You have seen her on The Nanny and on countless talk shows. Most talk-show guests say something and then laugh, so you know it’s supposed to be funny. She laughs, and then says something, so you know it was supposed to be a laugh and not a respiratory emergency. Not every role would be suitable for her. I cannot visualize her, for example, in The English Patient, saying “Promise you’ll come back for me.” Or as Sheriff Marge Gunderson in Fargo, saying, “And I guess that was your accomplice in the woodchipper.”
Beautician and the Beast contains a role that seems to have been whipped up out of two parts of Drescher’s public persona and one part of nothing else. She plays Joy Miller, who teaches beauty secrets in a Queens night school. After a smoking mishap leads to a wig fire and the school burns down, she is hailed on the front pages as a heroine (for saving the lab rats), and approached by a representative of the obscure central European nation of Slovetzia.
That nation has recently emerged from communism into a dictatorship controlled by Boris Pochenko (Timothy Dalton), a despot who wants to soften his image and thinks maybe importing an American tutor for his children might help. (Pochenko is also the name of the European exile who is killed at the beginning of Shadow Conspiracy, but I cannot think of anything to say about this coincidence, other than that they are both named after a popular Japanese pinball game.) Dalton plays the role as if he had somehow found himself the villain in a James Bond film instead of the hero.
Slovetzia is not an advanced nation. There are sheep on the runway of the national airport. Pochenko lives in a castle possibly mortgaged from Young Frankenstein. Joy makes a bad first impression, when she is late for her official welcoming ceremony because she hasn’t finished her hair and nails.
The dictator (known to his subjects as the “Beast for Life”) has three children, who have grown restive under his iron fist while nevertheless managing to speak in American accents after their first few scenes. The daughter is unhappy about her approaching arranged marriage. The son bites his nails. “Don’t do that!” Joy tells him. “Do you want to grow a hand in your stomach?”
Joy’s wardrobe runs toward day-glo stretch pants and pullover blouses. She is sublimely indifferent to the veiled threats of Pochenko, so he tries unveiled ones, which she tut-tuts away. Meanwhile, she has the castle running like a catering kitchen, and is able to save precious currency reserves by planning a diplomatic reception around frozen Chung King egg rolls.
The trajectory of this story is clear from its title. The beautician will get the beast, and in the subplot Juliet will get her Romeo. The direction is by Ken Kwapis, whose He She, She Said (1992) is invaluable for getting you from John Tesh to the Addams Family in the Kevin Bacon game. Kwapis tries to build suspense where none can possibly exist, which is always an annoyance; is it a crime for a movie to know as much about its story as the audience does?
But there are some genuine laughs here and there, and a certain charm emanates from Fran Drescher, who I suspect is easier to stand in real life than she lets on in her acting. And we are not disappointed in our wait for the Obligatory Transformational Entrance Scene, which all movies like this lead up to. After being an ugly duckling for three-quarters of the movie, the heroine turns up at the top of a staircase looking regal and beautiful, and descends while trying to keep one of those “are they looking at poor little me?” looks on her face. Beautician and the Beast made me laugh, but each laugh was an island, entire onto itself. They didn’t tie together into anything very interesting. Drescher never really seems to be interacting with the other characters. Like Mae West or Groucho Marx, she eyeballs the stiffs while they’re talking, and then delivers her zingers. We don’t care about her character because we never feel she’s really uncertain, insecure, or vulnerable. Here’s a woman who will never grow hands in her stomach.
Beethoven’s 2nd
(Directed by Rod Daniel; starring Charles Grodin, Bonnie Hunt, Debi Mazar; 1993)
There is a scene in Beethoven’s 2nd in which Beethoven, who is a large St. Bernard dog, takes his girlfriend Missy, also a large St. Bernard, to a drive-in theater for the movies. They sit on a hill above the parking lot, where they have a good view of the screen. This much I was prepared to believe. Some dogs are very clever. But when Beethoven came back with a box of popcorn for Missy, I realized these were not ordinary dogs but two of amazing intelligence, and when it was revealed that Missy got pregnant later that night, I found myself asking if they’d never heard of taking precautions.
In due time Missy’s four puppies are born into a world filled with human problems. The central tragedy is that Beethoven and his lady love have been separated. Beethoven of course lives with a large and loving family, the Newtons. But Missy has been dognapped from her loving owner by his bitter estranged wife, a woman who in appearance and behavior resembles the witch in Snow White.
The three Newton kids manage to rescue and cherish the puppies, after winning over their dad (the priceless Charles Grodin, who must have charged a high one for appearing in this). Mom (merry-faced Bonnie Hunt) of course loves the pups at first sight. And then the screenplay provides a vacation trip to a lake, where Missy’s evil dognapper (Debi Mazar) and her goon boyfriend (Chris Penn) are also visiting.
That sets up the entirely predictable ending, in which the evil villains attempt a puppynapping. It also sets up a scene so unsavory that it has no place in a movie rated PG. The oldest Newton girl, Ryce (Nicholle Tom) is trapped in a locked bedroom by a slick boy she knows from the city. “Ummm,” he says, dangling the keys and advancing on her, “this is gonna be great!” Luckily Beethoven saves the day before a sexual assault takes place, but were the filmmakers so desperate they could think of no scene more appropriate for a family movie?
The dogs are of course cute. All St. Bernards are cute. But their best features are not their eyes, which tend to be small, red, and runny—something director Rod Daniel should have considered before shooting so many soulful close-ups of Beethoven, who looks like he needs doggy Visine.
One of the film’s genuine blessings is that we do not hear the dog’s thoughts, although we do get several songs on the sound track that reflect their thinking. Missy and Beethoven are first smitten with each other while Dolly Parton and James Ingram sing “The Day I Fall in Love,” and I’m telling you, there wasn’t a dry face on the screen, mostly because the dogs were licking each other.
This movie has one clear reason for being: The success of the original Beethoven, which grossed something like $70 million. That film was no masterpiece, but it made good use of the adorable Beethoven, and in Charles Grodin it had a splendid comic actor who made the most of his role as a grumpy dad who didn’t want a dog causing havoc around the house. This time, with Grodin elevated to an innocuous role and Debi Mazur acting as if she were being paid by the snarl, it’s up to the dogs. You know you’re in trouble when the heroes of a comedy spend more time swapping spit than one-liners.
The Believers
(Directed by John Schlesinger; starring Martin Sheen, Helen Shaver, Robert Loggia; 1987)