Modern Problems (1981)

I think if you're going to map out the course of events that led to the downfall of the once effortlessly-funny Chevy Chase, the best graph point at which to start would be, say, 1980 or so.

When Chase left at the height of his success from NBC-TV's top-rated "Saturday Night Live", he said it was to explore other avenues.  In other words, he wanted to show the world he was a farceur and comic genius of the highest order and TV was just holding him back from what he was really capable of doing.  So off he went, did a couple of TV specials (which I still need to review, I know...) and then hit it really and truly big with the release of 1978's Foul Play.

Now here was a piece of work: directed by Colin Higgins, it was basically a Hitchcockian thriller with a rom-com slant starring Goldie Hawn who may or may not hold the key to a high-level church cover-up and Chase as the gumshoe who may or may not believe her.  And Dudley Moore shows up to act all lascivious and show off his boxers.  The movie was a huge hit, Hawn and Chase were called an ideal rom-com couple (which they proved yet again in the unsung 1980 Neil Simon comedy Seems Like Old Times) and a bright future seemed all but assured for Chase.

This was further solidified by 1980's Caddyshack, another sparkling example of slob comedy in the National Lampoon's Animal House vein.  With balls.

With so bright a star on the upswing, what could possibly have stopped Chase's meteoric rise to ultra-mega-super-stardom? 

1981.

Starting with Under The Rainbow, an underachieving, below-the-belt "what-if" comedy about Munchkins, Nazis, The Depression and Billy Barty, this was the kind of thing interesting only in the way a traffic accident was interesting  And for Chase, who played nothing but straight man to the non-existent nonsense, a major step backwards in his career.  Surely after this and another 1980 stumble Oh Heavenly Dog, where he played most of the movie as Benji (yes, Benji the dog), his next effort of 1981 could only help matters.

Let's just say that it tried to throw in everything for the sake of comedy...but ended up throwing in so much that it was all the actors could do to keep from stumbling over all the debris.

Modern Problems goes the route of trying to be topical and eat its comic cake, too.  Thing is, it doesn't use its topical points to be funny, it just...uses them.  As well as Chase.  Badly.

Look at this stuff: Max Fielder (Chase) is an overworked air traffic controller who struggles to make it through a typical day while pilots drop like flies, radars catch fire and explode, food vendors hawk their wares loudly right there in the tower and the nerves of every single worker are on edge, including Max's. After all of that and a grueling ride home in extremely bad New York traffic, Max finds his girlfriend Darcy (Patti D’Arbanville) has left him, presumably to find herself AND someone else whose life isn't a complete wreck.

Later on, after taking his own ex-wife Lorraine (Mary Kay Place) to a party for his wheelchair-bound publisher friend Brian (Brian Doyle-Murray) being held at a gay bar (Why? Don't ask.), Max gets more dejected when Lorraine and Brian hit it off AND when Darcy shows up at the same party with a new boyfriend. On his way home, Max tailgates a leaking tanker truck filled with radioactive waste, and when he wakes up in the morning, he has telekinetic powers.  And with them, he finds he can get back at everybody and maybe get back together with Darcy, in spite of a flurry of new suitors, one of whom is up-and-coming writer/self-help guru Mark Winslow (Dabney Coleman).

See?  In the early Eighties (let's just say 1980-1981) the hot topics were air traffic controllers, nuclear waste, gay bars, self-help gurus and psychic phenomena.  Well, maybe they weren't all hot topics but at least hot enough and current enough at the time to qualify for the writers (whom I'll get to) to shove 'em in the script.  And what a busy, frenetic script it is.  I guess by definition, if there's a lot of stuff going on in a scene at one time (people talking, phone calls coming in, people blathering over airline intercoms, groups of people milling about, etc.) that in itself equals large-scale comedy.

Unfortunately, comedy needs to build have inherent funniness in what one hears and sees.  Here, the viewer is too busy taking in all of the visual and aural evidence onscreen and trying to process it all at once to be able to sift any comedy through it.  Going from Comedy Bit A to Comedy Bit B to Comedy Bit C and back again while listening to all the noise and other nonsense is pretty difficult to do.  Try it sometime.

The shrill tone is a problem, too.  Director Ken Shapiro, who directed this and 1974's The Groove Tube - PERIOD - seems to believe that if a line is delivered loud enough, in a bad enough accent or with enough accompanying noise, it will be funny.  And the script he concocted along with fellow low-achievers Arthur Sellers and Tom Sherohman (who also wrote 1997's Mr. Magoo...yep.) is so full of these moments that it becomes almost unbearable to try and sit through it.

Shapiro (as director) also doesn't seem to believe in proper blocking, spacing, grouping and framing of his actors, since the cinematography, editing and filming of Modern Problems contains so much clutter, background props, unnecessary decoration, clumps of people and un-choreographed movements of same that you'll swear someone's trying to mess with your equilibrium with every scene.

And you'd be right.

Which brings me to the sad subject of Chevy Chase.  I'll go on record as saying that he has been funny on many occasions - some of them even post-1981 - but his propensity for maladroit-ism and clumsy oaf shtick is put to the supreme test as he fights with uncooperative vehicles, kisses department store windows, dances in a group of leather clad men, and looks around even more lost than when he was surrounded by Munchkins and Carrie Fisher.  He is also called upon to mug endlessly, especially after he is dumped with nuclear waste and becomes psychotically psychic.  When he causes a ballet dancer's codpiece to explode, he has to contort his face in a painful twisting of muscles.  When he causes one of Darcy's new beaus to suffer a nosebleed so massive that it literally squirts out of his face like Moby Dick at the edge of the ocean, Chase pinches his own nose so that you think he'll be the next one to start bleeding profusely.  Squinting and twitching about, he even simulates every stage of a stroke as he has psychic sex with Darcy, who apparently enjoys it.

(you know, it's strange the things you find yourself writing after a few years of writing movies.  If you had told me a few years ago I'd be writing a review of a film where one of the characters uses his mind to pleasure a woman, I'd have said you were crazy.  What a difference a few years make, I guess....)

Anyway, looks like in Chase's case it's not the size of your brain, it's how you use it.

And speaking of Darcy, Patti D'Arbanville is another matter: as Chase's past and future love interest, hers is a painful and pretty much useless performance to watch.  None of the charm and good cheer she infused in movies such as Rancho Deluxe, Big Wednesday, The Main Event and Time After Time was evident, as she only seemed to provide an object for Chase to covet and stumble after.  You know she has it in her, but Patti never gets a chance to show what she can do.  Oh, for the nuances of Hog Wild....

Speaking of squandered resources, Dabney Coleman plays his 28,478th version of himself as a Southern-accented jerk who is one of D'Arbanville's newest squeezes.  I recall a small movie in 1980 called How To Beat The High Co$t Of Living, where Coleman was cast against type as a romantic interest and was a very funny, very charming personae.  He did the same thing in 1981's On Golden Pond as well, but that's a whole galaxy removed from Modern Problems where he plays a pawn of Chase's new-found powers.  Oh, and he also gets some nude time...for the ladies.  Oh Dabney; we'll always have "Buffalo Bill".

Nell Carter, in an odd parallel, plays Nell Carter as a funky Eighties maid - dreadlocks and all.  I think there was some kind of casting conceit in the Eighties that any person of color who played a butler, maid or servant of some type in a movie had to be either (A) stereotypically J.J. Walker-jivey or (B) Jamaican.  Movies like this, Caddyshack, Maid To Order, Clara's Heart and Chase's own Seems Like Old Times only back up my theory - don't try to deny it.  But, Nell being Nell, she manages to be both at once.  Gimmie a break, indeed.

There are a multitude of other, smaller roles that patch up the proceedings like spackle in a very cracked, very crumbling and badly deteriorated retaining wall that could collapse any second.  Sandy Helburg, of many Mel Brooks films, plays a frazzled air traffic controller, Brian-Doyle Murray plays Chase's wheelchair-bound friend who doesn't really get to do anything very funny or even exploit the fact that he is not really wheelchair-bound and could very well be part of one of Chase's mental balletic exploits - and unfortunately never gets to be.  And Mitch Kreindel gets the thankless role of a passing paramour of D'Arbanville whose main purpose is to get a raging nosebleed almost as much of a mess as Monseiur Creosote's scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life...only not as over-the-top funny.  In fact, all Kreindel proves is that nosebleeds - by and large - are not funny.

What does anyone contribute, in fact, to Modern Problems?  Nothing: they pass the time until the next underdone slapstick bit of ESP nonsense plays out.  And there are a lot of them: the special effects team, in fact, gets a lot more of a showing than the "comedy" writers, since there are more effects on display than there are laughs.  For an effects extravaganza, that's a good thing; for a comedy, not so much.

Of course, comedies that center on psychic abilities worked so well for movies like Zapped! and Vibes.  But even with the prospect of Heather Thomas popping out of her clothes and Jeff Goldblum being Jeff Goldblum, these are hit-and-miss affairs.  What chance does Chevy Chase have?

Not a good one.  Modern Problems had a lot of problems since it was one of those "released-on Christmas-Day" flops that topped everybody's Worst List in 1981, got not one positive review in its initial release and made the world yearn for the the subtle humorous aspects of Carrie and Scanners.

(those weren't comedies, by the way)

In the end, while some money may have been made it wasn't enough to ensure we would see Modern Problems II: Psy-Dork.  Shapiro went back to obscurity, the bit actors moved on, and as far as Chevy goes....

Victories would come and go for Eighties Chevy.  For every National Lampoon's Vacation there would be a Deal Of The Century.  For every Fletch there would be a ¡Three Amigos!.  For every Funny Farm there would be a Caddyshack II.  It's not like he tries to be unfunny, but the evidence cries out in favor of the unfunny more often.

In the case of Modern Problems, the main problem is that it was made.  And no amount of wishful thinking or nuclear waste can change that fact.