We should have resisted, but Fiona and I remember when THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN came out in 1981 (the reviews! such bitter fury!) and so when we decided to do a podcast on the theme of miniaturisation (coming soon!), we thought we’d check it out. Curiosity can be a terrible thing, especially if it’s the morbid kind.
This started life as a John Landis project but became a Joel Schumacher one after the budget was slashed (a result of MOMENT BY MOMENT underperforming in 1978 — but by this time, NINE TO FIVE had been a smash, so the FX work in the movie is excellent). You can sense Landis’s fingerprints in some of the gags, but the sensibility is all Schumacher. Although never not capable of turning out a sickening turkey, Schumacher *did* get more technically able, and FALLING DOWN is actually impressive, in an icky, fascistic kind of way. At this point, he’s a terrible choice of director, since he overcuts furiously between one misplaced camera angle and another, which would be bad under any circumstances but is ruinous in a movie where Tomlin (for no reason) plays multiple roles and we have to believe they’re all inhabiting the same space, and where Tomlin on miniature sets has to interact with Charles Grodin et al on full-scale ones. The necessary Kuleshov-cohesion is lacking.
Weirdly, though this is written by Tomlin’s regular TV writer, Jane Wagner (they married in 2013), it doesn’t provide her with funny stuff to do. The role of a conventional suburban housewife and mother seems beyond her, though in fact other movies prove this is not true. If making THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN into a WOMAN makes a comedy of it, presumably this should rely on the character’s attitude to events, since the events themselves (falling down the garbage dispose-all, or into a cupboard full of scary, talking, moving, pissing dolls) are sort of the same. Indeed, it’s when the film’s at its most nightmarish that it seems most effective.
I’ve never seen Tomlin be bad in anything, but she’s generally uncomfortable to watch here: accidentally sliding on a skateboard the relative size of a surfboard causes her to open and close her jaw like an automaton — YA! YA! YA! Nothing human about it. So strange, because Tomlin is usually magnificent and one can’t see her taking any crap from a director (if you haven’t seen the video of her blow-up with David O. Russell, go check it out). But I guess Schumacher’s misguided notes (he seems quite sweet in interviews) would have been kindly delivered and therefore far more insidious.
The film’s central home is designed in nauseating cartoon pastels, making it look unreal and dollhouse-like before anything happens, one of those “false good ideas” that can derail any movie with money to spend. Adding to that a ghastly soft-focus aesthetic (to make Tomlin prettier?) results in a really unpleasant feel, like smother in rose-tinted cellophane.
(Criticisms of Schumacher — the former windowdresser — often have a homophobic sound to them. BATMAN AND ROBIN caused one Ain’t It Cool News correspondent to express the desire to murder the director with a hunting knife to the rectum. If we admit the existence of some kind of “gay sensibility,” Schumacher presumably has it, but it has nothing to do with whether he is a good or bad director. Spoiler: he’s mostly bad.)
“When I go to see a film and it has diffusion, I immediately walk out.” — Nestor Almendros.
The excellent Grodin is miscast in a role that makes you expect villainy, which he’s so good at, but the film is too chicken to knock the nuclear family. There’s a vague attempt at “satire” but rather than firing off in all directions it tends to implode: lousy corporate products can be bad for you, we’re told, as we watch a lousy corporate product. Which doesn’t have the nerve to point out that irony.
Weirdly, the film improves in its second half, which brings villains Henry Gibson (Tomlin’s NASHVILLE co-star) and Bruce Glover into play, along with “Richard A. Baker” (Rick Baker — took me WAY too long to figure that out) as a signing gorilla (the obvious gag of him holding a tiny Tomlin in his hand never materialises). Baker is the funniest ape since Charles Gemora in THE CHIMP, and Mark Blankfield is VERY funny, in spite of rather than because of the material.
Lily’s funniest moment is some good pratfalling, but I have an uncomfortable feeling it could be a stuntwoman concealed within that outsize glove puppet.
A movie starring Blankfield and Rick Baker as a gorilla still seems like an excellent idea, if anyone wants to make it.
Very small people may already be inside all of us. Is there a message you would like passed on?
