Splash [1984]

Financed not by Disney Studios but by Buena Vista, their distribution set-up, Splash finds itself free to quote from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on one of the television sets with which Madison becomes fascinated, and to have Allen express his inner feelings as romance blossoms with an a capella rendition of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah". However, since Uncle Walt is nowhere invoked on the credits by name, the film is also able to sidestep the coyness that restricted the aquatic activities of Anna Blyth in Mr Peabody and the Mermaid and Glynis Jones in Miranda, allowing the splendid Daryl Hannah to be innocently, tastefully naked in and out of the water, before she succumbs to the human joys of Bloomingdales and Allan's credit card. Like Something Wicked this Way Comes and Never Cry Wolf, Splash is a typically Disney subject trying to be grown up. But while Jack Clayton's magical Americana and Carroll Ballard's True Life Adventure interpret adulthood as a need to make solemn pronouncements, Ron Howard's updating of certain sit-com fantasies is far more relaxed and mature, constructed (like his equally amiable Night Shift) not as a hommage to a bygone genre but as a contemporary addiction to it. The opposition of the hero's hectic , everyday world and the heroine's serene dreamworld is a sophisticated development of the obviousness of Brigadoon, made workable by Howard's fine comic sense in the topside scenes, and the elegant realisation of a Clearwater marine paradise (with Bahaman seas standing in for Cape Cod and New York harbour) as Madison frolics among the corals and takes refuge in a sunken galleon whose charts usefully guide her to New York.

The attempts at physical comedy (Kornbluth's Clouseau-like efforts to wet Madison down; the final chase) do not match the script's wide-ranging verbal wit. But Hannah and Tom Hanks make the potentially slippery human / non-human love affair the most convincing and touching since the heyday of I Married a Witch and The Ghost and Mrs Muir. Having learnt the director's trade on New World car-action films (Grand Theft Auto) and made-for-TV movies (Cotton Candy), Howard, the likeable teenage straight man from American Graffiti and Happy Days, has now made the most interesting actor-to-director career move since Clint Eastwood began obsessively re-examining his own screen image. In a period when comedy in the cinema is equated with getting laid and food fights, Howard stands for off-beat ideas, oddball characters, snappy dialogue, comedians who genuinely get involved in their roles (Hannah abandoned her own screen treatment of The Little Mermaid to play the part), and a childlike but not childish enchantment that puts E.T. to shame. While Disney's recent highly touted attempts to break the company's kiddie image have failed to recoup their overly generous budgets, Splash - which would certainly have met with the approval of the man whose topless mermaids and nymphs had their nipples air-brushed out of Fantasia - has become the studio's biggest hit in fifteen years.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Monthly Film Bulletin vol.51 no.605 [June 1984] pp.183-184 [UK]

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