Addams Family Values: An Appreciation

The 90s seemed to be obsessed with turning bad and sometimes beloved American sitcoms into bad movies. But there was one adaptation that stood out from the rest: Addams Family Values, the 1993 sequel to The Addams Family (which is pretty good too). The casual, cheeky gothic tenor of the show isn’t lost on director Barry Sonnenfeld, who brings out the best in his cast. Addams Family Values is, I think, cherished in the memories of kids who grew up in the 90s, and for good reason. 

Where do I start? With Joan Cusack. Cusack was no stranger to comedy. She’d turned in small performances in John Hughes movies like Sixteen Candles, supporting roles as the bestie to Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer respectively, in Working Girl and Married to the Mob (both 1988), and played the killjoy love interest in the Steve Martin-Rick Moranis mob comedy My Blue Heaven (1990). Addams Family Values gave Cusack a chance to carry a larger role and play a femme fatale: the deliciously psychotic man-leech Debbie Jellinsky, who marries Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) for his money. She ingratiates herself into the Addams household by posing as a nanny (she’s actually a serial spouse-slayer), and when the older kids figure out her scheme, she sends them off to a chipper summer camp to keep them from blabbing. Cusack has a big personality, and she's a woman who seems totally embodied: you don't fail to notice a Joan Cusack appearance. Those soft eyes can bat at you and steal your heart, and then a moment later elicit a glare of comic rage that's both funny and terrifying. And that blonde hair, so strikingly different from Cusack's usual red-brown, provides the maniacal finishing touch. Cusack practically steals the show. 

And then there’s Christine Baranski, Broadway star (and sitcom BFF to Cybill Shepard on her now forgotten series Cybill), playing one of the blissfully dopey camp counselors trying to inflict her cheerfulness upon poor Wednesday Addams (Christina Ricci) and her brother, Pugsley (Jimmy Workman). When the elder Addams kids are shipped off to Camp Chippewa, they’re immediately subjected to the counselors’ joyish terrorism. Peter McNicol plays Gary Granger, and Baranski plays his wife, Becky Martin-Granger: they favor the bratty mean girl who thinks she’s talented because she’s pretty, and ridicule all the misfit kids (including a hypochondriac Jewish kid named Joel, who becomes Wednesday’s first boyfriend). No comedy ever captured the tyranny of relentlessly cheerful extroverts more aptly. When Wednesday refuses to smile, she’s forced to spend 24 hours in the “Harmony Hut,” which plays The Sound of Music, Annie, and episodes of The Brady Bunch on a loop.

Which brings me to Christina Ricci, who had a prolonged moment in the 90s playing the damaged, dark, cerebral teenage girl in movies like Ghost World. (She was more cynical than Reese Witherspoon and wittier than Thora Birch.) Ricci may have become pigeon-holed as a black-lipsticked goth girl, but she left her mark, and she registers as one of the most important and endearing 90s movie kids. (There were so many annoying ones, taking their cue from those little monsters in The Goonies.) When Wednesday stages the attack on Camp Chippewa—by sabotaging the big Thanksgiving-themed play—it’s the triumph of anarchy over conformism. No hipster could have done it better than Ricci, dressed as Pocahontas, treating the pilgrim-kids to a little reverse imperialism. The scene, which is my favorite in the whole movie, echoes the unashamed violence of a Bugs Bunny short, and channels John Waters' giddy anarchism too. 

That’s what is so wonderful about Addams Family Values (and about the Addams Family brand in general): its pointed, joyful rejection of the worst elements of mass culture and its love of anarchy. We’re told that movies like The Sound of Music are great entertainment because they’re wholesome, and good for us. But it’s wholesomeness for the sake of money, money milked from the wallets of audiences, and what good is wholesome culture when it denies reality? Let’s remember that The Sound of Music and The Brady Bunch were products of the 1960s, the same decade that brought us such atrocities as Vietnam, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., and such urgent, often tragic cultural moments as the civil rights movement. Addams Family Values dares to smile and laugh in the dark, and happily subverts all the fears that so often consume us, that drive us to the lies of The Sound of Music. 

I’ll close with an appreciation for Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia. Huston gives the most understated performance in the film, which makes her wonderful acting easy to overlook. She imbues Morticia Addams with an exuberant sadness that glimmers through her pale white skin and throws her black hair and wardrobe into relief. And Julia, wide-eyed and ever the gentleman, has such life in him that you could never believe his own life was coming to an untimely end. 

When Morticia conceives a baby, she and Gomez are delighted, until it morphs into a blond, curly-haired, smiling toddler. Morticia is horrified, as though she’d delivered a werewolf. (Actually, a werewolf would be a welcome improvement.) Gomez weeps in despair even as he tries to comfort his wife. But nothing can comfort you when your perfectly strange baby suddenly turns...normal. Addams Family Values takes delight in a world that is off-kilter and strange, but it's our "normal" world that becomes increasingly suspect in the process. 

Broadcast News

Broadcast News (1987) was written and directed by James L. Brooks, one of the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which may be the greatest sitcom ever made. Brooks returned to the newsroom comedy format with Broadcast News, but with far less success. The characters in this film--there are three main ones, played by Holly Hunter, William Hurt, and Albert Brooks--somehow seem more sitcomish than the characters on Mary Tyler Moore, who were richly developed even in the show's first season, and became even more layered as the show progressed. It's apparent that Brooks, who transitioned into movies after decades of working on the small screen, was unable to create characters who worked on a cinematic level. Instead, each of them is a kind of mishmash of various yuppie traits and psychological problems.

The film opens with short introductions to the main characters as children, showing us the traits necessary for their future careers manifesting themselves even in grade school. Hurt's character, the handsome but intellectually inferior anchorman, struggles even then to compete at an academic level, and complains that he'll never succeed in life because people only like him for his looks. Holly Hunter's character, a Southern girl who's already planted in front of a typewriter, shows her spitfire zeal for telling stories and seeing beneath the surface of communication, and Brooks's character is the typical egghead kid that nobody likes.

So the film establishes these rather obvious characters and then sets them at work in a newsroom together. But it's difficult to believe that William Hurt struggles to keep up intellectually, especially because he comes to Holly Hunter, who's the producer, and complains to her that he doesn't measure up. Somehow, his self-awareness and his ambition to improve make him a less interesting character. He's almost a Ken Doll of banality. If he were Ted Baxter from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the lovable narcissistic buffoon, we'd at least have something to laugh at.

And Albert Brooks, who made a pretty good living in the 80s playing cynical, sarcastic, smart yuppies (see Lost in America), grates on the nerves. His cockiness is a turn-off. He's more obviously arrogant than William Hurt's character, who may hide his arrogance behind a mask of fake-humility. However, he's intellectually honest, and the movie and James L. Brooks want us to prize this above all other qualities. And that's why Holly Hunter's character is so torn between the two men: One of them is handsome and "needs" her to help him be a better thinker, and the other one is smart and goes out of his way to value her as his equal. But these are such cookie-cutter 80s characters, and in so many ways, Broadcast News is such a cookie-cutter 80s movie, that I found myself increasingly less interested in the whole affair.

With Joan Cusack, Jack Nicholson, Robert Prosky, and Lois Chiles.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 15-year-old Charlie is recovering from a traumatic event in his life (the recent death of his best friend) and trying to adjust to high school. He soon finds a group of friends who haven't followed the herd mentality of adolescence, or so he thinks, and begins to find himself in them. Actually, when you read the plot of this movie in those terms, it sounds awfully cheap.

Some of the ideas in Wallflower seem so calculated to wrench out your heart that you feel writer-director Stephen Chbosky, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1999 novel, is performing the work of a surgeon, not a filmmaker. His movie resurrects a lot of the old devices and archetypes, including the hip, self-aware English teacher (Paul Rudd, more amiable than he's ever been because he doesn't appear to be trying so hard, nor does he seem as jaded as usual), and the parents who "just don't get it." Yes, Wallflower has most of the cliched ingredients of a teen drama. But yet it also has an effervescent sort of charm to it. You can't really feel any disdain for the world this film creates, because it's authentic, imaginative. Moreover, the relationships between adolescents and grown-ups and between adolescents and adolescents, is shown to be far more complex than "the parents just don't get it" or "the jocks don't talk to the geeks." It's refreshing.

Logan Lerman carries Wallflower with his wonderful performance, one of the strongest by an up-and-coming actor in recent memory. His Charlie feels the pain of everyone he knows, even of those who have caused him pain, and he can't let it go, or imagine it away. He reminded me of young Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People. Lerman makes it look so easy because he is, often, the most together of his friends (probably because he's hiding all his own problems so he won't fall apart.) The supporting cast includes Emma Watson, as Sam, the girl Charlie has a crush on, and Ezra Miller, as Patrick, Sam's step-brother, a remarkably self-aware young man who's also miserable because he's gay and has to keep his relationship with one of the football players a secret.

Wallflower is a wistful movie, one that makes you slightly depressed to have passed your teenage years, and slightly exuberant because you remember how bad they were, even if they weren't as cinematically bad as in this movie. (There are a lot of lovely moments in between the sad parts, though). I kept going back in my mind to John Hughes' movies, as they were, for me, the quintessential high school movies, even though they failed to reflect my own high school experience, which of course happened later than the 1980s. The high school experience that's reflected in Wallflower isn't in the same territory as a John Hughes movie though. It's more realistic, less sitcomish. You almost wish the John Hughes vision of high school life could be true, because it's such a fairy tale. Full of complications but all of them solved by the denouement. Wallflower won't solve the problems. It illuminates the people and leaves the problems where they are: some will go away with time, some won't. But the spirit that thrives in this joyful movie isn't nearly as temporal as those four years of prison, hell, and torment, or alternately freedom, euphoria, and excitement. And I liked that about it.

With Dylan McDermott and Kate Walsh as Charlie's parents, Johnny Simmons, Melanie Lynskey (as Charlie's Aunt Helen), Mae Whitman, Erin Wilhelmi, Joan Cusack, and Tom Savini. 102 min. ★★★½

Sixteen Candles

For my first review of 2012, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite 80s movies, Sixteen Candles (1984). It's basically Cinderella turned into an 80s high school melodrama. The movie is utterly unreal, and that's where its charm lies. Molly Ringwald plays Samantha, a girl who exists in the middle--she's not popular, but she's also not unpopular. The movie takes place over a 24-hour period, wherein Samantha's entire family forgets her sweet 16, and she falls for the high school prom king, Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), who's already dating the "perfect" girl (Haviland Morris).

In addition to her own personal problems, Samantha must deal with the advances of a determined geek named Ted (Anthony Michael Hall), who hides his insecurities behind a facade of mock-macho-self-aggrandizement. Hall's performance is terrific, and so is Ringwald's. Writer-director John Hughes had an incredible talent for casting young actors and eliciting believable performances from them that deepened the characters and made them endearing to the audience. So, while Sixteen Candles is a completely unreal fairy tale of a movie, its characters feel nuanced. They're fleshed out beyond their stereotypes, and become people you care about.

The humor is at times unsustained, but overall Sixteen Candles feels like a wonderfully fun late night: it breezes along without taking itself too seriously (like Hughes's follow-up, The Breakfast Club, did). Movies that take place in virtually 24 hours must have a vitality to them in order to be convincing. Sixteen Candles works, despite its shortcomings. 

Paul Dooley co-stars as Samantha's dad. He's probably my favorite onscreen dad because of his performances in this movie and in Breaking Away. With Gedde Watanabe, Carlin Glynn, John Cusack, Justin Henry, Edward Andrews, Billie Bird, Max Showalter, Carole Cook, Liane Curtis, Blanche Baker, Joan Cusack, Jami Gertz.

Friends With Money

Jennifer Aniston is a good actress but she seldom seems to get THE part. Usually we see her in a romantic comedy, in which she's clearly comfortable--and likable. But occasionally she gets to demonstrate her dramatic chops, like in this movie, Friends With Money. I found it in the comedy section of the video store, but I thought the categorization misleading. It's one of those movies where you feel like you're being a told a story completely objectively, just watching the lives of four women and their husbands unfold in a small splash of time. Aniston's character, Olivia, is single and has become a maid after quitting a teaching position she hated. Her three friends (played by Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand), are all married and financially well-off. Olivia is, in many ways, their pet project. She's the one they're "a little worried about."
This is the kind of movie where conflict resolutions aren't necessarily inevitable, in that it's a movie that tries to be realistic. If you hate that sort of thing, you might not enjoy this, but if you do enjoy it, like I did, you'll find a very clever, honest, sympathetic picture that's about the intricate, unstable, chaotic, and familiar nature of relationships. ★★★