Melvin and Howard (1980)

Capturing impotence is tricky business in the movies; as to do so is to court unintended flaccidity of narrative. Ask the overrated Carnal Knowledge or the underrated The Weather Man. There’s the issue of getting tied up in something overtly schematic; of choking the life out of your picture with a can’t-win-against-the-big-guy thesis that, regardless of validity, feels rigged and self-pitying. Melvin and Howard, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Bo Goldman’s film of a middling man stuck in indentured servitude to the myth of the “American Dream”, trumps the poor man card with repetition. Melvin Dummar’s (Paul Le Mat) failure isn’t the climax or a shock or a tragedy, it’s a constant, dependable, infuriating, comforting, given; a diaper this baby, truly, doesn’t want to outgrow. Melvin fails so often that it becomes a source of low-electric comedy; we get used to it, accept it, and move on to something of greater interest: the nature-the necessity-the ironic heroism-the sheer adventure-of delusion, specifically the very American delusion that we’re all going to one day “make it”. (We’re a country of Don Quixotes.) Melvin and Howard attains an uncompromised, compassionate, softly-melancholic-screwball tone; yet another picture that revels in Demme’s equal opportunity humanity; his belief in a flake’s unalienable right to be a flake.

The picture has a fixed lottery ending, the “American Dream” revealed yet again to be a piece of cheese that keeps the hamster’s wheel perpetually turning, but, unlike most pictures, Demme earns his pathos because he doesn’t try too hard. The warm lighting and shooting of the picture contributes, gracefully, to the energy of the characters’ defeat. (Demme favors a particular kind of loving dolly in on the characters that probably inspired certain shots in Boogie Nights.) The picture’s matter of factitude about Melvin’s eventual understanding that the courts will never accept Howard Hughes’ (Jason Robards) will is heartbreaking. Melvin, the puffy man-boy who squanders every opportunity he gets in the continued effort to quench various immediate thirsts sprung from feelings of inadequacy, grows up (kinda maybe) at the end of Melvin and Howard. Melvin drives off; appreciating his elusive night ride with the eccentric, near mythical Hughes for what it was and opting, one hopes, to move on and live his life.

Paul Le Mat is one of many actors that I wish we could’ve seen more from. Maybe it’s because his persona is so specific, so effective in certain molds, that unimaginative studio executives felt little could be done with him. Le Mat’s turn in American Graffiti is broad and sort of magical (how director George Lucas, with Le Mat, Richard Dreyfuss, Wolfman Jack, Candy Clarke, Charles Martin Smith, etc, manages to keep cutting to the aggressively boring Cindy Williams-Ron Howard pairing is beyond me, but that’s for another day). Le Mat brings that same blobby lack of definition to Melvin and Howard, but, again as in American Graffiti, he keeps surprising you, with sharp, off-kilter timing that keeps his character from slipping into the maudlin. Watch Melvin watch his favorite game show, bragging that he always picks the right door; this could easily too openly telegraph his pathetic disposition, too aggressively tug at the heart strings, but Le Mat dials down, without making a show of even dialing down. Le Mat appears to be, and maybe was, a found object.

Le Mat and Demme’s visions of this picture’s ungainly comedy of need are simpatico; and Mary Steenburgen is right there too; she’s, in my memory, never been better. Steenburgen, as Melvin’s eventual ex-wife, answers the phone in the middle of the night when Melvin calls to tell her of the inheritance, we see another man in the dark, his arm over her, but her face, in seconds, conjures that love that probably now itches like a phantom limb. Watch Steenburgen, a little girl who plays at being a sex kitten in a strip club, say (as if it requires no further explanation) that she likes to dance. Steenburgen is also given the dialogue that most consciously strives for poetry, and she assures that it reaches it. Fed up with Melvin (again), she says something to him in French as she leaves (again). Melvin asks about it, she says she always dreamed of being a French interpreter; he reminds her that she doesn’t speak French, she replies, through near tears, “That’s why it’s a dream.”

It’s a given that Jason Robards must disappear early on in Melvin and Howard, but his alienation haunts the picture. Robards exudes that specialty of his, a gruff disconnected man’s man intelligence that masks a surprisingly deep well of vulnerability. Melvin picks Howard up from the desert, where Howard has been sleeping after crashing his bike for an unspecified amount of time, and Melvin needles haggard, homeless-looking Howard into singing a song with him. Howard’s gradual, tentative opening up to this new, strange man is convincing and wonderful; an ideal movie fantasy of transcendent friendship and kindness. Demme confidently sells something here that’s harder to buy than a dinosaur reborn; or flying people, or whatever the physics compromise de jour may be: that we’re in this together.

Posted on June 20th, 2008 in Reviews, 1980, Classics |

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