 |
||||
|
The Addams Family [1991] Opening with the Addams Family preparing to pour boiling oil on an unbearably merry group of carol singers, in replication of one of the most famous of Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons, this overlays the image with a snatch of Vic Mizzy's finger-snapping original Addams Family television theme mixed into Marc Shaiman's effective score, signalling the fusion of approaches Barry Sonnenfeld has brought to this material. Slightly embarrassed by its origins in something as declassé as a '60s sit-com - and perhaps well aware of such scrappy old-TV-to-new-film precedents as Dragnet, The Nude Bomb [from Get Smart] or Twilight Zone - the Movie - Sonnenfeld has claimed in interviews never to have much cared for the 1964-66 show, even expressing a preference for the rival The Munsters, and that he tried to base this film more on the tone of the singleton cartoons. However, in the event, it is notable that the film's occasional pauses for a knitted three-legged baby suit or a one-eyed Halloween lantern are among the least amusing moments in what is generally a successful reprise of the bizarre tone of the television series, which really did the spadework of transforming Addams' nameless monster family characters into the stuff of storylines. Indeed, in its attempts to include all the well-remembered features of the old show with the added benefit of screen technology that can now free Thing from his box to make a severed hand one of the most active and likable characters in the film, the movie tries to cram in too much, so that several of the characters - most notably Lurch and Granny - barely seem to get a look-in, as if they were being saved for later episodes. Stuck with an actual plot as ephemeral as that of Munster Go Home or [indeed] the TV special Halloween With the Addams Family and thus doomed to a certain feeling of hurry when the whole storyline has to be resolved, The Addams Family still manages very affectingly to transfer from series to film both the basic joke, that pure decadence can be touchingly like innocence, and the subtly subversive notion, that Morticia and Gomez [unlike Lucy and Desi, Ward and June Cleaver, even Darrin and Samantha] have an intensely sexual marriage which, more even than the sword-fighting, hungry tiger rug and active furniture, is the secret of their disturbing rebellion against the milk-and-water normality expected of sit-com couples. Even now, it is unusual to find, within a marriage, comedy springing Tex Avery-like from sexual attraction, with Morticia driving Gomez to arm-kissing athletics by speaking to him in French and Gomez asking his clearly contented wife every morning if she's unhappy, the use of foreign languages and emotions underlining the major difference between them and the Munsters, that the Addamses are genuinely not a typical American family. While the film has a perfectly distinctive look and sense of visual fun, its best jokes are surprisingly character-based, like the oddly forlorn and unexplored detail of Thing expelled from the Addams haven hauling behind him a cart loaded with gloves, watches and rings, or Morticia's refusal to accept a teacher's assertion that her daughter's selection of an ancestor who was burned for witchcraft as a noteworthy hero or heroine is any stranger than the choice of a classmate who has picked George Bush. The Addams Family itself goes even beyond simple family ties, with the final acceptance of Gordon as Fester whether he actually is or not predicated simply on his willingness to enter into the spirit of their lifestyle, deserting the petty rottenness of Abigail and Tully to prove that Gomez really does make a distinction when asking "which is the real Fester, the loathsome underhanded monster you have become or the loathsome underhanded monster we came to love?" The film works as a celebration of unconventional togetherness thanks
mainly to a collection of casting coups, with the single odd choice
paying off as Christopher Lloyd's struggle between his own manic image
and the distinctive Fester likeness becomes part of the plot. Anjelica
Huston and Raul Julia develop the performances of Carolyn Jones and
John Astin without being hamstrung by old schtick, while especial mention
should be made of magician Christopher Hart, who manages to make his
hand express an extraordinary wide range ["it's not the same old
Thing" claimed a very clever teaser poster], and Christina Ricci,
the younger sister from Mermaids, achieves
stellar magnitude with her blank-faced Wednesday, strapping her brother
into an electric chair and informing him, as she throws the switches,
that this game is called "is there a God?" First Published In: Sight and Sound February 1994 pp.44-45 [UK] Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
|
||||