The basic miscalculation in Adam Sandler’s career plan is to ever play the lead. He is not a lead. He is the best friend, or the creep, or the loser boyfriend. He doesn’t have the voice to play a lead: Even at his most sincere, he sounds like he’s doing standup—like he’s mocking a character in a movie he saw last night. Barrymore, on the other hand, has the stuff to play a lead (I commend to you once again the underrated Mad Love). But what is she doing in this one—in a plot her grandfather would have found old-fashioned? At least when she gets a good line (she tries out the married name “Mrs. Julia Gulia”) she knows how to handle it.
The best laughs in the film come right at the top, in an unbilled cameo by the invaluable Steve Buscemi, as a drunken best man who makes a shambles of a wedding toast. He has the timing, the presence, and the intelligence to go right to the edge. Sandler, on the other hand, always keeps something in reserve—his talent. It’s like he’s afraid of committing; he holds back so he can use the “only kidding” defense.
I could bore you with more plot details. About why he thinks she’s happy and she thinks he’s happy and they’re both wrong and she flies to Vegas to marry the stinker, and he . . . but why bother? And why even mention that the movie is set in the mid-1980s and makes a lot of mid-1980s references that are supposed to be funny but sound exactly like lame dialogue? And what about the curious cameos by faded stars and inexplicably cast character actors? And why do they write the role of a Boy George clone for Alexis Arquette and then do nothing with the character except let him hang there on screen? And why does the tourist section of the plane have fewer seats than first class? And, and, and . . .
What Planet Are You From?
(Directed by Mike Nichols; starring Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, Greg Kinnear; 2000)
Here is the most uncomfortable movie of the new year, an exercise in feel-good smut. What Planet Are You From? starts out as a dirty comedy, but then abandons the comedy, followed by the dirt, and by the end is actually trying to be poignant. For that to work, we’d have to like the hero, and Garry Shandling makes that difficult. He begrudges every emotion, as if there’s no more where that came from. That worked on TV’s Larry Sanders Show—it’s why his character was funny—but here he can’t make the movie’s U-turn into sentimentality.
He plays an alien from a distant planet, where the inhabitants have no emotions and no genitals. Possibly this goes hand in hand. He is outfitted with a penis, given the name Harold Anderson, and sent to Earth to impregnate a human woman, so that his race can conquer our planet. When Harold becomes aroused, his penis makes a loud whirling noise. Imagine Mr. Spock with a roto-rooter in his pants.
If I were a comedy writer I would deal with that humming noise. I would assume that the other characters in the movie would find it extremely disturbing. I put it to my female readers: If you were on a date with a guy and his crotch sounded like it contained an operating garbage disposal, how would you feel? I submit that a normal woman would no more want to get into his pants than stick her hand down a disposal unit.
The lame joke in What Planet Are You From? is that women hear the noise, find it curious, and ask about it, and Harold makes feeble attempts to explain it away, and of course the more aroused he becomes the louder it hums, and when his ardor cools the volume drops. You understand. If you find this even slightly funny, you’d better see this movie, since the device is never likely to be employed again.
On earth, Harold gets a job in a bank with the lecherous Perry (Greg Kinnear), and soon he is romancing a woman named Susan (Annette Bening) and contemplating the possibility of sex with Perry’s wife Helen (Linda Fiorentino). Fiorentino of course starred in the most unforgettable movie crotch scene in history (in The Last Seduction, where she calls the bluff of a barroom braggart). There is a scene here with exactly the same setup: She’s sitting next to Harold in a bar, his crotch is humming, etc., and I was wondering, is it too much to ask that the movie provide a hilarious homage? It was. Think of the lost possibilities.
Harold and Susan fly off to Vegas, get married, and have a honeymoon that consists of days of uninterrupted sex (“I had so many orgasms,” she says, “that some are still stacked up and waiting to land”). Then she discovers Harold’s only interest in her is as a breeder. She is crushed and angry, and the movie turns to cheap emotion during her pregnancy and inevitable live childbirth scene, after which Harold finds to his amazement that he may have emotions after all.
The film was directed by Mike Nichols, whose uneven career makes you wonder. Half of his films are good to great (his previous credit is Primary Colors) and the other half you’re at a loss to account for. What went into the theory that What Planet Are You From? was filmable? Even if the screenplay by Garry Shandling and three other writers seemed promising on the page, why star Shandling in it? Why not an actor who projects joy of performance—why not Kinnear, for example?
Shandling’s shtick is unavailability. His public persona is of a man unwilling to be in public. Words squeeze embarrassed from his lips as if he feels guilty to be talking. Larry Sanders used this presence brilliantly. But it depends on its limitations. If you’re making a movie about a man who has a strange noise coming from his crotch, you should cast an actor who looks different when it isn’t.
When Night Is Falling
(Directed by Patricia Rozema; starring Pascale Bussieres, Henry Czerny; 1995)
Patricia Rozema was raised as a Calvinist in Canada, and saw no films until she was sixteen. In this she resembles her coreligionist Paul Schrader, who saw his first film at about the same age, and went on to write Taxi Driver and direct American Gigolo. Both of the Rozema films I’ve seen deal with a young woman coming to terms with her unrealized sexual yearnings. One suspects an element of autobiography.
Rozema’s first feature was the enchanting I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), the story of a young Toronto woman who dreams of becoming a photographer, and goes to work for a sophisticated older woman who runs an art gallery. The young woman idealizes the older one, but discovers secrets about her: That she is a lesbian, and that she is bitter about being a dealer rather than an artist. The film is ingenious in that it seems to be about the young narrator, and ends up being at least as much about the woman she gets a crush on.
Now comes When Night Is Falling, again about a young woman, this one a professor in a Protestant theological college in Toronto. Her name is Camille (Pascale Bussieres), she is from Quebec, and she is engaged to marry a fellow professor named Martin (Henry Czerny). Then one day at a laundromat she encounters a woman her age named Petra (Rachel Crawford), their laundry is exchanged, not by accident, and when Camille returns Petra’s clothes, Petra looks at her solemnly and says, “I’d love to see you in the moonlight with your head thrown back and your body on fire.”
There is a part of me that responds to reckless romanticism like that, and I guess I understand Petra saying it, but before their first date? Slow down, girl! Camille is shocked and tells Petra she has made a mistake. But she hasn’t, and Camille finds herself increasingly fascinated by Petra (whose name may or may not be inspired by the heroine of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fassbinder’s 1973 film about lesbianism).