, halfway-cohesive whole. They were wrong.

  Vinterberg’s Celebration cachet attracted a remarkable cast. Joaquin Phoenix and his soulful eyes of infinite sadness signed on to play John, a brooding, lovesick intellectual with a Ph.D. in Polish literature, which only sounds like the setup to a bad joke. Danes plays his estranged wife, a gloomy mega-celebrity with a bad heart, insomnia, and a history of drug abuse. Sean Penn plays Phoenix’s brother Marciello, a sensitive soul given to loopy, pseudo-poetic, pseudo-philosophical monologues about the nature of the world and the importance of human connection. Marciello used to be afraid of flying; then he took medication that worked so well that now he can’t do anything but fly. In another movie, that might qualify as a goofy throwaway joke, but Marciello literally spends his every scene expounding about the world from airplanes.

  After an extended break, John returns to New York to sign divorce papers for Elena, only to be swept up in a web of intrigue and deception. Elena’s family has commissioned at least three clones of her so that when Elena decides to leave the lucrative world of figure skating, they can replace her. But first, they must destroy Elena before she can screw up their plans. John helps Elena escape east, to an arctic hellhole where popular leisure-time activities include freezing and dying.

  Vinterberg got it backward. When working with a tiny budget and Dogme guidelines, he crafted a movie as entertaining and funny as any Hollywood crowd-pleaser. Then, while working with big American stars, a budget of $10 million, and no restrictions, he made a film as weird and noncommercial as any gritty Dogme provocation.

  As befits a film that closes with a monologue delivered by a man doomed to live out the rest of his life on an airplane—expounding about how, when it comes right down to it, it really is all about love—Love has a jet-lagged rootlessness and pervasive sense of dislocation. For all its faults, it captures that fragile post-9/11 mind-set of naked vulnerability and yawning doubt, before our souls again grew calloused and we developed an insatiable curiosity about the private life of Paris Hilton and the sweet 16 parties of the superrich. It poignantly evokes that strange historical epoch when it seemed somehow like the world would just stop, that the universe would punish us for the mess we’d made.

  Though Vinterberg likely wrote the film before 9/11, it nevertheless conveys how the event single-handedly rewired our sense of the possible and the impossible, and upended our sense of reality. In a world where planes fly into buildings and zealots armed with box cutters can strike widespread terror in the heart of the richest, most powerful country in the world, why shouldn’t Ugandans begin floating mysteriously? Love is filled with images that are simultaneously ridiculous, beautiful, and audacious, like a skating ballet with four Elenas gliding in unison that devolves into an ice-rink massacre as one Elena double after another loses her so-called life.

  Like Wong Kar-Wai’s strangely simpatico 2046, Love finds a maverick abandoning logic in a quixotic quest for beauty and truth. With its doppelgängers, surrealism, abstract characters, and gorgeous, painterly long shots, Love feels like a waking dream, especially in a superior second half that delivers the science-fiction goods while plunging farther and
farther into its own insanity.

  So is Love ultimately a Fiasco or a Secret Success? It’d be a real stretch to call it a success, but it’s exactly the kind of movie I wanted to highlight in My Year Of Flops, a film so stubbornly singular that it belongs to a sub-genre all its own—a mad, mad mix of science fiction, allegory, left-field social commentary, and romantic melodrama. If I weren’t so damnably attached to my rating system, I’d give it a final score more in line with its free-floating craziness, like say, Three Floating Ugandans, Two and a Half Elena Clones, and Seven Loopy Marciello Monologues. Can I call it a Semisecret Fiascopiece? Heck, if Vinterberg can make a movie this defiantly weird, then I think I’m entitled.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Semisecret Fiascopiece

  Mad Mutated Case File #64: The Island Of Dr. Moreau

  Originally Posted September 4, 2007

  In previous Case Files, I have proposed what I call the Great Gazoo Theory: that sometime in the mid-’70s, Marlon Brando began taking marching orders from the Great Gazoo, the tiny, effeminate green alien only Fred Flintstone could see. For example, Brando’s behavior on the set of The Score is wholly understandable if you imagine the Great Gazoo hovering over his ear and whispering, “Hey, dum-dum, if you really want to show that Frank Oz fool what’s what, call him Miss Piggy and refuse to talk to him.”

  The Great Gazoo Theory explains the totality of Brando’s career from Missouri Breaks on. I expected it to sweep film scholarship. In my hubris, I predicted that it would be at least as influential as the auteur theory, if not more so, since it prominently involved a minor supporting character from the Flintstones universe.

  The Great Gazoo worked overtime on the set of 1996’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau. No sane human being could have made Marlon Brando take a role that required him to cover his face in white pancake makeup because he has “allergies to the sun” (a line that, due to Brando’s slurred diction, sounds uncannily like, “I have an alligator for a son,” which actually makes sense within the context of the film), use an ice bucket for a hat, speak in the effete diction of a Masterpiece Theatre host, travel everywhere with a tiny sidekick who looks like a fetus that just barely survived an abortion, and spend his last few moments alive tickling the ivories while trying to explain the differences between Schoenberg and Gershwin to terrifying sub-human beasties.