This is one of
those quiet classics. I rarely hear anyone talk about this movie (and I hear a
lot of people talk about movies). It has a generic enough title that it can
easily be confused with several other movies. In fact, I'm about 20% sure that
I thought this was another movie when I put it in my queue. Still, it is an
incredibly respected movie. It's in a National Film Archive. In 2000 AFI listed
it as the 26th best American comedy of all time. While I don't trust Rotten
Tomatoes before maybe the mid 1990s, this does have a Tomatometer score in the
high 90s (Then again, Shoot to Kill
is 100%).
For me, the movie
breaks down into 1 positive, 1 negative, and 1 undecided.
The positive: Peter Sellers is
really, really good in this movie. Pulling off that steady monotone for an
entire film is extremely difficult. I love that during the closing credits, the
movie uses outtakes from a single scene to show how difficult it was for
Sellers not to break in the middle of the scene. I have great respect for what
Sellers does in the movie.
The negative: I don't buy this
story for a second, even as satire or farce. The joke of the movie is that we know
that Sellers' Chance isn't all there - he's simple if not outright stupid - but
the people in the movie mostly don't realize this. I didn't buy into this idea.
It didn't work at all for me. Now, smart readers may be wondering, "Alex,
isn't this exactly what you have your One Big Leap rule
for?" Well, yes. I do give any movie one thing that I just have to accept:
one contrivance or coincidence that's I'd otherwise call bad writing. In this
case, the Big Leap is that people don't pick up on Chance's oddness. The
problem I have is that people are aware of it. It's just that they are
selectively chosen. The realtor knows it. The house's old maid knows it.
Assorted others do too. But, the Rands (Shirley MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas)
don't. The President doesn't. Most unbelievable of all, when he appears on a
late night talk show, just about everybody is entranced by him. I don't like
the inconsistency. The people who do and don't see through him are picked
randomly. I suppose this could be chalked up to satire. That could explain it,
but it doesn't make me like it. I don't think it's smart satire, I guess. There
too much farce. Too many conversations that have to be said in an exact,
unnatural way for the misunderstandings to work. I hate that kind of stuff
unless it's in service of a great punchline. I couldn't find any punchlines in
this great enough to be worth the suspension of disbelief.
The undecided: That ending. I
didn't know what to make of the ending when I watched it. What's the meaning of
him seemingly walking on water? I wasn't sure, so I looked it up. While there's
no definitive interpretation, I have concluded one thing for certain: it
changes nothing about how I felt about the rest of the film before it. If I
bought into the rest of what the movie was doing, then yes, Chance appearing to
literally walk on water would blow my brain with possibilities and bump this
from an A to an A+. For me however, it doesn't answer much. My questions are
more along the lines of "why do some people see through him and not
others?" or "why did it take so long for him to stumble into this
success?". I don't particularly care why his shtick is working in a
general sense or if there's something supernatural about him. I think this is a brilliant ending in an abstract sense, but it was wasted on me.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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