Mid-career crisis
Mark Steyn
Bruce Almighty 12A, selected cinemas
Tn Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey plays a Ireporter on Channel 7 Eyewitness News in Buffalo desperate to get the big job when the station's veteran anchorman retires. I was thrilled when I first heard of this 'concept'. The real veteran anchor on Channel 7 Buffalo is a guy called Iry Weinstein and he retired a couple of years ago after holding down the Eyewitness News gig since 1964. Like most southern Ontarians of his generation, Caney grew up at a time when there was very little TV available in Canada and most of the stuff you wanted to watch came from across the border in Buffalo,
CBC news was like BBC news: sober fellows talking about interest rates and foreign policy, But Eyewitness News was another world, beginning with Irv's plaid jackets, which were garish even when the station was still in black and white. As the title suggests, the idea was to be on the scene as the story broke out, or at any rate before the cops showed up. Their staple was fires, and, fortunately for them, Buffalo was the most combustible city on the planet. To this day when I hear the names of the holy trinity of Buffalo suburbs — Lackawanna, Tonawanda and Cheektowaga — in my mind's eye they're always ablaze, as they blazed so reliably night after night through the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and beyond, while Iry recounted the valiant efforts of the local fire department — or, as he called them, 'Buffalo blazebusters' — to subdue them. A fruitless task, as the following night Cheektowaga would be ablaze all over again. I remember when Iry retired and a Lady wrote to the Toronto Star about a shopping trip to Buffalo: her automobile had caught fire, which was kind of a bummer, but she was thrilled when she got back to her motel to switch on Channel 7 and see Iry breathlessly announcing that Buffalo blazebusters were battling a car fire on Gennessee Street and there was her bright red Monaco engulfed in flames. That's the full Buffalo experience.
In America, the city is a synonym for loserville, but in Canada it's treasured for the poetry Iry found in decay and decline. Eyewitness News was a world where 'pistolpacking punks pop a plumber into the pavement', and where Irv's nightly greeting — 'It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?' — was a reminder that you and your family could be catapulted into this lurid universe at any moment. I wasn't surprised to hear that, promoting the movie on Channel 7, Jim Carrey could still do his Iry Weinstein impression, as he did when he was a kid in Newmarket, Ontario, and Eyewitness News was his window to the great republic next door in all its seductive horror. One reason why Canadian comics prosper in American pop culture is because they grow up watching it at one remove, which is one way to see the comedy in it.
But that was a long time ago for Carrey. He gets $25 million a picture now, and those rates tend to preclude gleeful horn
mage to childhood icons on the local news, Though the exteriors were filmed in Buffalo, Bruce Almighty is a factory-line Hollywood product set in Anytown USA. Carrey plays Bruce, the fellow who's stuck doing Channel 7's stories 'on the lighter side', like the bakery that's made the world's largest cookie, which Bruce uses as a metaphor for the ingredients that make Buffalo 'such a sweet place to live'. But you'd be hard put to find Jim Carrey and Jennifer Aniston's yuppie apartment anywhere within the city limits, and unlikely to run into any of the downtown traffic jams that so plague Carrey in this movie.
Does that matter? Well, in the end, yes. Not only does Bruce not get the anchor's gig, but he discovers he hasn't while he's in the middle of his live report from Niagara Falls and he doesn't take it well, handing back to the studio with 'I'm Bruce Nolan for Eyewitness News. Back to you, tuckers.' Out in the street, he rages against God for ruining his life, and the Lord appears. He is a black man in a white suit, played by Morgan Freeman, and He tells Bruce that, if he doesn't like the way things are, he should try being God himself. So Bruce is now Bruce Almighty, using his powers to cause live monkeys to appear out of his enemies' butts, make his girlfriend Grace's breasts bigger, and re-enact the parting of the Red Sea in his tomato soup.
The film-makers are so eager to invite comparison with h's A Wonderful Life they include a clip of the movie. But the more appropriate point of reference is Groundhog Day, which has a similar trajectory: a shallow guy on a local news show bored by covering cutesie events gets trapped in some weird situation and has to learn how to become a better person. Groundhog Day did it more effectively, in part because it made more use of the specifics of Punxsutawney than this film makes of Buffalo.
But more than that, Tom Shadyac's direction can't quite hook up the twin halves of the movie. Calling on the Almighty to rescue you from your midcareer crisis seems shallow, and nothing in the picture quite justifies it. By the end, the film seems like penance for the sins of Carrey's recent career choices: like Bruce, he's felt frustrated at being trapped as the funny guy; like Bruce, he's tried to go serious (The Majestic) and bombed. But the film's moral — that you can find contentment in small modest ordinary things — is negated by the wearying zaniness of Carrey's comedic excess. Whatever passing box-office success this film enjoys, all it will do in the long run is further advance Carrey as the classic definition of the star who rises without trace. Whatever the dreams of that kid in Newmarket watching incendiary Iry Weinstein, I'll bet this bland project wasn't one of them.
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