BY SARAH VOWELL | In a recent panel discussion at New York’s 92nd Street Y called “Why Are Canadians So Funny?” moderator (and Vancouver native) Michael J. Fox mentioned a contest once sponsored by MacLean’s magazine. MacLean’s, which Fox identified as the “Canadian Time” (as is the Canadian comparative habit), once asked its readers to fill in the blank at the end of the phrase, “As Canadian as …” to counterbalance the motto “As American as apple pie.” According to Fox, the winning entry was “As Canadian as … possible under the circumstances.”
Which reminds me of a stand-up bit Jon Stewart used to do about a Canadian woman who asked him to come clean with what Americans really think of Canada. “We don’t,” he replied. Stewart is one American comedian who understands that a juicier question than “Why are Canadians so funny?” is its corollary, “Why is making fun of Canada so much fun?” As host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, Stewart recently introduced a segment on a Canadian who chews on a pig’s spleen to predict the weather by noting that Canadian culture’s gift to the world is “I don’t know, Loverboy and … stuff.”
A high comedian birth rate, however, is Canada’s one claim to cultural dominance here in “the South,” and thus, the world. The panel at the 92nd Street Y convened to discuss the mystery of why such a kind, bland country (so modest it didn’t even get around to having its own flag until 1965) would nurture so many funny men and women. Because what requires more cruel honesty, more self-absorption, more guts and glory than making a living by making other people laugh? Yet Canada is the homeland of panelists Martin Short, Eugene Levy and “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels. Not to mention oddball American favorites like Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Catherine O’Hara and all the Kids in the Hall (Dave Foley et al.).
(Confidential to Canadian readers: Please note that the word “American” will be employed herein as an adjective deriving from America, as in United States of. No offense, eh? Why, some of my best friends are Canadians …)
The evening at the Y was giddy and spontaneous — and glamorous, what with the presence of that hilarious former PBS newsman (and Canadian) Robert MacNeil in the audience. Though the panelists never quite directly answered the question of why Canadians are funny, one came away feeling that, yes, Canadians sure are funny. Over and over, their wisecracks poked at their homeland’s wimpy rep. Short recalled his excitement as a child, running downstairs to tell his parents that ABC anchormen Huntley and Brinkley had mentioned Canada in one of their evening newscasts. When Short reflected on the humility of growing up saluting Britain’s Union Jack, Eugene Levy retorted that he was just “so damn proud to be part of the Commonwealth.” Michaels deadpanned, “Benedict Arnold was one of ours.”
So what are these barbs telling us? That Canada is a New World weakling still sucking the monarchy’s teat? That Canadianness is impossible to define precisely because it only exists in opposition to American flash, American ambition, American independence, American glitz?
Pretty much.
Thus, the central concern of Canadian humor, I would argue, is self-deprecation. And not just exhibiting modesty, but playing with it, flaunting it, questioning its value, stomping it out. Think of the mantra of Mike Myers’ thinly veiled Canadian routine “Wayne’s World.” Whenever Wayne and Garth would encounter their heroes, such as Aerosmith, they’d plunge to the floor slavelike, fan their arms and whimper, “We’re not worthy!” Conversely, Carrey’s essential schtick is an over-the-top play for attention — his contortions, his drool, his constant facial freakouts all rely on the un-Canadian habit of invading others’ space. And Scott Thompson (the most fabulous Canadian) has played both sides, as Hank’s submissive, sycophantic assistant on “The Larry Sanders Show” as well as the gay Quebecois barfly narcissus with the perfect feet, Buddy Cole, on “The Kids in the Hall.” But the master of twisting and turning modesty in on itself is Martin Short.
Is there a more charming man in North America than Martin Short? A man more huggable, more adorable, more undeniably cute? Who cares if he’s always in lame movies? Martin Short isn’t about acting. Martin Short is about life, about joy, about cheek-pinching glee.
When the four panelists entered the stage at the 92nd Street Y, Fox, Michaels and Levy calmly walked out and took their seats. Short, on the other hand, pranced out and spread his arms, unabashedly begging for love. Which he got, though he could have gotten more — cash, kisses, the firstborn of every man and woman in the room. (The best place to love Short right now is on Broadway in Neil Simon’s musical “Little Me.” Playing eight characters, his virtuoso hamming is the play’s only virtue.) At the Y, Short batted back and forth between extreme self-confidence and delightful self-defeat, often in the same breath. When Michaels, coveting Short’s Order of Canada pin, asked him how he received their country’s highest civilian honor, Short looked down his nose at his former “SNL” boss and snootily whiffed, “A little thing called ‘Three Amigos.’”
While Short’s American amigos such as Steve Martin betray a barely contained inner bitterness — see Martin’s wildly believable meanie in last year’s “The Spanish Prisoner” — Short makes self-loathing enchanting. He was, in the panel, constantly shocking. He would make some mild-mannered cute quip like the one about Huntley and Brinkley, only to switch gears with the occasional strong-willed reply: When Levy went on and on interminably about doughnuts, how doughnuts mean Canada and Canada means doughnuts, Short cut him down, scolding, “It would be a shame if the only thing we came up with was that.”
Canadian comics carry within them the whiff of the exotic precisely because their very profession flies in the face of the national code. Like American communists and Jamaican bobsledders, Canadian comics seem caught between two worlds, both from their country and defiant of it. Lorne Michaels, who has had more influence on American television comedy than anyone in the last quarter-century, suavely summed up the northern condition. “In a country where civility and moderation are celebrated,” he said, “show business seemed like showing off.” He asserted, for example, that a Canadian would never have made a film called “It’s a Wonderful Life” because “that would be bragging.” He envisioned the Canadian version would have been titled “It’s an All Right Life.”
“Playing by Heart” is one of those movies whose message might be summed up by borrowing a line from Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau: “Eeet’s all a part of life’s rich pageant.” You know, a picture that mixes laughs and tears while working its way toward the little life lessons it wants to impart. As soon as it begins, with Angelina Jolie adapting the famous line about music — “talking about love is like dancing about architecture” — we know that we’re going to be watching as the characters learn what it is to love: the joy, the tears, the discoveries and the goodbyes. And you might be tempted to sneak out for a few drinks until they get it all sorted out.
Writer-director Willard Carroll (whom I’m always tempted to refer to as Millard Fillmore) employs a structure that cuts from character to character in a series of seemingly self-contained vignettes that finally — surprise! — all come together. Each has his or her own neuroses or secret or insecurity to overcome. Watching “Playing by Heart,” I got the feeling that Carroll had sat down with a stack of women’s magazines, scanned the advice columns and compiled a list of problems to give his characters: loveless marriage; too insecure about self to trust men; opens up too easily; jealous over spouse’s old flame. And, like any manipulator at the helm of these life’s rich pageant specials, Carroll makes sure to include disease and death. Apparently, unable to decide, he tosses in AIDS and a brain tumor.
I’m not unable to enjoy movies like this. I had a perfectly good time at “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (even though Hugh Grant wound up with the wrong woman), but the director, Mike Newell, was smart enough not to lay on either the homilies or the heartbreak too thick. In “Playing by Heart,” when a character announces that she’s unable to cry, you know that the ultimate destination on this tour of the heart is Niagara Falls. For a movie that pretends to be an open, understanding examination of love and relationships, its view is pretty traditional. Madeleine Stowe (an actress who works too seldom and here has not nearly enough to do) seeks refuge from her loveless marriage and unimaginative husband in weekly clandestine meetings with her lover (Anthony Edwards). They have a great time in bed and she’s content to leave things at that, avoiding expectations and jealousy. But, of course, she has to learn what she’s missing, i.e., that sex without love can never be satisfying.
Carroll isn’t a complete clod. The movie is smoothly made and a few of his touches — like revealing the connections between the characters by their separate use of a distinctive slang word — are clever. I loved it that his women characters are all pet-mad. There are some absolutely magnificent dogs running through “Playing by Heart,” and even a one-eyed tiger cat who’s a mangy, grumpy-faced charmer. One of the pooches, a mastiff named Barley, provides a great sight gag when Jon Stewart (who must be all of about 5-foot-7) arrives at a date’s apartment and the enormous friendly mutt greets him by standing on his hind legs and placing his paws on Stewart’s shoulders. Carroll has been lucky enough to get Vilmos Zsigmond to shoot the movie, and he gives the L.A. bars and clubs and cushy houses a nice warm glow. (It’s a humane, lived-in West Coast version of the sort of upscale look Woody Allen goes for.) And he’s assembled a remarkable cast.
Unfortunately, working with material like this, what the actors avoid doing is more important than what they actually do. As a couple nearing their 40th anniversary, Sean Connery (still the most beautiful man in the movies) and Gena Rowlands (who has developed a relaxed, believable presence) make the prospect of growing old together look pretty damn good. They don’t go for the obvious heart tuggers Carroll has provided them with, but I don’t particularly relish seeing either one standing ankle-deep in mush and trying to keep their feet dry.
The best scenes are the ones between Gillian Anderson and Stewart. It’s a pity that Stewart, one of the few recent comics whose sense of irony isn’t inhumanly superior, has wound up in the midst of the sneer fest that is Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” “Playing by Heart” suggests he could be a terrific romantic comic lead. He manages to play a nice guy willing to put up with the insecurities of the woman he’s attracted to without seeming like a sap; that he’s only willing to put up to a point gives him a nice edge. If there’s such a thing as common-sense ardor, Stewart has it. He and Anderson are charming together. There’s a sweet moment when he nuzzles her neck in the bathroom after their first night together and she breaks into a grin showing a mouth full of toothpaste. Anderson takes a conceit and makes it into somebody we all know: the smart, capable person hounded by the doubts she does her damnedest not to let show. Anderson captures someone whose braininess has made her a mass of consistent contradictions. She screws up in completely recognizable ways, as Eric Rohmer’s characters often do.
There’s one other notable performance. As a young scenemaker who keeps landing in one bad relationship after another, Jolie doesn’t exactly avoid the pitfalls of the material she’s given. But her performance is flabbergasting. Jolie appears to be one of those actors so unembarrassed by emotion that she just leaps right into a part and somehow manages to filter out the calculation (maybe because she doesn’t see the calculation). Everything about her — eyes, cheeks, lips — seems full, ripe, bursting with energy, and she talks with the speed of a buzzsaw, but a buzzsaw that purrs. The character could easily seem shallow, a club kid who pours out her insides before she thinks, but I kept looking forward to Jolie’s scenes whenever she wasn’t onscreen. Jolie is a smartass whirligig, her delivery perfectly poised between the heart on her sleeve and the martini in her hand.
Just whiskers away from being really snazzy, “The Faculty” still manages to make for a fun night out. Though the movie hasn’t been the “Scream”-sized hit the producers were hoping for (though it was penned by “Scream” writer Kevin Williamson), it’s still playing in the theaters, and if you’re looking for a respite from all the prestige holiday releases, you might try it. There’s something about its honest, good-natured junkiness that feels like a relief.
The plot weds “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” to teen-movie schlock. An evil alien thingy (the sort of thing Slate’s David Edelstein once called “a slimy wangdoodle”) comes down and starts taking over high school teachers. Like the pods in “Body Snatchers,” this puppy’s got global domination on its mind. Soon the aliens are taking over the kids, starting with the most popular and influential. Enter our heroes, nerds, stoners and screw-ups who begin to suspect something is going on and find themselves outrunning the fast-advancing alien hordes.
The idea of having outsiders battle the forces of conformity doesn’t have the resonance it did in Philip Kaufman and W.D. Richter’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” largely because these victims don’t have the oddball singularity that Veronica Cartwright and Jeff Goldblum and Donald Sutherland did in that picture. There’s the well-intentioned kid who wants to give up the football team for academics (Shawn Wayne Hatosy), the scandal-hunting editor of the school paper (Jordana Brewster), the sunny Southern belle (Laura Harris) transplanted from Atlanta, the neglected rich kid (Josh Hartnett) who turns a fast buck by keeping his classmates in dope and condoms and the whipping-boy nerd (Elijah Wood). They’re agreeable enough, just a little bland. The exception is Clea DuVall’s Stokely, with her freckled face as hard as a piece of marble some cynical artist sculpted with a permanent sneer. Stokely dresses in black (natch), tells everyone she’s a lesbian and can’t ask for the time of day without making it sound like an accusation. Stokely is the sort of kid who makes teachers and parents and even her schoolmates throw up their hands in frustration. She isn’t buying any of the high school spirit horseshit. And you’d have to be a creep not to love her.
(A word about the much pooh-poohed promotional deal that clothes the young cast entirely in Tommy Hilfiger duds: I realize the pressure commercial sponsors can exert on movies. But I’d be more concerned if the pictures they gravitated to weren’t such blatantly commercial enterprises to begin with. I recently listened to an academic railing against the product placements in “Godzilla.” But who goes to “Godzilla” expecting artistic freedom? Academics, that’s who.)
I didn’t much care for Williamson’s script for “Scream.” The acclaim for it as postmodern satire struck me as a sham, a way of getting by with a lousy movie by telling the audience you know you’re making a lousy movie. And splatter-movie violence (for me, at least) has nothing to do with the sensuous pleasure of being scared; it’s always just been unpleasant. But here, after the requisite gory opening, director Robert Rodriguez (“Desperado,” “From Dawn Till Dusk”) finds a good cartoon tone for the violence. When Hartnett rips the blade off a paper cutter, it’s so outsized and ludicrous you just find yourself giggling at the carnage you know is a few frames away. There’s a striking effect of a goldfish-sized alien sprouting willowy red feelers in a tank of water, and a couple other effects that are doozies: a full-sized alien changing — in the blink of an eye — to its human form in the school swimming pool. And later, as it walks in its human form, casting a many-tentacled shadow.
It’s too bad Williamson didn’t bother to make explicit the allure of turning into an alien (it appears to give the women teachers a makeover, but doesn’t do so much for the men). He just uses it as a pop metaphor for conformity. But his swiping of the “Body Snatchers” premise (or his liftings from “Carrie,” “Blue Velvet” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” among others) didn’t much bother me. And he’s got a blessedly light touch with the teen-alienation stuff — the movie doesn’t indulge in any John Hughes-style sanctimony. Some of the dialogue among the kids has the authentic heartlessness of high school, and several of his pop culture references are up-to-the-minute clever without feeling showy.
The appeal of high school movies is the promise that we’re getting some revenge for what we went through ourselves, and the quick sketches of the faculty deliver it. Here are nastily funny caricatures of every hack, burnout and do-gooder you remember: the history teacher (Daniel Von Bargen) with the perpetually loosened tie who seems to be melting — Jabba-like — into his own resentment; the young science teacher (the dry Jon Stewart) who wants to come on like a hip dude; the brisk, competent principal (Bebe Neuwirth) who’s frazzling around the edges; and the easily intimidated drudge (Famke Janssen). The movie could do more with the football coach (Robert Patrick); perhaps the joke is that he’s an asshole before an alien gets anywhere near him. But Piper Laurie’s drama teacher — a dimpled mess one day, fretting about getting the money to put on “Guys and Dolls,” and a coolly efficient, apple-cheeked monster the next — is a flaky triumph.
It’s problematic that the heroes discover a solution that will allow the people who’ve been taken over to become human once again. The picture might have seemed too hopeless without it (they’d have lost all their family and friends), but it does prevent the staging of a kids vs. teachers showdown where they let things rip. It’s unlikely that “The Faculty” will give teens (the ones not prevented from getting in by the R rating) the rapt pleasure or shivers of recognition that “Carrie” gave an earlier generation of high schoolers. It’s hard to imagine them sitting through this picture the way some of us watched Carrie killing off her tormentors, sighing in perfect contentment: “At last, someone understands me.” And only intermittently does “The Faculty” affect us emotionally. “The Faculty” doesn’t have the brains or the heart or the imagination you can find week to week on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But it’s an awfully enjoyable, hip little B-movie. And when the heroes are snorting up homemade no-doze in order to save the day, it’s almost subversive. That’s school spirit I can get behind.
