food for
thought
by Douglas Messerli
Jules Feiffer (screenplay, after the
comic strip by E. C. Segar), Robert Altman (director) Popeye / 1980
The moment of I heard of the death
of comedian-actor Robin Williams, I searched my memory for a movie that might
permit me to best express his talent. I’d seen most of his films. But the
Williams I love best was a manic comedian that didn’t always come off well in
film. Yes, there was the riffing radio personality of Barry Levinson’s Good Morning Vietnam, in which Williams
is allowed some virtuoso comic moments of what Time Out Film Guide as “achingly funny, irreverent motormouth”
behavior “with a taste for hot soul and a subversive vision of the Vietnam
conflict.” But the all too predictable ending—his character’s somewhat
patronizing relationship with a young Vietnamese woman, his friendship with a
Vietnamese enemy operative, Tuan, and his inevitable fall from grace—ruins this
film for me. Even less to my taste are the series of Williams films in which he
plays a kind of “serious” psychological advisor or teacher as in Gus Van Sant’s
Good Will Hunting, Penny Marshall’s Awakenings, and, my least favorite,
Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, all
of which not only bleach out Williams’ comic musings, but turn him into, as
acerbic critic David Thompson describes it, a “nice guys becoming dangerously
sanctimonious and superficial.” At times, in these often sentimental
concoctions it is almost as if you can see Williams’ mind knocking against the
sweet smile of his unperturbed fatherly face, intensely calling, “Let me out of
here!”
I have joyfully watched Chris Columbus’s Mrs. Doubtfire several times, where, at least, Williams is allowed
to combine the manic madman with his correct-thinking pontifications. But one
has to admit that, in the end, the film, despite its funny and even touching
moments, is a totally unbelievable mess.
A couple of movies I hadn’t yet seen offered greater promise, Robert
Altman’s Popeye and Paul Mazursky’s Moscow on the Hudson. Since I had just
reviewed a couple of Mazursky’s films on the occasion of his death this same
year, I ordered up Popeye from
Netflix.
Before I was able to view it, critic Eric Spitznagel, writing in Vanity Fair, beat me to it, calling the
Altman film, “The Best Film Robin Williams Ever Made.” Since I haven’t seen all Williams’ films, I’ll forego the
superlative claim, but I will argue, in observations somewhat different from
Spitnagel’s, that Popeye is certainly
a good film that nicely represents Williams’ comic and serious acting talents.
Perhaps the fact that this work represents the actor’s first film
appearance may contribute to the sense, as Spitnagel argues, that there is a
kind of freshness to Williams’ performance, whose “Popeye had a shy and timid sweetness. He
didn’t storm through the movie with an insistent likability and ‘look-at-me’
bombast.”
Let me first admit that Altman’s film received numerous dismissive
reviews. Vincent Canby of The New York
Times loved it, describing it as “charming, immensely appealing mess of a
movie,” as did Roger Ebert, characterizing it simply as “lots of fun.” But one
of my favorite critics, Dave Kehr, then writing for The Chicago Reader characterized the film and its actors in ways
with which I couldn’t disagree more strongly:
Robert Altman's busy, detailed
mise-en-scene, flattened cartoon-style
through space-compacting
long lenses, does capture some of the
frenetic atmosphere of
the Fleischer cartoons, but it tends to crowd
out, and neutralize, the
story values. The plotting of this 1980
feature—outsider in a
hostile environment—is personal to Altman,
though few of the
feelings survive the clutter: it looks like a remake
of McCabe and Mrs. Miller stripped of
deep commitment.
Robin
Williams is entertaining as Popeye, in a performance based
entirely on Jack Mercer's brilliant voice
characterization in the
original cartoons; as Olive Oyl, Shelley
Duvall can't bring
her squashed naturalness to the proper level
of stylization—
she seems miscast in the role she was born to
play.
All right, we all have our off-days. And
Altman’s work is crowded, frenetic,
at times even purposely off-putting. Jules Feiffer’s script seems amazingly
close to what the creator of the cartoon, E. C. Segar, originally penned. It is
no accident, perhaps, that many of the greatest long-lasting cartoon strips—notably
Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, along with Segar’s Popeye—were either created during or, in
Annie’s case, became most popular
during the 1930s Depression. Flaunting coarse exaggerations of human behavior,
employing larger-than-life stereotypes, embracing absurd-like half-human
figures (talking animals and babies), and freely dabbling in racial epithets,
these cartoons often presented human behavior at its lowest level—the reason,
admittedly why I have never been fond of comic strips. Yet in a time where the
ordinary everyman of American culture was made to feel very, very ordinary and
forced to suffer ridiculous indignities in order to survive every day, these
works clearly spoke to millions in a way that no other literature of the day
could hope to. While Capp cloaked his attacks on the American system in the
costume of hillbilly backwoods homilies, Segar took his Thimble Theatre creations into a strange world where—as in Charles
Dickens’ fabulous representation of underground London in Fagin’s Oliver Twist lair—characters survive in
a dystopian society controlled by a mysterious “Commodore” (a title, reports by
dictionary, of commander, abolished until World War II, and therefore
signifying an unofficial position that carries no “rating”) who uses the brutal
Bluto to accomplish his wishes and who survives by the insidious demands of a
creative tax-man.
Altman not only attempts to recreate this
wacky expressionist-like community, Sweethaven—brilliantly conceived by
production designer Wolf Kroeger—but dares to express its story through the
genre of an original musical comedy, with music by Harry Nillson (a nearly
burned-out 1960s and 1970s composer-performer, best known previously for his rendition
of “Everybody’s Talking” in Midnight
Cowboy), and sung by actors with little or no experience in singing and
dancing—a major exception being Ray Walston (the Commodore), who performed on
stage and film in Damn Yankees and South Pacific.
Altman apparently determined to make his
Sweet Haven one of the strangest and least pleasant communities on the planet
(he mysteriously created the set in Malta, perhaps just to escape the long arms
of Hollywood and hands-on producer Robert Evans), suggests this ramshackle,
tough and tumbling down community, a distorted mirror-image of the good old
USA, is a dictatorship “safe from democracy”:
We the
people
Love
Sweethaven
Hurray
hurray Sweethaven
Flags are
wavin'
Swept
people from the sea
Safe from
democracy
Enter the quite innocent sailor, who in
obvious befuddlement, good naturedly suffers various derogations, from the
quick-shifting machinations of the town’s taxman (Donald Moffat), the basic
distrust by community members of strangers, and the near destructive stumbles
of the boarding-house owner’s daughter, Olive Oyl (Shirley Duvall) to the rude
table manners of the boarding-house tenants (Wimpy [Paul Dooley], Castor Oil
[Donovan Scott], Ham Gravy [Bill Irwin], Cole Oyl [MacIntyre Dixon], and Nana
Oly [Roberta Maxwell]) who in their speed to chow-down their dinner permit
Popeye not a bite to eat. In fact, Popeye is hardly ever allowed to eat
throughout his Sweet Haven stay; the very next day, at the local diner Wimpy
(the character who will “gladly pay you Thursday for a hamburger today”) eyes
and eventually devours Popeye’s hamburger breakfast. Indeed, in the “sweet,
sweet haven” where he has suddenly found himself in search of his Pappy, food
seems to be the major commodity. As expressed in “Food, Food, Food”
Everything is food, food, food
Everything
is food to go
Everything
is food for thought
Everything
you knead is dough
It is food
Everything
is food
The song not only reiterates the fact that
a great majority of the town’s citizens are named after food or condiments that
go atop, but also suggests that its people are empty husks of reality,
desperate to be filled with something that might give them the energy to move
forward or to actually come up with an idea. As Altman, Feiffer, and Nillson
make clear, their world is an inverted one,
Everything is upside down now
Everything is sunny
side up
It's ubiquitous
Enigmatic and
They can't trick us
With no hot dogmatic
Williams as Popeye suffers all these and
more indignities through a non-stop under-the breath utterance of reactions to
his experiences that with their odd pronunciations and numerous malapropisms
are absolutely hilarious—if you can catch them fast enough within the fold of
your ear (meeting Olive Oyl, for example, he mutters, “Sounds like some kind of
lubricant”/ encountering prostitutes later, Popeye nearly lisps, “Women of a
venerable disease.”). As Altman demands of the viewer in every single film he
ever made is that he or she be as quick-witted and attentive to every moment of
the movie as the language he and his collaborators projected into space. And,
in that sense, Altman’s creations are always somewhat Platonic, abstract
representations of a real world in another time and place. Both Popeye and his
Pappy carry around photographs of one another that consist only of words: “Me
Pappa,” “Me Son.” And food, as the song suggests, is always “food for thought.”
Is it any wonder that on the night she is
about to celebrate her engagement to the genetically mean Bluto, Olive Oyl
secretly packs up her bags and heads to the streets. All she can say of her
marital “catch” is that is “He’s large.” Duvall is so perfect as Miss Oyl that
it is hard to take one’s eyes off of her; as if she were truly a figure of ink,
she spins and twists her entire body all at once in two directions. If before
one might have thought of assimilating Duvall in very small doses, in Popeye—despite her shrill cries and
whining insinuations—you want all the oyl you can get. If Williams is
absolutely charming and rambunctiously infectious, Duvall is radiant in her
calamitous clumsiness. And when the two suddenly acquire their little Swee’pea
(the forever chortling photogenic grandson of director Altman), singing a
lovely duet over the sleeping beauty that pulls them into opposite directions
of desire—he asking the babe to “Sail wit’ me,” she pleading for him to “Stay
with me”—the sensitive viewer is almost swept away.
We know, of course, that our characters
and we must suffer numerous adventures—the child’s abuse by both Wimpy and
Olive as a horse race tipster, the kid’s kidnapping by Bluto, Popeye’s
discovery of his Pappy and his Pappy’s indignant denial of his heir, a chase to
a buried sea treasure in which Olive is stuffed into smokestack and made to
wrestle a gigantic octopus, and Popeye’s being forced to swallow up every last
dollop of his least-favorite food, spinach—before we can reach that apogee
again. But we don’t mind as long as Popeye “yam what he yam”—a delightful,
bow-legged, one-eyed, dancing sailor man—who needs his Olive Oyl in order to
raise up his little Swee’pea in a new and sweeter haven.
I might even go so far as to suggest that
in this film Altman, with the help of Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno,
has created a kind of American equivalent of Fellini’s Amarcord (on which Rotunno worked as director of photography in
1973), another portrait of a distorted fascist society of the 1930s in which
the citizens struggle to outgrow their seemingly endless adolescence.
Fellini’s Amarcord begins with a young woman hanging out freshly-washed
cloths, happily pointing at the puffballs floating in the wind. A nearby old
man, mutters the community aphorism, “When puffballs come, cold winter’s done.”
Indeed, as children in the town square jump to catch the puffballs, the village
idiot recites a poem dedicated to regeneration.
All we need to transform a Sweet Haven
into a heaven, suggests Altman and friends, is a little bit of faith and a good
sense of humor, both of which Popeye projects even in his very first encounters
with the seeming no-good inhabitants of the film’s cockeyed hamlet. As they
spiritually and sometimes even physically attempt to “blow him down,” the sweet
tempered sailor (as perfected by Williams) croons—or perhaps I should “growls
out”—an anthem of possibility and hope:
It's a lovely place
Think I'd like to stay but
Blow me down
Blow me down
It's
nice and friendly here
I think I'll spend a year
Or
two maybe three
…
In
the evenin' air
Lots
of people there
Tryin'
to blow me down
But
unlike the clothes I wear
I
haven't got a care, so
Blow
me down
Blow
me down
Even if Popeye
was neither Williams’ or Altman’s best
film, it’s certainly worth another long look.
Los Angeles, August 16, 2014
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2014).
