What happens during Clarabelle’s progress down the street I will leave for you to experience if you are unwise enough to see the film. As the Dandies plan their operation, Dick draws a diagram of the town that looks uncannily like an aerial view of the chalk outlines on a sound stage floor that von Trier used to create Dogville. Odd, that the Dogma movement from Denmark, which originally seemed to call for the use of actual locations exactly as they were, has become more stylized and artificial than German Expressionism.
It is true that America has problems, and that many of them are caused by a culture of guns and violence. It is also true that a movie like David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (or I could name countless others) is wiser and more useful on the subject than the dim conceit of Dear Wendy.
Apart from what the movie says, which is shallow and questionable, there is the problem of how it says it. The style is so labored and obvious that with all the goodwill in the world you cannot care what happens next. It is all just going through the motions, silly and pointless motions, with no depth, humor, edge, or timing. Vinterberg has made wonderful films like The Celebration (1998), filled with life and emotion. Here he seems drained of energy, plodding listlessly on the treadmill of style, racking up minutes on the clock but not getting anywhere.
Death to Smoochy
(DIRECTED BY DANNY DE VETO; STARRING ROBIN WILLIAMS, EDWARD NORTON; 2002)
Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.
The movie, directed by Danny DeVito (!), is about two clowns. That violates a cardinal rule of modern mass entertainment, which is that everyone hates clowns almost as much as they hate mimes. (Big Fat Liar, a much better recent showbiz comedy, got this right. When the clown arrived at a birthday party, the kids joyfully shouted, “Hey, it’s the clown! Let’s hurt him!”) Most clowns are simply tiresome (I exempt Bozo). There are, however, two dread categories of clowns: clowns who are secretly vile and evil, and clowns who are guileless and good. Death to Smoochy takes no half-measures, and provides us with one of each.
We begin with Rainbow Randolph, played by Robin Williams, an actor who should never, ever play a clown of any description, because the role writes a license for him to indulge in those very mannerisms he should be striving to purge from his repertoire. Rainbow is a corrupt drunk who takes bribes to put kids on his show. The show itself is what kiddie TV would look like if kids wanted to see an Ann Miller musical starring midgets.
The good clown is Smoochy (Edward Norton), a soul so cheerful, earnest, honest, and uncomplicated you want to slap him and bring him back to his senses. Sample helpful Smoochy song for kids: “My Stepdad’s Not Bad, He’s Just Adjusting.” Both of these clowns wear the kinds of costumes seen at the openings of used car lots in states that doubt the possibility of evolution. Rainbow is convoluted, but Smoochy is so boring that the film explains why, on a long bus ride, you should always choose to sit next to Mrs. Robinson, for example, rather than Benjamin.
Enter the film’s most engaging character, a TV producer named Nora (Catherine Keener), who, like Rachel Griffiths, cannot play dumb and is smart enough never to try. She’s taking instructions from the network boss (Jon Stewart, who might have been interesting as one of the clowns). They’re trapped in an inane subplot involving two bad guys, Burke (De Vito) and Merv Green (played by the gravel-voiced Harvey Fierstein, who, as he puts on weight, is becoming boulder-voiced). There is also Vincent Schiavelli as a former child star, now a crackhead.
The drama of the two clowns and their battle for the time slot is complicated by Rainbow Randolph’s attempts to smear Smoochy by tricking him into appearing at a neo-Nazi rally. One wonders idly: Are there enough neo-Nazis to fill a thundering convention center? Do they usually book clowns? The answer to the second question may be yes.
The movie ends by crossing an ice show with elements of The Manchurian Candidate. It involves an odd sexual predilection: Nora has a fetish for kiddie show hosts. It has a lesbian hit-squad leader with a thick Irish brogue. It uses four-letter language as if being paid by the word. In all the annals of the movies, few films have been this odd, inexplicable, and unpleasant.
D.E.B.S.
(DIRECTED BY ANGELA ROBINSON; STARRING SARA FOSTER, MEAGAN GOOD; 2005)
At some point during the pitch meetings for D.E.B.S. someone must certainly have used the words Charlie’s Lesbians. The formula is perfectly obvious: Four sexy young women work for a secret agency as a team that is gifted at lying, cheating, stealing, and killing. How do we know they have these gifts? Because of the movie’s funniest moment, during the opening narration, when we learn that trick questions on SAT exams allow an agency to select high school graduates who can and will lie, cheat, steal, kill.
Amy (Sara Foster), the leader of the group, is a latent lesbian. Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), a thief and master criminal, goes on a blind date with a semiretired Russian assassin named Ninotchka (Jessica Cauffiel). When the D.E.B.S. monitor the date on a surveillance assignment, Amy is attracted to the smiling, seductive Lucy, which causes security complications. Pause for a moment to ask with me, would this movie be as interesting if the blind date had been with a guy? I submit it would not, because the lesbian material is all that separates D.E.B.S. from the standard teenage Insta-flick.
The character traits of the D.E.B.S. are only slightly more useful than the color-coded uniforms of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In such movies, taxonomy is personality; once you’ve got the label straight, you know all you’re ever going to know about the character. In addition to Amy, who is a lesbian, we meet Max (Meagan Good), who is black, Janet (Jill Ritchie), who is white, and Dominique (Devon Aoki), who corners the market on character attributes by being an Asian with a French accent who smokes all the time. I would not identify the characters by race, but the movie leaves us with no other way to differentiate them.
Dominique’s smoking fascinates me. She never lights a cigarette, extinguishes one or taps an ash. She simply exists with a freshly lit filter tip in her mouth, occasionally removing it to emit a perky little puff of uninhaled smoke. I wish I had stayed through the credits to see if there was a cigarette wrangler. Dominique’s very presence on the screen inspires me to imagine an excited pitch meeting during which the writer-director, Angela Robinson, said with enthusiasm: “And Dominique, the Asian chick, smokes all the time!” At which the studio executives no doubt thanked the gods for blessing them with such richness and originality in character formation.
I have mentioned the pitch more than once because this movie is all pitch. It began as a popular short subject at Sundance, where audiences were reportedly amused by a send-up of the Charlie’s Angels formula in which the angels were teenagers and one was a lesbian. The problem is, a short subject need only delight while a feature must deliver.