Okay, here's the deal. Probably more than any other time of year, this particular month can wear you out. Tension's everywhere, chewing at your soul like a rabid beaver on a wooden leg. Trying to park at a mall, fighting over the last Choke-n-Puke Ernie (or whatever vibrating Muppet toy is deemed the Holy Grail this season), trying to feed the armies of holiday parties you feel like you have to host, dealing with the swarm of family that zap in and out to "visit" and stay through New Years' Day.... It's all enough to make your head do a "Scanners" and rupture right over the veggie tray.
Well, the same thing goes if you try to venture out and relax this time of year. Restaurants are near full from sundown to closing. Whole sections of bars roped off so they can host office parties. Lines out the door for movies. And when you get into the theatre, you're more than likely faced with some fat epic that you have to study on harder than you did the SAT's. All the studios are pushing their highbrow hoorah out so they can be the hot topics when the Oscar ballots start going out in the next couple of weeks. All well and good for film lovers, but who needs a message pounded into your head for three hours during the holidays? Almost makes you wish for a Men In Black or an ID4, just so you could sit back and let the effects take over, without having to follow some intricate plotting and subtle dialogue.
There's nothing wrong with a high-quality film, mind you. I love a well-made film of epic proportions as much as the next guy, but, like everybody else, I just get tired of them every week. For every Gandhi you see, you need a Caddyshack to balance out the equation. If you don't keep the balance, you end up like those folks who write out their family history in a form letter and send it out as a Christmas card. Too much stretching to fill up a page, too many boring details, when a short and pleasant comment could do the trick.
So, with that sentiment in mind, I threw a few bones to Shelley the Ticket Girl and purchased entry to For Richer or Poorer, the new Tim Allen/Kirstie Alley movie that got sandwiched in between the Oscar horses. And, while it won't make too many Top Ten lists, it definitely hit the spot as a user-friendly comedy.
Allen plays Brad Sexton, a real estate mogul who's taken to developing land for such enterprising endeavors as The Holy Land, a theme park based on the life of Jesus, with such attractions as the Water Into Winery and the Torah! Torah! Torah Water Slide. His wife, Caroline, played by Alley, is a frustrated fashion designer who gave up her career to be a materialistic charge-card-aholic. Both Brad and Preston live the Sharper Image life, where overspending is a habit. Their marriage is floundering, but they're too busy keeping up with the Joneses to really care.
Their accountant, played by "Seinfeld's" Wayne Knight ("Hello, Newman...."), has been working on other things, though. Namely, milking about five million in coin out of their coffers and fronting the paperwork. He splits town, but not before informing the Sextons that the IRS has warrants out for their arrest for tax fraud. The couple panic and take it on the lam, winding up in Intercourse, Pennsylvania, deep in the heart of Amish country, where they try to blend in with the locals and not be noticed. Well, it worked for Harrison Ford, didn't it?
I've gotta say it up front: the first thirty minutes or so of this thing had me worried. Allen tries way to hard to play the lockjaw socialite-type, and his humor suffers for it. Let's face it, folks. Allen's strength is in line delivery, not mugging faces and acting stuffy. He comes off sounding like Buzz Lightyear, his character from Toy Story. And, lord love her, Miss Kirstie plays this portion like an extension of her character on "Veronica's Closet", all flash and no substance.
Only when this movie gets to the fish-out-of-water formula does it take off. Once the two are hiding in an Amish village, the laughs come easy. Tooltime Tim has to tame a horse the size of a double-wide trailer and plow fields the size of Gettysburg. Kirstie ends up slaving in a kitchen, where she has no more knowledge of cooking than a dog knows how to yodel, and doing all the chores she's spent ten years hiring out others to do. Of the two, Alley does the best at inducing the chuckle-meter. Her city reactions to the no-nonsense ways of Amish women are by far the more funny gags, and Alley, who is finally getting her due as a comedic actress, works wonders with those fabulous eyes, rolling them and glancing away for effects.
And credit director Bryan Spicer for allowing this comedy to work without turning the Amish people into semi-sinister outsiders. These people aren't the semi-spooky Amish folks from Witness, or the inbred dunces from Kingpin. These are simple hard-working folks that have a firm belief in their spirituality, and nothing more. They offer advice to the Sextons on their marriage, about how to farm and cook and clean, and, at times, offer a passing fancy about being more liberal in their thinking, dreaming of more colorful clothing and telephones, things frowned upon by their religion.
In turn, we get a nice twist on the usual formula, having the Sextons actually start fitting in with this new culture rather than remaining outsiders. They learn to have pride in a busy, backbreaking day, or a plowed field, or a meal made from scratch. And this appreciation begins to spice up their marriage again as they learn to live with less material and more substance.
Granted, there are some major flaws in the story logic. The whole subplot of the two IRS agents chasing them is more irritating than it is effective. Larry Miller, whose drier-than-chalk sarcasm usually scores big, is wasted as one of these overzealous agents. And, I may be wrong, but I really don't think too many Amish people square-dance. And, there is this mysterious grandfather character that just appears every so often in a scene, then disappears. No one talks to him, no one even refers to him in the script. His only job, it appears, is to bust the Sexton's door open every morning at 4:45 A.M with an axe in his hand. Like some kind of Children of the Corn Cuckoo Clock, then fade away until the next day.
That being said, I ask again, in this hurried and harried time of year, we don't need perfection all the time, do we? For Richer or Poorer is good, not great, and it makes no implications that it was supposed to be great. It achieves exactly what it was supposed to do. Give an audience some easy laughs to help us unwind for a little while. Sometimes, better than average is just fine....
Copyrighted image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
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in for observation