Fun With Dick and Jane?

What a great premise for a movie! A satire based on that square, old, elementary school textbook about Dick and Jane and Spot. Except for Jesus and his entourage, and Mother Goose and hers, Dick and Jane must be the most recognizable characters in storydom. And their “story” is so perfectly cornball; it’s the epitome of moralistic and chauvinistic platitudes. What more could a satirist ask?

I salivate buckets just thinking about the possibilities for this film. Then I grind my teeth in rage thinking about what actually happened. The artistic community ought to sue the entire crew involved in this film for ruining this material for the rest of our lifetimes.

Guys who get an idea like this have a moral obligation not to screw it up. What makes Dr. Strangelove such a monumental achievement is that Stanley Kubrick tackled probably the major black-comic-satiric idea of the past twenty years; and he brought it off successfully. Can you think of anybody doing a better job on the bomb, the American military, and the entire human race?

Fun with Dick and Jane is almost the exact opposite. Here we have probably the best satiric idea since Dr. Strangelove, and all you can say about the film is: if only. If only the writers were more imaginative. If only the director had a sense of style and comic pacing. If only the actors had been chosen with more care. Etc., etc. You can get a sense of how mediocre this movie is by looking at the ad campaign: “Bonnie and Clyde they ain’t.” Had Fun with Dick and Jane truly lived up to its potential, it wouldn’t have had to lean on another movie for support. Great movies—especially comedies and satires—are supposed to be original.

Fun with Dick and Jane is devastating proof of how defunct is the old Hollywood studio system. The names remain (Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Columbia—all controlled by conglomerates) but that’s all. The genius of the studios is gone. You can condemn the wily and tyranical old movie moguls for a lot of things, but I doubt if they would have let this movie get past them. Somebody would have seen its potential and shepherded it through production. For they had something back then that is missing in today’s Hollywood—talent to burn. Forty years ago a producer could assemble and re-assemble his package of writers, directors, actors and technical people until a movie idea was fully realized. Today this can’t happen. Studios don’t have the massive stables of talent from which to draw. And blockbuster movies and slick TV shows now get first priority.

Although Fun with Dick and Jane is a major disappointment, it’s obviously not the worst film of the year. We Winnipeggers may have weird taste in movies, but we’re not about to keep absolute dreck around town for seventeen weeks (and more; it’ll probably be back for a spell on the drive-in circuit), no matter who worked on it (two Canadians: Ted Kotcheff and Mordecai Richler).

There are some very good moments in this movie. Unfortunately they are mostly in the script and almost ruined in the execution. The drug-store robbery is a brilliant idea. Dick, flustered and still trying to commit his first successful crime, collides with a door and then lets his pistol slide out of his belt and down the leg of his too-tight pants. Because of this he gets tongue-tied. The overly solicitous pharmacist, seeing Jane duck down in the stolen getaway car, misinterprets Dick’s awkwardness and gets out $8.50 worth of prophylactics. Dick vainly tries to retrieve the pistol through his fly but then abandons the robbery and buys the proffered goods. In its precise delineation of this archetypal confrontation, its swipe at the much-deserving smarminess of drugstore personnel, and its spoofing of the Freudian gun-equals-phallus cliche, the scene deserves to be singled out as one of the better moments in recent satire. Too bad it starts so limply and too bad that George Segal overdoes the gun-retrieval business to the point of incredulity.

The repossession of the bushes and plants and carpet-lawn is also a very clever conceit—especially the “Ricker”: when her snoopy neighbors come over to see what is going on, Jane turns the tables on the landscapers by ordering them to take everything out because it’s not what she ordered.

But almost every good moment is accompanied, preceded, or followed by a real clunker. Some of the troubles are in the script. I don’t think anybody could have brought off the scene in which Dick Gautier plays a greedy and gaudy EST-style evangelist. But a wiser or more savvy director probably would have deleted it. A better director most certainly would have handled the clumsy-Jane-ruins-the-fashion-show scene with more finesse. A better director would not have included the gratuitous business of Jane using the commode. A better director … I’ll not belabour the point. Suffice it to say that Canadian directors rarely get the opportunity to do comedies—because comedies demand more time, money, and experience. Ted Kotcheff probably got this property on the strength of his success with Duddy Kravitz. Somebody was mislead.

The director doesn’t deserve all the blame for what goes wrong in Fun with Dick and Jane—unless he had something to do with the casting. For the casting is the major fault with this movie. Jane Fonda is totally wrong. She’s personally too independent an individual and identified too strongly with anti-storybook-Jane concerns. This makes her yoga exercises, her multi coloured socks and her decision to give up ski lessons, French wine, and the Book-of-the-Month Club seem phony. Only Jane Fonda acting would do such things—which deadens the effect of the scenes.

George Segal is so competent he’s transparent. He’s the original invisible man. He can act, but he never brings anything to a role. He has no soul, no depth, no impact.

What this movie needs is an actor and actress who embody the grown-up Dick and Jane storybook characters. It needs people as vapidly “Amuricun” as possible—people who will give the script an extra dimension and some credibility. For without this edge the story is frivolous. And it could have been important.

Who would you choose as the perfect, real-life adult embodiments of Dick and Jane? How about Sybil Shepherd and Peter Bogdanovich? How about Marisa Berenson and almost anybody? (Stanley Kubrick chose Ryan O’Neal, but Marisa’s so insipid a character that she could do in any partner.) My choice, and I admit it’s a bit unconventional and chancey, would be Watergate’s John Dean and his paperdoll wife, Maureen. After all, a good director can coax a good film performance out of almost anyone.

Gene Walz is the Film Editor of Arts Manitoba. He also directs the Film Studies programme at the University of Manitoba.