by Nathan Rabin
In No-Name City, 400 lonely, horny men pine desperately for the civilizing touch of a woman’s hand. So when a Mormon shows up with his two wives in tow, the entire town gathers to leer at them. A muscle-bound, shirtless brute offers to pay $50 worth of gold dust just to hold the traveler’s baby, although it’s unclear initially whether he wants to drink in its unspoiled innocence or devour it whole as an afternoon snack. Another lusty fellow gazes at Jean Seberg’s Elizabeth with a look that says, “Ain’t you the filly what betrayed Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless? We don’t see your likes much ’round here.”
Four hundred men. Two women. That’s a gender imbalance of Smurfian proportions. The fellas don’t think it’s right for one man to have two wives while they have none, so a surprisingly game Elizabeth agrees to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Rumson isn’t too drunk to recognize the deal of a lifetime, so he purchases the rights to both Elizabeth and her “mineral resources” for $800.
Rumson then sets about transforming his podunk mining town into a dazzling mecca of sin and moral dissolution by kidnapping some French harlots for a two-story brothel, complete with moonshine, card games, and vices of every imaginable stripe. The seeds of No-Name City’s spiritual ruin are sewn when Rumson successfully completes his mission, only to learn that Pardner and Elizabeth have fallen hopelessly in love following a brisk getting-acquainted montage and a tender ballad that Eastwood croons through clenched teeth. Ah, the getting-acquainted montage, that deathless crutch of the lazy filmmaker. Why bother writing dialogue conveying characters’ growing attraction when you can use a few soft-focus shots of leads gazing moonily into each other’s eyes as glib shorthand for the complicated dance of courtship and consummation?
Rumson is angry at first, until it’s decided that he and Pardner can both be Elizabeth’s husbands, social conventions be damned. Why should Mormons have all the fun? Paint Your Wagon dramatizes how the West was civilized, then hopelessly corrupted. No-Name City becomes a boomtown Sodom and Gomorrah where bears fight bulls for the depraved enjoyment of the townfolk and whoring and gold dust thievery represent promising growth industries.
While No-Name City is devolving into a cesspool of depravity, Pardner and Elizabeth discover the joys of conventional morality when they play host to strangers hung up on the “one man, one woman” concept of matrimony. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, No-Name City ends up facing a profound reckoning when underground tunnels dug in part by Rumson and Pardner cause the entire city to collapse in on itself while Rumson stumbles obliviously, drunkenly through the wreckage like a muttonchops-sporting Buster Keaton.
Paint Your Wagon arrived at a time when musicals were rapidly losing favor with increasingly divided audiences. While the youth explosion that would soon transform Hollywood dug unconventional antiheroes like Marvin and Eastwood, they weren’t eager to see them in antiquated musicals.
The Paint Your Wagon DVD thankfully includes an intermission, as if to say, “Sorry this movie is so fucking long. Here’s five minutes for a quick smoke break.” Beyond its elephantine running time, the film suffers from forgettable songs and a deathly vacuum at the center of its love triangle. Elizabeth is betrothed to Rumson because he paid $800 for her. Pardner and Elizabeth’s bond, meanwhile, is cemented during the aforementioned getting-acquainted montage. Neither provides a solid foundation for either a love affair or a $20 million, 164-minute-long epic.
The fuzzy passivity of Eastwood’s character proves equally problematic. Marvin gets to deliver a big, brawling, funny, cantankerous star turn, but Eastwood is stuck playing a wimpy role that Ricky Nelson could probably have played just as well. Audiences watch Clint Eastwood movies to see him kick ass or take brain-damaged female boxers off life support, not play house or defer to his more charismatic life partner.
Paint Your Wagon divided audiences and critics. With its central three-way marriage, debauchery, polygamy, and unconventional stars, it was too damn weird and adult for family audiences, and too old-fashioned for stoners. Nevertheless, I can imagine that at least a few acid freaks stumbled out of the theater wondering if they’d merely hallucinated seeing a three-hour-long movie where Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin sang and danced and were married to the same woman yet seemed kind of into each other. I can also envision them freaking out hardcore when No-Name City began falling apart under the weight of its sins. It’d be enough to put them off the brown acid permanently.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
Fucking Original Straight First Foremost Pimp Mack Fucking Hustler Original Gangster’s Gangster Case File #52: Gigli
Originally Posted July 24, 2007
From the time the dashing male star of the 1901 silent film “Man Purchasing Hat” wooed the charming ingenue of “Lady Trying On Petticoats,” we’ve been fascinated by movie-star couples. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Verne Troyer and the skank in his sex video. Their names are burned indelibly into our collective imagination. We live vicariously through their exploits, through sun-dappled vacations in tropical paradises and stormy on-set romances. We imagine what it would be like to be them, to breathe their rarefied air, to attend parties where everyone is someone. We coo at their newborns, recoil at their excesses, mourn their losses, and celebrate their triumphs.
Celebrity couples come and go. They bedazzle us with their newness, novelty, improbability, glamour, and sex appeal. Then we lose interest.
Why did the coupling of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez fascinate and madden us so? Why did this particular celebrity romance shine so bright and burn out so spectacularly? Why was the media construct known as Bennifer a pop-culture phenomenon instead of the principals’ subsequent marriages?
Affleck and Lopez are certainly attractive and successful, but Hollywood is full of attractive, successful actors, many of whom have the decency to pair off with one another for our voyeuristic amusement. At the time of their doomed romance, Affleck and Lopez were both big stars, but they weren’t Will Smith/Tom Cruise/Tom Hanks–level supernovas. So why did we care?
The answer, I suspect, is that the public is an angry god. We elevate stars to dizzying heights, then delight in destroying the false idols we’ve created. Affleck and Lopez won our hearts. Then they went too far. They abused our affection. They lingered in the spotlight too long. We gave them everything and still they wanted more. So we had to destroy them. As a warning. To send a message. To restore a sense of equilibrium to the universe.
But before we could tear Affleck and Lopez down, we had to build them up. Each exploded onto pop culture with a heartwarming tale of Triumph Over Adversity©. Affleck was the dreamer from Boston who wrote a screenplay with his buddy when he couldn’t catch a break as an actor, won an Academy Award while still in his mid-20s, then became a ubiquitous movie star. Lopez was the ’round-the-way girl from the Bronx who danced on In Living Color and became a movie star playing tragic icon Selena Gomez in the 1997 biopic Selena. In an act of pop-cultural transubstantiation, Lopez gained Gomez’s power by playing her, like a warrior devouring the heart of an enemy in order to acquire his strength.
Lopez was once a respected actress whose ruthless ambition hid an underlying softness. Steven Soderbergh brilliantly used this quality in 1998’s Out Of Sight, but once Lopez decided to become a pop star, she seemingly lost interest in acting. Lopez apparently came to see acting as just one minor component of the J. Lo empire. Lopez stopped being a person and became a brand.
The newly minted pop star released a string of singles asserting her authenticity. She released a song called “I’m Real.” On “Jenny From The Block,” she simultaneously bragged about her glamorous lifestyle and patted herself on the back for remaining down-to-earth. The more Lopez sang about being real, the faker she seemed. People who are grounded and sincere don’t generally feel the need to release songs asserting they possess those qualities.
In what astonishingly qualifies as only the third or fourth biggest miscalculation of her re
lationship with Affleck, Lopez decided to “spoof” the tabloid world’s fixation with her torrid current romance by romping with her boyfriend in a series of glamorous locales in the video for “Jenny From The Block.” The idea was to show that Affleck and Lopez had a sense of humor about themselves. But the video reeked of self-love rather than self-deprecation.
Lopez and Affleck seemed to be rubbing the public’s face in the awesomeness of their lives. They were just like us, except for being stalked by the paparazzi and having mind-blowing celebrity sex on giant piles of thousand-dollar bills, then calling their famous friends on diamond-encrusted cell phones while riding cryogenically preserved woolly mammoths the non-famous know nothing about and guzzling an energy drink made from the tears of extinct animals.
We embraced Affleck and Lopez as underdogs. We rejected them when they became oppressively ubiquitous, when they peered out at us with smug smirks from newsstands and DVD boxes, engaging in the world’s most visible and sustained PDA. Affleck had starred in too many terrible movies. Even worse, he starred in movies everyone saw but nobody liked, such as Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. Affleck and Lopez had reached a critical level of overexposure. Bennifer had aroused the Shiva the Destroyer within the general public. They were going down.
The 2003 flop Gigli proved the instrument of their destruction. But before I throw a little more dirt on Gigli’s casket, I’m going to praise it. Sort of. In its shaggy, digressive rhythms, focus on mismatched outsiders operating on society’s fringes, and pop-culture riffing, it echoes funky ’70s character studies and the early films of Quentin Tarantino the same way Kurt Cobain’s feral howl survived his death and mutated into the goat-like bleating of an army of imitators. A film of sublime disharmony and staggering miscalculation, Gigli merits the consolation prize given out to movies with more ambition than brains; it ain’t much, but at least it’s going for something.
“You see, after all is said and done, the only thing you can be really sure of, the only thing you can really count on in this world, is that you just never fucking know,” pontificates Affleck’s protagonist, the eponymous Larry Gigli, in the opening voice-over. Watching Gigli for the second time, I found something soothingly familiar about Affleck’s mini-monologue, in its fuzzy-headed philosophizing, excessive verbiage, and the way Affleck utters Each. Word. Slowly. And. Deliberately, as if giving audiences time to let the brilliance of the writing sink in. Where had I seen that combination before? Then it hit me: Elizabethtown.
Like Elizabethtown, Gigli is the story of a successful filmmaker’s tragic love affair with himself and his voice. Like Cameron Crowe, Gigli writer-director Martin Brest is so in love with his words and ideas that he doesn’t realize that the universe he’s meticulously created bears only a passing resemblance to the real world.
In Brest’s profane fantasy universe, for example, a low-level enforcer like Gigli exploits his captive audience—a gentleman he has tied up and stuck inside a dryer at a Laundromat—by subjecting him to a long-winded discourse on the nature of fate and the composition of the human body. After Reservoir Dogs, cinematic hoods everywhere morphed into strange combinations of Michel Foucault and Chuck Klosterman. Before, all a hit man needed was a gun and a menacing scowl. In a post-Tarantino realm, the price of entry rose to include novel ideas about popular culture and man’s place in a godless universe and a gift for machine-gun banter.
Gigli is clearly talking to hear himself talk; even while “menacing” a duct-taped dude in a dryer, he poses no threat. He seems incapable of hurting people’s feelings, let alone breaking their bones. He’s a poodle masquerading as a pit bull, a hapless hood who can’t even get weasel-faced boss Louis (Lenny Venito) to pronounce his last name correctly. (It rhymes with “really.”)
The title character is so unthreatening—and invisible, apparently—that when he’s assigned to kidnap Brian, the mentally challenged brother (Justin Bartha) of a powerful federal prosecutor intent on putting Louis’ boss Starkman (Al Pacino) in prison, he’s able to perambulate about Brian’s special school without anyone paying him a second glance.
Gigli lures Brian into his car by promising to take him to “the Baywatch.” Brian labors under the delusion that Baywatch is a real place. Louis and Starkman don’t trust Gigli, so they dispatch a second “independent contractor” to look after him in the form of Ricki (Jennifer Lopez), a lesbian philosophy freak who speaks in the soothing, maternal tones of a patient kindergarten teacher, even when she’s threatening a young punk with “digital orb extrusion” (that’s Gigli fancy-speak for gouging someone’s eyes out).
When Ricki disrespects Gigli’s gangsta, he lays down the law, boasting, “I am the fucking sultan of slick, babe. I am the rule of fucking cool. You want to be a gangster? You want to be a thug? Just sit at my fucking feet. Gather the pearls that emanate forth from me. ’Cause I’m the fucking original straight first foremost pimp mack fucking hustler original gangster’s gangster!”
Swearing is an art form. The more profanity a film uses, the less impact it has. By that standard, Brest should have had his swearing privileges rescinded during the film’s first 20 minutes. Then he should have sat in a corner quietly and thought about what he’d done.
Ricki pays Gigli no nevermind. She sees him for what he is: a little boy throwing a temper tantrum. She’s soon playing mommy to Brian and Gigli alike. Ricki is the contractor that mob types send for when they need kidnapping, intimidation, and other crimes executed with a woman’s gentle touch.
Ricki herself hungers for a woman’s gentle touch. When Gigli puts the moves on her, she tells him, “This might be a good time to suggest that you not allow the seeds of cruel hope to sprout in your soul,” which is her way of saying she’s a lesbian. Nobody in Gigli ever uses a simple, direct word when eight or nine flowery, polysyllabic ones will suffice.
Then Christopher Walken swoops in from Pluto as an enigmatic cop named Stanley and gives Brest’s garbled, excessive, semi-undeliverable, comically wordy, and punishingly unnatural dialogue a lunatic bravado. It’s like Miles Davis popping into a Holiday Inn lounge and jamming with the house band. Brest has written dialogue so doggedly strange and unnatural that only Walken can hack his way through it without looking like an amateur.
Walken delivers the lines, “Man, you know what I’d love to do, right now? Go down to Marie Callender’s and get me a big bowl of pie with ice cream on it, mmmm, mmmm good, put some on your head ! You’d probably slap your brains out trying to get to it! Interested?” in a conspiratorial purr that grows from creepily lascivious to insulting. The pregnant pauses, the unexpected emphases, the shifting eyes, and unnerving, rapacious sexuality—Walken puts on a master class in stealing scenes.
Then the genius soloist departs and Cinderella’s coach turns back into a pumpkin. By the one-hour mark, almost nothing has happened in Gigli. Gigli nabs Brian and joins forces with Ricki. After that, it’s all bickering and babysitting. Once upon a time, movies about criminals were full of action. In a post-Tarantino world, they’re full of talk.
After an hour of jibber-jabbering, Gigli and Ricki are asked to cut off Brian’s thumb so it can be sent to his father as a warning. They’re horrified; when Ricki signed up to be a thug for hire, she never imagined she’d be asked to do something distasteful and, well, thuggish. So Gigli purloins a thumb from a corpse at the morgue, while Brian favors us with an a cappella rendition of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”
In Gigli, the gender roles are reversed; behind her soft, feminine exterior, Lopez plays a hunter and a warrior. Behind his ridiculous, transparent tough-guy façade, Affleck plays a vain, sensitive mama’s boy who is happy to become Lopez’s bitch. Gigli wins Ricki by exposing his vulnerable feminine side; it’s only when he’s willing to appear weak that he becomes attractive to her.
Ricki, Gigli, and Brian eventually form that hoary cliché: the trio of mismatched outsiders who come together to form an unlikely but loving surrogate family. Pacino’s screaming enthusiast/mob bos
s is unmoved by the trio’s familial bond, however, and he murders Louis, seemingly on a whim, just to prove how loco he is before climactically confronting Ricki and Gigli on their pathetic attempt to pass off the finger of a dead man as Brian’s thumb.
Starkman vows to murder his underachieving flunkies until Ricki comes up with a better idea: Why doesn’t he just let them go after they pinkie-promise to exterminate Brian with extreme prejudice? This makes no sense; if Ricki and Gigli couldn’t bring themselves to cut off Brian’s thumb, how could they kill him? Yet Starkman inexplicably acquiesces.
Gigli’s tonal shifts grow increasingly violent as it races to the finish line. One moment, Starkman is waving around a gun and screaming at the top of his lungs (sadly, that now appears to be Pacino’s normal speaking voice), the next Gigli and Ricki beam with parental pride as Brian wanders onto the set of a beach movie or television show where no one seems to notice the incongruity of a mentally challenged young man in a hoodie mixing it up with scantily clad hardbodies. For Brian has finally made it to “the Baywatch,” a state of mind more than an actual location. Aren’t we all, ultimately, just looking for our own Baywatch? Gigli ends on a preposterously upbeat note, as Gigli, bathed in a golden halo of light, watches Brian gyrate with a beach bunny while inspirational music soars in the background.
In the real world, Affleck, Lopez, and Brest never made it to their own personal Baywatch. There would be no happy ending for the film or for Bennifer. Lopez and Affleck broke up not long after the film flopped. Two-time Oscar nominee Brest, meanwhile, hasn’t written or directed a film since, in spite of scoring successive hits in 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop, 1988’s Midnight Run, and 1992’s staggeringly awful yet highly successful Scent Of A Woman. The world, it seems, no longer wants to sit at Brest’s feet and gather forth the pearls that emanate from his laptop.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
