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 pants, you should cast an actor who looks different when it isn’t.
What’s the Worst That Can Happen?
(DIRECTED BY SAM WEISMAN; STARRING MARTIN LAWRENCE, DANNY DE VITO; 2001)
What’s the Worst That Can Happen? has too many characters, not enough plot, and a disconnect between the two stars’ acting styles. Danny De Vito plays a crooked millionaire, Martin Lawrence plays a smart thief, and they seem to be in different pictures. De Vito as always is taut, sharp, perfectly timed. Lawrence could play in the same key (and does, in an early scene during an art auction), but at other times he bursts into body language that’s intended as funny but plays more like the early symptoms of St. Vitus’s Dance.
There is an old comedy tradition in which the onlookers freeze while the star does his zany stuff. From Groucho Marx to Eddie Murphy to Robin Williams to Jim Carrey, there are scenes where the star does his shtick and the others wait for it to end, like extras in an opera. That only works in a movie that is about the star’s shtick. What’s the Worst That Can Happen? creates a world that plays by one set of comic rules (in which people pretend they’re serious) and then Lawrence goes into mime and jive and odd wavings of his arms and verbal riffs, and maybe the people on the set were laughing but the audience doesn’t, much.
The plot involves Lawrence as a clever thief named Kevin Caffery, who frequents auctions to find out what’s worth stealing. At an art auction, he meets Amber Belhaven (Carmen Ejogo), who is in tears because she has to sell the painting her father left her; she needs money for the hotel bill. She has good reason to be in tears. The painting, described as a fine example of the Hudson River School, goes for $3,000; some members of the audience will be thinking that’s at least $30,000 less than it’s probably worth.
If Kevin is supplied with one love interest, Max Fairbanks (De Vito) has several, including his society wife (Nora Dunn), his adoring secretary (Glenne Headly), and Miss September. (When she disappears, Max’s assistant, Earl [Larry Miller], observes there are “Eleven more months where she came from.”) Kevin also has a criminal sidekick named Berger (John Leguizamo), and then there is his getaway driver Uncle Jack (Bernie Mac), and a Boston cop (William Fichtner) who is played for some reason as a flamboyant dandy. If I tell you there are several other characters with significant roles, you will guess that much of the movie is taken up with entrances and exits.
The plot involves Kevin’s attempt to burgle Max’s luxurious shore estate, which is supposed to be empty but in fact contains Max and Miss September. After the cops are called, Max steals from Kevin a ring given him by Amber Belhaven, and most of the rest of the movie involves Kevin’s determination to get it back, intercut with Max’s troubles with judges, lawyers, and accountants.
The jokes and the plots are freely and all too sloppily adapted from a Dortmunder novel by Donald E. Westlake, who once told me he really liked only one of the movies made from his books (The Grifters); he probably won’t raise the count to two after this one. A comedy needs a strong narrative engine to pull the plot through to the end and firm directorial discipline to keep the actors from trying to act funny instead of simply being funny. At some point, when a movie like this doesn’t work, it stops being a comedy and becomes a documentary about actors trying to make the material work. When you have so many characters played by so many recognizable actors in a movie that runs only ninety-five minutes, you guess that at some point they just cut their losses and gave up.
Note: Again this summer, movies are jumping through hoops to get the PG-13 rating and the under-seventeen demographic. That’s why the battle scenes were toned down and blurred in Pearl Harbor, and no doubt it’s why this movie steals one of the most famous closing lines in comedy history, and emasculates it. The Front Page ended with “The son of a bitch stole my watch!” This one ends with “Stop my lawyer! He stole my watch!” Not quite the same, you will agree.
White Chicks
(DIRECTED BY KEENEN IVORY WAYANS; STARRING MARLON WAYANS, SHAWN WAYANS; 2004)
Various combinations of the Wayans family have produced a lot of cutting-edge comedy, but White Chicks uses the broad side of the knife. Here is a film so dreary and conventional that it took an act of will to keep me in the theater. Who was it made for? Who will it play to? Is there really still a market for fart jokes?
Marlon and Shawn Wayans play Marcus and Kevin Copeland, brothers who are FBI agents. Fired after a sting goes wrong, they’re given a second chance. Their assignment: Protect Tiffany and Brittany Wilson (Anne Dudek and Maitland Ward), high-society bimbos who seem to be the target of a kidnapping scheme. The girls get tiny cuts in a car crash and are too vain to attend a big society bash in the Hamptons. Marcus and Kevin have the answer: They’ll disguise themselves as the Wilsons and attend the party in drag.
Uh, huh. They call in experts who supply them with latex face masks, which fool everybody in the Hamptons but looked to me uncannily like the big faces with the talking lips on Conan O’Brien. There is also the problem that they’re about six inches taller than the Wilsons. I suppose they’re supposed to be, I dunno, Paris and Nicky Hilton, but at least the Hiltons look like clones of humans, not exhibits in a third-rate wax museum.
The gag is not so much that black men are playing white women as that men learn to understand women by stepping into their shoes and dishing with their girlfriends. Womanhood in this version involves not empowerment and liberation, but shopping, trading makeup and perfume tips, and checking out the cute guys at the party. “Tiffany” and “Brittany” pick up a posse of three friendly white girls, inherit the Wilsons’ jealous enemies, and engage in the most unconvincing dance contest ever filmed, which they win with a break-dancing competition.
Meanwhile, a pro athlete named Latrell (Terry Crews) is the top bidder at a charity auction for Marcus, who represents his ideaclass="underline" “A white chick with a black woman’s ass!” This leads to all sorts of desperately unfunny situations in which Marcus tries to keep his secret while Latrell goes into heat. Also meanwhile, a labyrinthine plot unfolds about who is really behind the kidnapping, and why.
The fact that White Chicks actually devotes expository time to the kidnap plot shows how lamebrained it is, because no one in the audience can conceivably care in any way about its details. Audiences who see the TV commercials and attend White Chicks will want sharp, transgressive humor, which they will not find, instead of a wheezy story about off-the-shelf bad guys, which drags on and on in one complicated permutation after another.
Are there any insights about the races here? No. Are there any insights into the gender gap? No. As men or women, black or white, the Wayans brothers play exactly the same person: an interchangeable cog in a sitcom.