During his Let's Get Small days, Steve Martin used to wax rhapsodic about
his banjo. You just can't be sad, he would intone, when you're playing one. Then,
of course, he would wander off on a fifteen-minute bit about banjos, plucking and
grinning the whole time, proving beyond all doubt that a banjo is the wrong instrument
on which to write a sad song. Can't be done.
Young Steve Martin was a banjo. It's impossible to imagine him pulling
off great soul-searing drama. He just carries around with him some great aura of
goofiness, as if there is a great cosmic joke that is known only in his mind that
he finds extraordinarily amusing and that will be revealed when the time is right.
Perhaps it's the arrangement of his face, or the uncoordinated coordination of his
lanky frame, but it is impossible to imagine that the film world in which his characters
live will contain any kind of tragedy.
Which may be why Pennies From Heaven is such an odd little movie for Martin.
Set in 1934, in post-depression Chicago, Pennies tries to tell the story of
Arthur, a traveling sheet-music salesman who is riddled with great angst. His marriage
is going to hell, largely because he wants a wife who is more sexually adventurous
and he subsequently hooks up with a small town school teacher with a deeply repressed
wild streak, lusciously played by Peters. A series of dead-end adventures follow,
all oddly punctuated with Dream On-like snippets of happy-go-lucky musical
numbers that replace character development and disperse any rising tension. But it
is the musical numbers that make the movie worth watching. Martin and Peters make
a great singing and dancing team and the film comes alive whenever they start tapping.
Christopher Walken does a malevolently hysterical strip-tease that is as funny as
it is disturbing. Pennies From Heaven looks gorgeous, like a moving Edward
Hopper painting, despite the fact that Martin just can't sustain the inner turmoil
that needs to be the driving force of Arthur.
But Martin's inner giddiness makes Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid a classic.
This loose film is more than a spoof of the hard-boiled noir of the Forties and Fifties;
it is a tribute to the wonderful memories these films created in a generation. Dead
Men is a postmodernist's dream because the plot is simply spliced-together clips
with enough script around them to justify the whole exercise. Well, enough script
and Martin's wonderful deadpan antics, that subtly wink at the sheer amount of fun
he and the rest of the cast is having, playing characters ripped straight from celluloid.
That much joy could be justification for almost anything. This is a movie, however,
that doesn't need much vindication. Sure, it's not great art that speaks to the human
condition or some such elitist nonsense, even though it does confirm some undeniable
attraction that straight men have for breasts. It is a rip-roaring comedy that whisks
you into a black & white world where Humphrey Bogart and Joan Crawford still
reign supreme. While technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last 16 years,
the blending of old and new footage still works in this early attempt. Granted, the
plot is silly - down-on-his-luck detective is hired by mysterious, zaftig woman to
discover why her crazed-scientist father was murdered - and the jokes are equally
silly, but the whole thing is carried off by Martin's charm and inherently jocular
persona.
Even the most upbeat banjo tune can quickly rub raw the happiest of people if
it goes on for way too long, played by a well-natured fool who doesn't seem to realize
that the audience has had all of the silliness they can stand. True as well for even
the hardiest of Martin fans. While The Man With Two Brains was written by
the same team that produced Dead Men, the two really can't be compared. Dead
Men was full of potty jokes, but they were tempered with an even-handed wit that
cut through the inanity. Not so for Two Brains. Here, Martin and company turn
the proceedings into an unfunny farce, flinging out silly jokes at the rate of an
Airplane movie in the desperate hope that something will stick. While some
do find their mark, it seems to be more the result of a happy accident than any real
attempt on the filmmaker's part. This is not to say that there isn't some ineffable
quality that still makes Steve Martin watchable. His every gesture seems to be calculated
for effect. Expressions stream across his face at a speed that almost makes you motion-sick.
Watching him walk across a room or jump out of an elevator screams volumes about
the burbles of goofiness that lurk beneath his skin. Unfortunately, there just isn't
quite enough else going on in this boy-meets-girl, boy-hates-girl, boy- meets- disembodied- brain- and- transplants- it- into- first- girl's- body
flick to create any real dramatic action. You just don't care how it ends as long
as it does. Or maybe the tension is leached out by Joel Goldsmith's constant bad
Eighties synth music that underscores almost every scene, which wears on the nerves
worse than any banjo ever could. - Adrienne Martini
© 1995-99 DesertNet, LLC . Austin Chronicle . Powered by Dispatch