My Year of Flops (9 page)

Between all the confessions, breakups, and impromptu reconciliations, the couple somehow finds the time to sneak into a screening of
Salaam Bombay!
where Nick attempts to win his wife back by going down on her in a theater. (Incidentally, if this Case File accomplishes nothing else, I'd like it to at least introduce “seeing
Salaam Bombay!
” as a euphemism for cunnilingus.) Judging by Deborah's orgasmic glow exiting the theater, it's safe to say that Nick is the undisputed king of seeing
Salaam Bombay!

For the wealthy power couples of
Scenes From A Mall,
drinking in the misery of street urchins from Bombay is just another consumer choice in a pop world teeming with them. As the day progresses, the tension and resentments bubbling under the surface of the Fifers' marriage burst into plain view.

At its best,
Scenes
captures how the mundane details of a long-shared history can pull a couple together while simultaneously tearing them apart. Nick longs for the freedom and excitement of single life yet is reluctant to leave the security and comfort of the nest. But it ultimately doesn't seem to matter whether these self-absorbed suburban monsters break up or stick around to torment each other for decades to come.

It's easy to see why
Scenes From A Mall
failed. Its characters run the gamut from unlikeable to vaguely monstrous, and it's hard to muster up sympathy for smug adulterers.
Scenes
also falls victim to the Parental-Sex Rule: Unless you're a 17-year-old newly adopted by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, you don't want to imagine your parents having sex, especially if they're Woody Allen and Bette Midler. We want to imagine our parents as perfectly asexual, as devoid of genitalia or sexual impulses as Barbie and Ken.

Late in the film, Nick, his surfboard, Deborah, and Fabio all squeeze into an elevator together while a frustrated Deborah sexually
violates Fabio with her eyes. In moments like this,
Scenes From A Mall
almost gets by on novelty value alone. And there are quiet, subtly powerful moments sprinkled throughout, as Midler's and Allen's faces reveal the extreme psychological and social cost of dissolving a marriage, however troubled.

Scenes
never gains any traction as a comedy or drama, as an anti–Woody Allen movie or a Woody Allen movie of a different color. The couple's dark afternoon of the soul is more like an extended shrug. Yet the film retains the same strange morbid fascination as Allen's sad little ponytail, that telltale symptom of a man immersed in a midlife crisis. The
Scenes
DVD is depressingly spare, but I'd like to imagine that Mazursky shot at least one scene of Allen riding the surfboard he carries throughout the film as a visual gag. Woody Allen surfing: Now
that
would be funny.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Book-Exclusive $20 Million Case File: The Cable Guy

As a child, it blew my mind that my father made something like $36,000 a year as a government bureaucrat. That worked out to almost a hundred dollars
a day
! To an 8-year-old, that represented an unimaginable bounty. I could barely comprehend what it would be like to have a hundred dollars for even a single day, let alone to make a hundred dollars
every day,
even on your days off. For that kind of money, my dad could buy six-packs of Mountain Dew
and
beer, a pizza, a cassette of the hottest new rock album, the latest
Playboy,
a Samantha Fox poster, and a stack of
Mad
magazines, then spend his entire day playing videogames before finishing off the night with a movie, popcorn,
and
soda, all without running out of money! This is how I imagined adults would live their lives if they weren't weighed down with children and families and stupid desk jobs.

So you can imagine how impressed I was to discover that my favorite movie stars and baseball players make a million dollars
or more
every year. It somehow seemed unfair that someone should be paid such inconceivable sums to play sports before adoring fans, or romance the world's most beautiful women.

Mind-boggling salaries for athletes and artists are so commonplace these days that we've become jaded. But when it was announced that Jim Carrey would be making $20 million for his role in 1996's
The Cable Guy,
society responded the way my 8-year-old self did upon learning that my dad made a hundred dollars a day.
Twenty million dollars?

It was one thing for Harrison Ford to make that much. In his films, he saved the world repeatedly. It would be churlish to begrudge him the spoils of his make-pretend heroism. But when
The Cable Guy
went into production, Carrey was only a few years removed from being the white guy on
In Living Color.
Worse, he was Canadian. It's bad enough that Canadians pass as Americans, have barbed penises to aid in their fiendish sexual proclivities, and plot covertly against their unsuspecting neighbors to the south. Now they looked like they were out to bankrupt our film industry with excessive salaries.

Ford at least pretended to do great things; Carrey was getting paid $20 million to behave like an ass. He was to receive the biggest up-front salary for any comic actor in history to do the kinds of things that earn fidgety, misbehaving 12-year-olds Ritalin prescriptions and one-way trips to military school.

Cable Guy
began life as a Chris Farley vehicle about a hapless, awkward, but fundamentally sweet and nonviolent cable guy who accidentally played havoc with a customer's life. Director Ben Stiller liked the basic premise but not the screenplay, so he brought in Judd Apatow—a
Ben Stiller Show
writer and a veteran of smart television satires like
The Critic
and
The Larry Sanders Show
—to take the script in a much darker direction.

Given Stiller and Apatow's subsequent ascent to ubiquitous, prolific superstardom, it's ironic to think that hiring them as director and
script doctor/producer transformed a seemingly surefire blockbuster into a risky proposition. In Stiller and Apatow's hands, the screenplay morphed from a
Tommy Boy
–style buddy comedy to a more mainstream precursor to
Chuck & Buck,
a creepy, homoerotic black comedy about a disturbed loner and the sad sack he torments.

For the role of the straight man/Carrey's foil, the filmmakers chose Matthew Broderick, an actor who has spent the decades since his career-making turn in
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
exploring the infinite colors of the schlemiel rainbow. Actually, that's not fair, as the last few years have found Broderick playing everything from a putz (
The Stepford Wives
) to a yutz (
Marie & Bruce
) to a schmendrick (
Finding Amanda
) to a schmuck (
Then She Found Me
). The man has range.

Apatow reconceived the story as a dark riff on thrillers like
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle,
which boldly exposed the furtive menace posed by nannies, temps, cops, and myriad other professions that quietly house sociopaths intent on murdering you and your family. He also turned it into a meta-commentary on the way television warps the human psyche, a recurring motif in Stiller's films.

In
Reality Bites,
Stiller plays a man so twisted by working in television that he looks at Winona Ryder's homemade footage of her and her friends goofing around and sees a
Real World
–like reality show instead of an avant-garde masterpiece. In
Zoolander,
Stiller's sentient mannequin is more or less rendered mentally challenged by prolonged exposure to the fashion industry. In
Tropic Thunder,
Stiller plays a pompous actor who has been coddled and flattered by the culture of celebrity for so long that he's unable to delineate between movies and the real world. In
Permanent Midnight,
he plays novelist/screenwriter Jerry Stahl, a man driven to shooting junk by the indignity of having to put words in Alf's mouth. So it's no surprise that Stiller's dream project has long been Budd Schulberg's seminal showbiz morality play
What Makes Sammy Run?,
the archetypal tale of a man who makes it in show business by losing his soul.

So it's fitting that in
The Cable Guy,
Stiller once again plays a pathetic show-business figure, a disgraced former child star accused
of killing his weak-willed identical twin. Stiller's dual role amounts to little more than a cameo, but he makes an indelible impression with a minimum of screen time. Playing a combination Menendez brothers, O. J. Simpson, and Todd Bridges, Stiller nails the furrowed-brow expression of intense concentration ubiquitous on the faces of celebrities on trial, a dour look that implicitly conveys, “If I just sit here quietly and look remorseful and serious, we can let these silly homicide charges slide, right, guys?”

The Cable Guy
opens, naturally enough, with Broderick's Steven Kovacs flipping through the vast wasteland of the cable universe. We stumble through one garbled, staticy corner of the television hellscape to another: inane talk shows,
My Three Sons,
superhero shows, and tabloid coverage of the sibling murder trial. Stiller's unblinking camera renders the familiar creepy and unnerving. It's channel surfing as the preoccupation of the damned.

The Cable Guy (his actual name is never revealed) is four hours late, yet he appears enraged when he finally shows up. An unseen Carrey pounds relentlessly on Steven's door while repeating “Cable guy!” with mounting exasperation. The title character annoys us before his first on-screen appearance.

Steven unwisely takes the advice of his best friend (Jack Black, one of many future superstars in the supporting cast) and offers Carrey's Cable Guy $50 to hook him up with all the movie channels—even the dirty ones—for free. In doing so, he becomes complicit in his own undoing; that ill-considered nosh on the apple of knowledge leads to Steven's fall from grace.

Like Christian Bale in
American Psycho,
Carrey seems to be merely impersonating a human being. He's empty and vacant on the inside, so he throws himself into playing roles he's seen on TV: the affable cable guy with an overflowing roster of “preferred customers,” the aggressive jock with the menacing tomahawk jam, the drinking buddy out to get his best pal laid, the love guru who hips Broderick to the aphrodisiac that is
Sleepless In Seattle,
and the karaoke rock star.

In the film's funniest sequence, the Cable Guy takes Steven to his
favorite restaurant, a medieval theme eatery where he seems to know the beats of every line better than the dinner theater's cast. Janeane Garafalo, one of several
Ben Stiller Show
cast members in small roles, steals the scene as their “serving wench,” a dispirited slacker whose commitment to historical authenticity doesn't extend to taking out her nose ring or washing off a thick coat of Goth makeup.

For Carrey's character, life is role-playing; since he doesn't have an authentic self, he inhabits roles he's seen other people play. Carrey the actor began his career as an impressionist. What are impressionists, ultimately, if not people who subvert their own identities to inhabit the voices, personalities, and affectations of famous people?
The Cable Guy
takes Carrey's persona into thrillingly dark places: He's playing his usual exemplar of comic aggression, but the repellent neediness and desperation at its core defies sentiment.

The Cable Guy's incursions into Steven's personal life become increasingly unhinged. When Steven's ex-girlfriend (Leslie Mann, later to become Apatow's real-life wife) goes on a date with a slick-talking smoothie (Owen Wilson), the Cable Guy, whose wardrobe seems stuck somewhere in the mid-'70s, viciously beats his pal's romantic rival in the men's bathroom. He pushes Steven past his breaking point, humiliating him in front of his parents and his ex during a game of “porno password” and getting him arrested. These events lead to a climactic conflict in a giant satellite dish, during which the Cable Guy delivers a painful speech in which all of his character's subtext spills embarrassingly to the surface, as he bemoans a childhood in which he learned the facts of life from
The Facts Of Life.