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"Addams Family" and "Hook" reviews

January 10, 1992

Since we don't want to turn this column into the CBG equivalent of "At the Movies," I'll combine my views of two genre releases this go-around and that should be that until "Aliens 3" opens on Memorial Day of 1992.

"The Addams Family"

Boy, did I want to like this movie unreservedly. Unfortunately, the promotional geniuses at Paramount made sure that it was extremely difficult.

For the month prior to the release of "The Addams Family," we were inundated with a slew of commercials, clips and sneak glimpses of the film. Everything that we saw was laugh-out-loud family. Unfortunately, what this approach effectively did was strip mine the movie of its best gags, and when you actually get to the theater, what's left might induce a smile here, a soft chuckle there. But the real knockout stuff--with the single exception of Wednesday's and Pugsley's rather unique excerpt from "Hamlet"--has all been seen before, repeatedly.

Certainly the film makers can't be blamed for this. But it's damned irritating. As a result, what we have is a beautifully photographed and well-acted film that was spoiled for me by overzealous promotion. On the other hand, you can't dispute success--"The Addams Family" did superb box office in its opening weeks, leaving the competition thoroughly spooked.

Movie studios have been extremely high on the prospect of pre-sold projects...that is, projects that already have a built in audience. One of the sources for such films is 1960s television, as the movie-going adults of today have the chance to relive their youth, played out "in living color" on the big screen. "The Addams Family" takes absolutely no chances in that regard, as the familiar finger-snapping opening is heard right at the beginning, during a re-enactment of the famous Charles Addams cartoon wherein the family is about to pour boiling oil (or perhaps tar) down upon unsuspecting Christmas carolers.

Indeed, screenwriters Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson have stated repeatedly that their inspiration is the original Addams cartoons (a staple of The New Yorker magazine once upon a time) rather than the 1960s television program.

Unfortunately, what's up on the screen does not support this statement. The producers of the TV series started with the cartoons and then built an entire Addams family "universe", as it were, developing the names of the characters, their environs, and the dozens of different shticks that were repeated with clockwork regularity and occasional slight variances throughout the show's two season run.

Thompson and Wilson started with the cartoons, and developed--well...nothing new, really. Gomez (played with latin flair by Raul Julia) has his entire personality lifted from John Astin's 1960s, portrayal (right down to going berserk with lust when wife Morticia speaks French), and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) is slightly more perverse than her 1960s incarnation ("Gomez, don't torture yourself," she implores at one point when her husband is upset, and then slyly adds, "That's my job.")

Young Christina Ricci's hysterically deadpan delivery of Wednesday's lines makes you wish they'd given her more screen time. ("We're going to play a new game," she informs her brother as she calmly straps him into an electric chair. "It's called, ´Is There a God'?")

Other than that, though, the screenplay brings no new vision, no unique styling, no real building upon what's gone before. The only wrinkle introduced into the Addams concept is that Gomez and Fester are brothers. It is upon that wrinkle that the flimsy plot hinges when, after an absence of 25 years, Fester (Christopher Lloyd, who elevates anything he's in) shows up on the Addams doorstep. But is he the real Fester, or part of a scheme to get at the Addams vast wealth? That's it. The whole plot.

Now of course, the original series wasn't exactly plot-heavy either. But there were the bits, and the recurring lines that you would intone along with the characters ("Thank you, Thing." "You rang?" "I'll shoot 'em in the back!" "Tish! That's French!"). The audience participation made it the small-screen version of "Rocky Horror." But most of the familiar routines were excised from the film, and there's nothing to replace it, leaving a creative vacuum.

What plot there was of the original series invariably involved the Addams family interacting with the "normal" world. There's much less of that here, and it's a pity. The look of polite but agonizing boredom on the faces of Gomez and Morticia during a cloyingly sweet school play is utterly priceless. Likewise Morticia's recounting of "Hansel and Gretel" to some kindergartners, told from the point of view of the witch.

As one might expect considering that director Barry Sonnenfeld has most of his credits as a cinematographer, "Addams" is a gorgeous-looking movie. It's the cinema equivalent of a comic book produced by a Wartist--it looks great, but there's not much there. You want to see more of the things that work, but you don't, and so are disappointed. They say that "Less is more." Well, sometimes they're wrong.

"HOOK"

The past few months of movies have given us some rather off-beat father figures: The Terminator. Gomez Addams. And now Peter Pan.

But Peter's all grown up, you see. He's turned into a humorless corporate lawyer named Peter Banning, who specializes in raiding and taking over smaller companies ("Why, Peter!" says great-grandmother Wendy with a mixture of amusement and sadness, "You've become a pirate"). He still has a small, ringing companion with whom he converses, but it's not a pixie named Tinkerbell--it's a cellular phone. And he has no memory whatsoever of his glorious childhood in Neverland. This is eminently consistent--Peter Pan always had a memory like a sieve.

His old nemesis, Captain James Hook, however, has a perfectly intact memory--and Peter does not play a fond role in it. Seeking revenge, and perhaps even out to recapture some of his own youth, Hook kidnaps Peter's children and leaves a challenging note, requiring Peter's return to his old homeland. There, Tink and the Lost Boys (who are not vampires this time out, thankfully) must whip him into shape and get him fighting, flying and crowing like his old self so that he can challenge Hook.

I hate to admit how much I enjoyed this movie. I hate it because director Stephen Spielberg, as always, is subtle as a brick. He shamelessly manipulates your emotions, and how you react to his films depends entirely upon whether such obviousness on Spielberg's part bothers you or not.

Well, it doesn't bother me one bit.

Coupled with the fact that I've liked Robin Williams in virtually all of his movies--even his lousy ones--and it was hard for me not to be predisposed to get a bang out of "Hook." It's been stated that, at the beginning of filming, Williams loudly announced--in reference to himself, co-star Dustin Hoffman, and Spielberg--"Okay! The people who brought you ´Popeye,' ´Ishtar', and ´1941' are about to work their magic again! Let's do it!" He needn't have worried.

Much of the pre-release "buzz" centered on the sets of Pirate Town and the full-sized pirate ship that serves as Hook's domain. It's understandable; they're damned impressive. The effects are flawless, although there was a perverse part of me that imagined Peter or Tinkerbell flying across the face of the moon, and crashing headlong into Elliot and E.T. heading in the opposite direction. I assure you, you'll believe a Pan can fly.

Williams is one of the few actors around who could have pulled off both the humorless Banning and the magical Pan. Another who might have done so is Hoffman, and one wonders what sort of film we would have gotten if the casting had been switched.

Hoffman's Captain Hook is eminently civilized--perhaps even a tad too civilized to be as menacing as we would like him to be. Then again, the entire film is about how adulthood brings new perspective to the views of childhood, so perhaps it's appropriate. A key exchange is when Peter says to the less-than-imposing Hook, "I remember you as being a lot taller", to which the unflappable pirate quite accurately responds, "To a ten-year-old, I'm huge."

Maggie Smith is luminous as the elderly Wendy Darling--you can still see the soul of the young girl in the face and eyes of great-grandmother Wendy. Bob Hoskins was born to play Smee, Hook's right hand (right hook?) man. Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell has some excellent moments in the film's first hour, but she's pretty much reduced to status of prop in the second half--except for one sequence where she confesses her love to Peter. It's nicely staged, nicely played--and utterly unnecessary, bringing the plot (which had really started to gain momentum) crashing to a halt for five minutes.

This sort of excess is, unfortunately, not unusual in "Hook." If I have any complaint at all about this film, it's that it should be tighter. Scenes go on for far too long, giving us unneeded additional character bits, as if Spielberg didn't trust the actors to be able to do the job of connecting with the audience.

A sequence early on where lawyer Banning is about to take leave of his co-workers should end when Banning says blithely, "Well, gotta fly." Instead the scene goes on for over a minute, belaboring Banning's acrophobia. When Peter first confronts the Lost Boys, they chase him...interminably. A depressed Hook contemplates blowing his own brains out; the sequence could have been tossed with no problem. Banning also tosses off a number of jokes that sound perfectly right coming from the ad-libbing Robin Williams, but perfectly wrong from the humorless Banning. They were funny, but they were inappropriate.

All these moments serve to slow the film down, and with a running time of two and a quarter hours, that's unwise. One wonders where the film editor was, or what happened to Spielberg's ability to discern what's needed in a movie and what isn't. Apparently, Spielberg's affection for the source material (he's stated oftentimes how much he wanted to do "Pan") blinded him to his usual knack of knowing just when to end a sequence. Maybe he just fell in love with certain bits and forgot the creative credo that dictates "Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings." Ironic, considering the number of Darlings in the film.

Despite the toy tie-ins, "Hook" is not a children's film, but rather a film for adults about childhood--in the same manner as "Miracle on 34th Street." Unlike "Miracle," there is real danger and real violence. When Hook speaks of killing Lost Boys, he's not kidding. Neverland always had an edge to it, and that edge has not been lost in "Hook." What has been gained is an adult perspective on the proceedings, and a notion that growing up isn't necessarily so bad...as long as you don't forget what you're leaving behind.

(On a different note, Peter David, writer of stuff, must respectfully differ with the esteemed John Byrne. John claims that "Rai" had the worst logo of all time. I must admit, I don't recall the "Rai" logo. But I have difficulty believing that it's worse than the ghastly "Laser Eraser and Pressbutton," which was not only longer than "Rai," but utterly illegible and colored in the most hideous hues imaginable. Perhaps Don and Maggie could run them side-by-side and put it to a vote.)

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