Saw Funny Bones (thanks, Basil!) It was a humorous non-comedy about the show business of comedy. It follows a comedian trying to make it in the enormous shadow of his father. The comedian is dying we presume because he keeps repeating that he doesn't have long to live. In an attempt to reignite his creative juices and to connect with something meaningful, he returns to his childhood home. It is a fading land full of fat, gaudily-dressed housewives and the remnants of an ancient comedy underground. The film uses clownish slapstick as the symbol of "real" comedy and therefore embraces the inherent grotesquerie and pathos of clowns. One of the characters profoundly explains that all of comedy comes from pain and that comedy is the alchemical spinning of gold from this dross.
It's an idea I used to be obsessed with and one I find very interesting. With such a neat idea to chew over, I just wish the film had been a bit better. It leans on the show-biz stuff of crowds cheering in slow motion and over-the-top histrionics. The effect is nicely artificial and hysterical-feeling and kind of merrily ghoulish, as all good circus acts should be, but it also has a circus act's quality of frivolity. To be blunt, I never felt like anything mattered. We never get to really know the protagonist and his hopes and dreams are never as interesting to me as, say, an inexplicable side-plot involving a mumu-clad Oliver Reed. That said, the film does deliver on many other fronts. It's visually splendid, delightfully melodramatic, and moody. The film seems like a darker version of Moulin Rouge! with less glam and more grotesques.
Overall the film is definitely interesting. It deals with ideas a bit too lightly for my taste, but I perhaps only feel this way because the film has had the misfortune of hitting on one of my pet obsessions (namely that comedy IS pain, man.) I would have loved this in high school. Now, in my jaded advanced years, I'm a bit too distracted by the goofy lightness of the plot to be sucked into the delightful ugly whimsy of the film.
When I saw this movie (in high school, I think) I thought that it was dark as fuck -- there's one scene I'm thinking about in particular, which is a flashback to a slapstick routine gone murderously wrong, and which serves as a grisly undercurrent for the rest of the film. I should really watch this again, though, to see if I have the same reaction now. Probably I am quite a bit more jaded these days.
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