Blogical Conclusion

POTTY PLANNERS

The Farrelly brothers focus on toilet jokes and leave their characters hanging. Plus, a fairy-tale princess finds love in Manhattan, while Harry Potter has sex.

FEB 15, 2007 - WHEN INDIAN FILMMAKERS OF A CERTAIN KIND are stuck for ideas, they usually head to the DVD store and raid the shelves containing hits from the recent past. That’s why, I’m fairly certain, there hasn’t yet been a desi version of The Heartbreak Kid from the early seventies – and that’s a pity, because if there ever was a Hollywood property begging for an Indianisation, this one’s it. The film is about a man (superbly played by Charles Grodin) who marries a woman whom he doesn’t know all that well, grows increasingly uncomfortable with who his wife is turning out to be, and falls for someone else – not necessarily because this new woman represents everything he dreamed of in a partner so much as the fact that she’s simply not his wife. How much of a stretch is it to see this premise extrapolated to a country where arranged marriages are still the norm? Yes, The Heartbreak Kid is about a lot more than just the inscrutable mechanics of desire – it is, for instance, about how the things we yearn for, the things we think we cannot do without, don’t seem all that indispensable once we have them in hand – but even with the extraneous subtext pared down, there’s enough in there to resonate deeply within our audiences.

What a pity, then, that if an unauthorised local version of The Heartbreak Kid does make it to our multiplexes, it’s less likely to delve into male psychology than a female nostril blocked by an oversized analgesic pill. Among the many gross-out highlights of the Farrelly brothers’ take on the older film is this scene where Eddie (Ben Stiller) deploys a pair of tweezers to clear the nasal tracts of his wife Lila (Malin Akerman) – and this is possibly the least offensive gag, one that can actually be described in a family newspaper. But while this kind of comedy isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself – and Jerry Stiller, playing real-life son Ben’s reel-life dad, has a few outrageously laugh-out-loud moments – it’s an uneasy fit in this material. I could see the point of a remake if someone, say, saw something missing in the earlier film and sought to present his unique take on the whole thing, coming at it from a whole new angle, but why pick this particular film if all you want to do is strip it clean of the very things that made it interesting in the first place and retrofit it with poo-poo humour instead?

If I were to guess what intrigued the Farrelly brothers about the original, it’s probably that the film is a comedy about the cruel things that we do to the ones closest to us, sometimes without realising it – and therefore amping up the cruelty and the comedy could result in the blackest of farces. (Exhibit A in this contention would be the much-married Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner going for each other’s throats in The War of the Roses.) But despite the narrative being fairly faithful to the earlier film, the characters are so differently drawn that the Farrellys might as well have written the whole thing from scratch. The loser that Grodin played was a subscriber of the old Groucho Marx philosophy of not wanting to belong to any club that would accept the likes of him as a member. The girl he married was as anonymous as he was; they were made for each other in the unremarkable way that could describe a great many husbands and wives. So the object of our sympathy was the wife he so callously abandoned, the wife who was no worse (and certainly no better) than he deserved – but here, Lila is caricatured as such an overbearing monster, no man would want to stick around for a future with her. Your sympathies are entirely with Eddie, despite the icky implications of his falling for Miranda (Michelle Monaghan) while still on his honeymoon. The Heartbreak Kid isn’t unwatchable, but it needed funnier gags and higher stakes, and its premise is far too squirmy for us to simply sit back and brush it away as light entertainment. Public urination jokes are all fine, but they do little to illuminate the private hell of a man stuck in relationship limbo.

HAVING LONG EXHAUSTED THE OEUVRE OF The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen – and especially after the advent of Pixar – the mighty roar of the Disney empire has collapsed into a mousy squeak. (Does anyone really remember Tarzan? Mulan? The Hunchback of Notre Dame?) So it is a bit of a surprise that Enchanted is such a charmer – but then again, maybe not, considering that the film is simply a modern-day spin on classic fairy-tale tropes. The back-to-the-basics story is about a princess (Giselle, wonderfully played by Amy Adams, with just the right amount of wide-eyed innocence and fairy-dust sparkle) who leaves her never-never-land (rendered in animation), finds her Prince Charming (Patrick Dempsey, as Robert) and lives happily ever after. Small postmodern twist: he’s in Manhattan, “where there are no happily-ever-afters,” and worse, he’s a divorce lawyer who’s himself divorced. But director Kevin Lima isn’t out to make Beauty and the Shark, so Robert is just about the sweetest single father ever to have taken the bar exam. His only failing – and this is a failing in the Disney universe, where boys and girls have their predetermined roles to perform on this planet – is that he tries to toughen up his daughter by having her take karate lessons and gifting her books about women achievers like Madame Curie. But soon Giselle comes into their lives and bats her eyes and cooks and cleans and goes shopping and shows the child what a woman is really meant to do.

But if this subtext is somewhat disturbing, it’s no more so than in the fairy tales themselves, where the women are merely damsels in distress, forever waiting to be rescued by their dashing men. Besides, Enchanted does opt for a neat gender-reversal of this conceit towards the end, while also having Giselle realise that real love is more complicated than simply falling for a handsome prince (James Marsden) – and if the film isn’t all that it could have been, it’s at least a whole lot of fun. While the love story plays itself out, there’s a parallel movie that’s practically a spot-the-Disney-connection parlour game (the same way Shakespeare in Love was chockfull of sneaky, catch-them-if-you-can references to the Bard) – whether it’s the song where rats and roaches help Giselle tidy up an apartment, or the poisoned apples conjured up by a wicked-witch stepmother, or the television set that doubles as a magic mirror, or the ballroom dance that echoes the most famous set piece of The Beauty and the Beast, or the elaborately choreographed production number that’s a rousing throwback to once-upon-a-time musicals where people weren’t afraid to drop everything and suddenly burst into scarily-in-sync song and dance. Toss in a gesticulating chipmunk – now that he’s no longer in fairy-tale land and no longer a cartoon character, he cannot talk, see? – who’s thankfully undemonstrative of his bodily functions (well, almost), and you have the kind of family fare that’s become increasingly rare to find in this era of Shrek: a wholesome entertainment blessedly free of irony.

SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE, DECEMBER BOYS will gain trivia-footnote importance as the film where Daniel Radcliffe bared his bottom and put his wand to non-magical use, but till that moment, we’re left with a pleasant-enough-but-unremarkable coming-of-age tale that didn’t really need to be told. Playing like Summer of ’42 crossed with The Cider House Rules, Rob Hardy’s film revolves around a quartet of orphans (nicely played by Radcliffe and Co.) getting important life lessons – about, you know, Love, Sex, Death – while vacationing on a gorgeous Australian beachfront. Early on, as a line of orphans is inspected by prospective adoptive parents, the now-adult narrator’s voiceover movingly confesses that what he remembers from those days isn’t the heat or the dust or the nuns, but “a sense of anticipation, the constant belief that I’d be saved.” The desires of these children to belong to an actual family unit – where mothers aren’t automatically women in black habits – coalesce into a strong core of emotion, but this mood is frequently (and annoyingly) undermined by uninvolving subplots and overblown metaphors (involving everything from gyroscopes to black stallions to prehistoric fish). Harry Potter fans, however, may be interested to note that Radcliffe is mostly required to register loneliness and alienation, the chief emotions he’ll be channelling in the last two installments of the boy-wizard adventures.

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