Moviegoer Diary: Health, Funny People

HEALTH

Plot In A Nutshell
Robert Altman’s little-seen 1980 satire, set in a Florida luxury hotel, about behind-the-scenes chicanery as an American health organization prepares to elect a new president.

Thoughts
“What is this an allegory for?” asks Dick Cavett, playing himself in Robert Altman’s Health (aka HealtH, aka H.E.A.L.T.H.). That’s the question that’ll be on anyone’s mind as they watch this odd little satire, one of the hardest titles to track down from Altman’s late-’70s wandering-the-wilderness period. There are enough references in the film to Adlai Stevenson to suggest Altman meant it in part to be an allegory for the 1956 American presidential election, but somehow that’s kind of an unsatisfying answer.

The Stevenson figure in the film is Isabella Garnell (Glenda Jackson), a humourless, deeply moral ascetic who apparently lives solely on hot water and whose every public utterance seems designed to be as long and tedious as possible. (Even when she’s on the roof of the hotel and speaking through a bullhorn, people find her boring.) The Eisenhower figure (although some critics say she reminds them more of Reagan) is Esther Brill (Lauren Bacall), a hearty platitude-spouter who claims to be an 83-year-old virgin and who has a disconcerting habit of lapsing unpredictably into coma-like trances, often in mid-sentence. There’s a third candidate too, played by Paul Dooley, but he mostly devotes himself to heckling the others from the sidelines and doing what he can to attract attention to himself.

It’s never clear exactly why it matters who runs this health organization, or what the stakes of this election are, but I suppose Altman likes it that way — part of the joke is that everything that happens at this convention is of no consequence whatsoever. (At the end of the film, we see a new convention arriving at the hotel, one for hypnotists, and it comes complete with its own TV host to cover it — Dinah Shore, playing herself. One more pointless distraction, Altman seems to be saying.)

There’s humour in almost all of Altman’s work — that’s one of his most appealing qualities as a director — and yet, paradoxically, some of his least successful films are the ones where he sets out primarily to be funny. Health’s most overt stabs at humour fall pretty flat — I’m thinking of the running gag of Bacall’s trances, the way he has Henry Gibson play most of his scenes in drag (an forerunner of the awful Danny Aiello drag scenes in Ready to Wear), the hot-to-trot nurse played by Diane Stilwell who won’t stop talking about her orgasms, all the extras wandering around the background in vegetable costumes, and a really terrible scene where Carol Burnett discovers a dead body in the hotel pool and leaps into James Garner’s arms like he was Lyle Waggoner.

But while the gags in Health might not be funny, the rhythm of the scenes often is. For a diehard Altman fan like myself, it almost doesn’t matter if the movie is one of his best; it’s pleasurable enough just sinking into the groove of his trademark overlapping dialogue, or watching one of his actors perform an unexpected solo — like Donald Moffat, cast here as a belligerent Texan instead of one of his usual New England patriarchs, or Alfre Woodard, playing a hotel employee venting her frustration at these health nuts who’ve taken over her building.

Altman also gets a lot of laughs through that editing trick he perfected in Nashville, where an actor sneaks in a quick non sequitur comment a split-second before he cuts to the next scene. It’s a style of comic dialogue that reminds me of Doonesbury — which seems appropriate, since Altman would collaborate with Garry Trudeau on Tanner ’88 a few years later, a much more successful political satire for which Health seems like a dry run. (The theme song from Tanner, a jingle called “Exercise Your Right to Vote,” even makes a brief appearance in Health.)

For a movie with such a lousy reputation, Health is an enjoyable curiosity for Altman completists. Of course, it probably helps that Lauren Bacall reminds me of my grandmother, Carol Burnett reminds me of my mother, and I read Dick Cavett’s autobiography about a dozen times when I was a teenager. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like Altman really had anything important to say here — for all I know, the movie was simply a convenient excuse for him to hang out in Florida for a couple of months with Lauren Bacall. I won’t begrudge him the trip, but of course, I’m not one of the executives at 20th Century Fox who shelled out $6 millions for it.

RATING: 3/5

* * * * *

FUNNY PEOPLE

Plot In A Nutshell
Judd Apatow’s 2009 comedy/drama about a misanthropic superstar comedian (Adam Sandler) who, upon learning he has a rare blood disease, hires a struggling standup comic (Seth Rogen) to be his assistant/paid friend.

Thoughts
Adam Sandler is even better in Funny People than he was in Punch-Drunk Love, the role that first earned him credibility as an actor among critics — and his character is an even more ruthless deconstruction of his comic persona. All of Sandler’s comic tics are here — the high-pitched, half-mumbled funny voices, the weird mix of adolescent gawkiness and berserk adult rage — but here, it’s clear that they’re only tools this quasi-sociopathic man has for dealing with other people. Sandler is playing a man for whom “being funny” is as reflexive (and joyless) as breathing, and the fact that he doesn’t even have to try to crack people up makes him hate them even more.

I might be saying this only because I’m currently rewatching the second season of Mad Men, but Sandler reminds me a little of Jimmy Barrett, the insult comic played by Patrick Fischler — everything these two men say is more hostile than funny, but everyone laughs anyway. There’s also a little bit of Jerry Lewis in there from The King of Comedy — in that simmering glare of contempt that Lewis keeps giving Robert De Niro. At least Lewis was a grownup, though; Sandler is a manchild, a Jerry Langford who’s so lonely he hires his own Rupert Pupkin just to have someone to hang out with.

I kind of wish Apatow had made the whole movie about Sandler and the stifling bubble-world of the mega-famous, but then again, he’s probably to genial a filmmaker to make a movie that dark and creepy. Apatow doesn’t have Billy Wilder’s cynical streak — he could never make a movie like Sunset Boulevard. (If he did, he’d put in a lot more long scenes of Norma Desmond’s bridge buddies hanging out and making dick jokes.)

Instead, Sandler isn’t even the movie’s main character. That would be Seth Rogen, whose inadequacies as an actor I’ve always been inclined to excuse, but whose inability to project any emotion other than puppydog enthusiasm (and puppydog hurt feelings) really robs Funny People of much of its potential impact. Apatow has a lot of subtle things he wants to say in this movie about how becoming famous often requires you to sacrifice a certain amount of your humanity, but Rogen’s one of those actors who’s just never going to give you anything but the surface reading of a line. He’s not a subtext kind of guy — he can ad-lib funny lines all day along, but he’s not an actor whose ad libs delve any deeper into the character he’s playing.

Of course, Rogen doesn’t even get to ad lib much during the film’s final third, in which Sandler attempts to win back the heart of his ex-wife (Leslie Mann), who’s now living with an Australian lout played by Eric Bana. (If the first two-thirds of Funny People feel like Apatow’s version of a Cameron Crowe movie, the last third feels like Apatow’s version of Blake Edwards.)

I would be very surprised if Funny People did even half the business of Apatow’s earlier films, Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Sandler’s character is far too prickly, and Rogen doesn’t make his relationship with him interesting enough to give you a way into the material emotionally. But Sandler’s willingness to commit to this project so fully is impressive: if Punch-Drunk Love exposed the dark side of Sandler’s characters, Funny People exposes the dark side of the man himself. You don’t make movies like Click and Bedtime Stories without feeling a whole lot of self-loathing.

Stray Observation
I was pleased to note that the script supervisor on Funny People was Anne Rapp, who wrote a pair of Robert Altman movies in the’90s, Cookie's Fortune and Dr. T and the Women. I've been wondering what became of her.

RATING: 3/5