Cinema
Happy families
Mark Steyn
The Golden Age of pop culture has been ill-served by motion pictures: Greystoke (that's to say, Tarzan) and Bat- man Returns persisted in trying to turn good junk into bad art, and passing the cor- ner store and seeing in the window Batman Returns the Video I can only say I know how he felt.
Mirroring precisely Batman's genera- tional progression, The Addams Family was born in the Thirties, translated to television in the Sixties and sold to Hollywood in the Nineties. Its original home, the New Yorker, sniffy about association with anything so vulgar as a hit TV show, banished Charles Addams's characters from its pages until just before his death in 1988. By now, with the sequel to the movie of the sitcom of the cartoons, there should be nothing left. Yet, unlike Batman, whose comic book, TV and film realisations have nothing in common except the guy's passport details, there's a strong sense in Addams Family Values that Charles Addams's original values endure.
But then Addams was always in with a better shot. His jokes were basic TV sketchwriter gags, operating on a simple inversion principle (Morticia to Gomez, after discovering their child being a helpful boy scout: 'Well, he certainly doesn't take after my side of the family') but elevated by those wonderfully Gothic drawings, derived from horror pics. The gags were made for TV; the pictures look like a film set any- way: here's one you'd have to be really dumb to screw up.
Barry Sonnenfeld and his writer Paul Rudnick keep things simple, with a story that's little more than three sitcom plots bounced along by some slick set-pieces: plot A, Morticia gives birth to a mousta- chioed baby; plot B, a bosom-toting pur- pose gal puts the moves on Uncle Fester; plot C, the kids, Wednesday and Pugsley, are sent to summer camp. The jokes are good — Gomez: 'He has my father's eyes', Morticia: 'Gomez, take them out of his mouth'. But they're all the more effective for being played straight, and pans don't come any deader than Anjelica Houston's as Morticia or Christina Ricci's as Wednes- day (if we have to have kiddie actors, this one should be giving master-classes).
Steering between the nudging, leering excesses of contemporary Hollywood corn- edy and the ghastly patronising of their own characters that you get in, say, Mike Leigh's films, all these fine performances from admired straight actors like Raul Julia are following a basic comedic princi- ple. Borrowing more than just the TV show's finger-snappy theme song, the movie defers to the first rule of sitcoms: your main characters form the show's 'nor- mality% it's the outsiders who are weird.
As the title suggests, this is what gives Addams Family Values a topicality their creator could never have foreseen. Even with a disembodied hand (Thing) and a granny with dead birds in her hair, the Addams family are probably the least dys- functional family in America. Gomez and Morticia are blissfully happy, and their lush, extravagant tango is probably the most romantic dance scene you'll see this year; they love their children and Uncle Fester, and their house is a genuine family home. Outside, meanwhile, America is going mad, with camp counsellors who sen- tence the insufficiently perky to 'a little time in the harmony hut'; cocky rich kids haunted only by memories of their pre- plastic surgery noses; trashy self-help authors peddling Fester books like Strange Men and the Women Who Avoid Them; and Debbie the gold-digging nanny who, given a Malibu Barbie rather than a Ballerina Barbie for her birthday, incinerates both her parents.
Joan Cusack, the kookie best pal sup- porting a much duller actress in Working Girl, gets the best role of her career here, teasing, pouting, wiggling and fluttering her way into Fester's heart. 'Isn't he a ladykiller?' squeals Debbie. 'Acquitted!' declares Gomez. And you sort of believe him. For all the carnage in their wake (including an unfortunate stag-party babe who climbs into the cake before it's baked) and the S&M sex life of Gomez and Morti- cia, the Addams are innocents. They're dis- appointed by Debbie because she breaks the ultimate Addams value: it's not that she's a serial killer, but that it's family she's killing serially. Even her taste in decor — 'I still think it looks better on you.'
the flashy pastel opulence of her ersatz mansion — contrasts badly with the under- stated decay of the Addams home. Present- ed with Addams family values or modern America's, it's no contest.
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