Miss Independent: MR. WRONG

Ellen DeGeneres is as omnipresent as celebrities get these days. We know it all. Over the past several decades she successfully worked up the stand-up ranks, headlined a network sitcom that was never more noticed than when she came out — a brave decision that also sent her into a showbiz wilderness for some years before her comeback playing the voice of an iconic animated character in Finding Nemo and dancing her way to becoming America’s nice, funny, pleasant talk show friend. The subsequent trials and tribulations of her public image — from being in an early celebrity gay marriage, to stumbling in her out-of-touch responses to our current political moment — her every career moment is well known to the general public. And yet, through love for and irritation with Ellen, not to mention nostalgia for 90’s pop culture, this knowledge all-too rarely includes Mr. Wrong, a failed attempt to turn her into a movie star. It was an instant flop and remains largely forgotten at best, a punchline at worst. The years have not made it a better movie, but what we now know about its lead makes it more weirdly compelling than it would’ve seemed at the time.

By 1994, Ellen’s charmingly observational stand-up got her a sitcom, the career path many of her contemporaries (Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence, et al) followed. In her show, she maneuvered through mild farce with a group of friends. It was very 90’s, and coasted off her considerable charms. You can see why an executive would want her starring in a feature film. But in 1996’s Mr. Wrong, she’s the lead in a movie caught awkwardly between comedy and suspense. It’s immediately apparent why it has been forgotten.

She plays a single 31-year-old morning talk show producer who just can’t find a man. Surrounded by romances and well-intentioned pestering, she vows to ignore pressures to find a guy and settle down. Then Bill Pullman walks into her life. They have a brief affair – including unconvincing love scenes – until she follows a sinking feeling and breaks up with him. Her reasons double as explanation of the movie’s failings. “Sometimes it’s about chemistry, you know. Sometimes [it] works and sometimes you get an explosion, or a really bad smell.”

Pullman’s character has sinister notes from the beginning. His idea of a good time is shoplifting. He offers to break his finger to prove his love for her. (He does; she’s not flattered.) But after the break-up, rejection turns him into an entitled stalker demanding her hand in marriage. What starts as romantic comedy gets progressively weirder, closer in tone to Ben Stiller’s dark comedy The Cable Guy (also ’96) than what Nora Ephron had Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan doing at the time. (One wonders what Ephron’s sweet-and-tart tone could’ve brought to this project.) Here Pullman is aggressive, mailing expensive gifts, making a scene at the opera, lurking outside her window dressed as a clown (creepy), and trying to sabotage her career.

There’s an even creepier, and funnier, subplot about his ex-girlfriend (Joan Cusack). She’s hilariously deranged. We are told she once tried to assassinate Stevie Nicks. Eventually she kidnaps Ellen, attacking her with a jar of hungry ants before trying to stab her with a Swiss Army Knife. With Pullman and Cusack hunting and threatening her, Ellen hires a private investigator (Dean Stockwell) who doesn’t take the situation as seriously as you’d hope. It’s clear this is no usual rom-com, and it’s failings to be so shouldn’t be held against it. With these eccentric supporting roles, it’s working up to a dark farcical gender-swapped 90’s echo of the peak 80’s woman-scorned thrillers like Fatal Attraction.

As the threats to Ellen develop, director Nick Castle (best known for The Last Starfighter) uses suspense techniques. Low angles, rapid zooms, spinning 360-degree dollying, and emphatic insert shots make appearances. There’s a dissolve from an overflowing cup of tomato juice to a red train roaring by. This would be more effective if the screenplay (attributed to three writers, including Bill & Ted’s Chris Matheson and Bates Motel's Kerry Ehrin) wasn’t also tepidly joking around. Laughs are rare, and the tone is off. It’s wobbly, uncomfortable more than funny.

On Ellen’s talk show and in her stand up, if a joke doesn’t quite go over, she can sometimes sell it just by holding the pause, grinning until she gives a little half laugh, amusing herself. She uses that here, like she knew this thing was going to be a tough sell. Critics, understandably perplexed, wrote off the movie when it opened on Valentine’s Day weekend. It went on to earn just under $13 million before limping out of theaters. But now we know more about Ellen, and it makes Mr. Wrong more worthy of note.

It came out the year before she did, in a Very Special Episode and on Time’s cover. Now there’s poignancy to the panic setting in as her character struggles to extricate herself from increasingly scary heteronormative demands. The movie opens on Ellen wearing a wedding dress inside a Mexican prison, a statement of subtextual purpose (marriage can be a jail cell), before flashing back to the story’s beginning. The climax finds psychotic Pullman attempting to marry her at gunpoint. A children’s choir sings “I Want to Know What Love Is” as she walks down the aisle – in a double dolly shot straight out of a Spike Lee film – fearing for her life. It’s a good, if probably unintended, metaphor for the discomfort of anyone feeling pressure to fit into a norm they’re not meant to fit.

It’s not hard to see Mr. Wrong as a story of nonconformity. Everyone presses this poor woman into a relationship with Mr. Wrong, well past the point he’s clearly a danger. Seen from this perspective, it becomes a much more interesting film. Not a significantly better film, mind you, but interesting. Note how other characters don’t seem to find Pullman as odd or unrelatable as she does and how, right up until the end, no one seems to find events as strange as she does. The movie ultimately hinges on a woman loosening the shackles of hetero relationships and becoming a happier person for it. So what if the movie’s not good in the way its ostensible genre demands? Its very failures and retroactive subtext make it interesting, coloring in darker elements. It’s uneven, to be sure, but funny and creepy, with awkwardness more earnest and more fascinating than most guessed at the time.

Trip Despise-Her: SNATCHED

Snatched is one of those disappointing high-concept, mid-budget, star-driven Hollywood pictures that seems to come around every so often. It has the right cast, a fun premise, and a few funny moments, but otherwise just sits there on screen collecting dust. The basic fish-out-of-water adventure comedy plotting finds a dopey daughter (Amy Schumer) and dotty mother (the great Goldie Hawn in her first role in fifteen years—sadly she should’ve waited longer) on a South American vacation. They inevitably get kidnapped and must cease their squabbling long enough to survive and maybe, just maybe, learn a little about themselves along the way. On this sturdy, predictable structure director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before) and screenwriter Kate Dippold (The Heat) pile flat, simple, one-note scenes. This is a movie that only can hold one idea, and often only one person, in a frame, plodding simply without escalation from plot point to plot point, allowing its performers just enough personality to fill out just barely more than a trailer’s worth of entertainment.

 

Cut together with journeyman boredom in every choice – a tourism brochure montage of establishing shots, a slow-mo dance sequence or two, vistas of B-roll you’d find on a hotel lobby TV – the whole endeavor could only succeed with diminished expectations. It’s too thin and grindingly workmanlike in its impersonal bare-bones competence, flatly staged and unimaginatively developed. Comedy and action work best with surprise: an unexpected swerve, a shock reveal, an eccentric resolution. Here we get a smattering of these moments. In an opening scene, Schumer’s boyfriend (Randall Park) says he’s breaking up with her and she responds, “When?” Later a grizzled jungle guide (Christopher Meloni) is asked if a piece of fruit is okay. “Yeah, sure,” he replies, then takes a beat and adds, “Oh! You mean to eat? Probably not.” Funny. So too are Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack as vacationing gal pals intensely interested in looking out for their fellow foreign ladies because you simply never can trust a foreign vacation. (There’s unexamined Ugly Americanism here, natch.) But we’re talking silly little grace notes on the edges of a leaden comedy, flat-footed and tone-deaf, in which two American women get kidnapped and flail around Latin American stereotypes for 80 minutes. 

Why take Hawn, capable of effervescently charming performances, and make her a dowdy scold? Why take Schumer who, at her best, can lampoon awkward social issues in casually biting satire, and make her a routine R-rated comedy-style stunted adult-child? They’re allowed to play against type to fit the dragging constraints of a hectic and unfunny action plot that’s so narrative heavy it rarely pauses to let its leads breathe. Their best moments allow the two of them space for banter that feels like a real testy mother-daughter relationship, one with some history and tension that could flower with room to grow. Instead they’re shoved into tumbles down muddy jungle roads and made to slog through tone-deaf humor. When they arrive at a distant village, it’s a cue for smug eye-rolling and flailing gross-out humor at the expense of the native’s customs and well-meaning doctors, culminating in a sequence involving a tapeworm that’s just flat out nasty. The movie just doesn’t have a point of view, has no idea how to maximize the inherent charms of its cast or activate any sense of tension or suspense in its premise. The emptiness just makes it seem limp and sad, so much running around and yelling and frantic flailing for naught.

In Treatment: WELCOME TO ME

With its central recurring tragicomic setpieces taking the form of a deeply strange local access talk show, the Kristen Wiig-starring Welcome to Me recalls SNL sketches where she’d play a televised oddball attention seeker. Unlike that series’ endless iterations of the cracked talk show concept, this film deepens the emotional terrain and provides context tying the laughs to melancholy and sadness. It’s a small character study brushing up against eccentric details, but never losing a central thread of depression and pain. It’s funny, but in the cringingly awkward way an unexpected inappropriate comment punctures empty moments. The movie is appealingly uneasy.

Never let it be said Wiig plays it safe with her choice of roles. Here she’s a woman with borderline personality disorder who goes off her meds after winning millions in the lottery. Against the advice of her therapist (Tim Robbins), best friend (Linda Cardellini), and parents (Joyce Hiller Piven and Jack Wallace), she cuts a check to a tiny nearby TV station, buying airtime on which she demands to star in her own daytime program. Oprah-obsessed, she imperfectly models her show on her idol’s. Clearly enjoying the cult-of-personality aspects above all else, she creates a show with no interviews or topics. Instead, she only discusses herself. It’s a warped reflection of any social media feed you might encounter, or any string of comments below any article, where you slowly realize the person behind the messages is deeply troubled.

The results are a program that’s a stilted mess of naked neurosis and narcissism, clearly the product of a disturbed mind, and strangely compelling because of it. She uses the airwaves as her own personal therapy session, much to the confusion of the station’s managers (Wes Bentley, James Marsden, and Joan Cusack), who continue cashing her checks, the only thing keeping them out of bankruptcy. The show, also called Welcome to Me, features a woman exorcising her past amongst rudimentary graphics, mannered reenactments by confused day players, stretches of silence, crying jags, cooking demonstrations, and rides across the stage in a swan boat. It’s a close, psychologically complex, cousin of the Tim & Eric aesthetic. Of course it would generate a cult following, from baffled channel surfers and an overeager grad student (Thomas Mann) hungry for more.

Her show, and the performance that comes with it, is the source of the movie’s appeal, crafting a painful vision of a woman for whom personal validation is inextricably tied to a desire to be on TV. (If that’s not a comment on our current media landscape, I don’t know what is.) Beyond it, director Shira Piven and screenwriter Eliot Laurence have created a small world, but a consistently compelling one. Under bright, flat cinematography, Wiig shows off a range of hilarious and heartbreaking line readings which are always firmly rooted in a good sense of character, especially as the woman increasingly disappears up her own unmedicated ego in bizarre and elaborate episodes. Relationships beyond the studio setting are perfunctory indie dramedy fare turned slightly unsettled by the context. But they take a backseat to the show-within-the-movie. It builds in complexity and heart with each repetition, drawing difficult emotional reactions from what could’ve easily tipped over into stiff camp.

Often queasily hilarious, this story of a woman struggling with mental illness is still treated just soberly enough to not feel mean-spirited. Even when she is making self-destructive decisions, or exploited by those who should know better, her plight is treated with empathy and understanding. At best, it’s a comic character study so unusually sharp it draws tears, but retains a layer of artificiality keeping the proceedings vaguely humorous. Because we see the person behind the show, it’s both funny and painful. Like her cult following, I found myself hanging on every word while she’s on the air. The film doesn’t come to any sort of satisfying resolution and many subplots fall flat, but it’s Wiig’s memorable character, and the core of cringe comedy respectfully played, that sticks with me. The show’s warbling theme song still echoes in my brain.

Quick Look: MARS NEEDS MOMS

Milo (who has the movements of Seth Green and the voice of Seth Dusky) fed the cat broccoli off of his plate and then tried to deny it so he was sent to bed without getting to watch TV. When his mom (Joan Cusack) tells him that her “life would be better if I didn’t have to play the nagging mom,” he snaps back that his life would be better without a mom at all. And here’s the remarkable moment that begins this mostly sweet little family film: Milo’s mom doesn’t respond but the camera holds on her face while tears well up in her eyes as she closes the door. Ouch. This is a family-friendly performance-capture CGI production from director Simon Wells (I vaguely recall enjoying his 1995 Balto when I was much younger) based on a children’s book by Berkeley Breathed. The movie is filled with all the requisite slapstick and bright colors but also happens to deal with a rather serious topic in a sometimes subtle and involving way. Martians kidnap little Milo’s mom and he stows away on her captors’ spaceship determined to rescue her. Along the way he runs into a sloppy human (Dan Fogler) with a tragic past that has left him stranded for a couple decades in the bowels of the Martian city. Later, he’ll meet an alien graffiti artist (Elisabeth Harnois) who is basically the Banksy of the endless gray corridors of Mars. But all of this sci-fi craziness springs forth from the simple emotional moment that opens the film. It’s a movie about learning that your parents are people too, that your words can wound them, and that just because they might punish you doesn’t mean they’ll love you any less. The narrative itself feels awfully undercooked and I left the theater with a dull sense of dissatisfaction. I can’t say I blame the people who’ve avoided the film because of its 3D surcharge, but it’s hardly worthy of its status as a colossal flop. It’s a nice, sweet movie with its heart in the right place. If there’s a 2D version playing in your area and you (and your kids) have already seen Rango once or twice, you could sure do worse than Mars Needs Moms.