# On View: Lift Every Self **URL:** **By** David Brudnoy **Published:** January 1, 1981 --- “If you’re going to take the time and trouble to dream, might as well dream big, and what dream in a success-oriented society could be bigger than young, sad Melvin’s?” No one dreams about the joys of losing money and becoming poor. Maybe an occasional back-to-basics type bemoans the complexities of life and actually tears up his credit cards and retires to the woods to play Thoreau. But your garden variety dreamer imagines himself the sudden inheritor of somebody else’s vast fortune, cruising the Greek isles with a honey or two and all that comes along with the Midas touch. ## Melvin and Howard Easy Street, with or without yellow bricks, is surely the majority’s idea of Oz, and in our time, give or take a Getty, nobody seemed better to exemplify the lost opportunities to enjoy easy street than the (probably) late Howard Hughes. Little wonder that Melvin Dummar, who passed through a dozen occupations on his way to no success at any of them, caught the public imagination when for a time it looked as if he, this Melvin Who?, stood to inherit the vast Hughes fortune. If you’re going to take the time and trouble to dream, might as well dream big, and what dream in a success-oriented society could be bigger than young, sad Melvin’s? Little matter that the poignancy of the Melvin Dummar experience far overshadowed the comic aspect. It is a story straight out of the book of the big American fantasy, an ideal subject for an epic tale or, as happens, for a splendid movie, the lyrical comedy of the year, _Melvin and Howard_. As directed by Jonathan Demme, the film moves sure-footedly through two sequential stories—Melvin’s irritatingly luckless years, followed by his brief prospects as Howard’s heir—and it accomplishes at once a delicious allegorical task (of which more more later) and a neat examination of the grubby nature of mundane American life. Melvin Dummar, at least as portrayed by Paul Le Mat, is a winning enough fellow whose fate is to come ever so close but never close enough to the realization of the national dream of untold riches. Le Mat’s Dummar stands within a tradition every one of us understands fully: he grubs at this, he tries that, he reaches over there, ever over to farther and farther theres, to make it. His first wife (Mary Steenburgen) wins $10,000 on a TV game show called “Easy Street,” and Melvin blows it in an instant on down payments for large, conspicuous consumer items, the balance on which he can of course not pay. His second wife (Pamela Reed) ties him a bit more more tightly to reality, but Dummar dreams the big dream and is ripe, over-ripe, for the plucking when at last the fates seem to have handed him the prize. We get all too little of Hughes (Jason Robards), who in the film and in the real Melvin Dummar’s recounting of the story accepted a minor favor from Dummar one lonely evening and, as in the nicest of fairy tales, remembered, remembered so well that he made Dummar the beneficiary of the so-called Mormon will. Well, everybody knows that it came to nothing in the end; there is no glorious ending to the film because there was no glorious triumph in the courts. Melvin returned to ground zero and we are left, as Melvin was left, with no bags of gold and jewels for the nice guy who may or may not have met, befriended, and so mightily impressed the multi-millionaire. So much for the story and for Melvin as Melvin. But this cinema Melvin exists on a second level, above or at least beyond the linear. He is something of an Everyman for our time, no Bunyan-esque pilgrim, to be sure, but a seeker nonetheless, progressing from one to another pitfall which blocks the realization of his goal. He wants not wisdom or beatific contentment, he searches not after the perfection of his soul, he chases no ideal of spiritual oneness: he hungers for lots of goodies, things, items, threads, wheels, plastic cards, dollar bills, charge accounts. Our Melvin seeks to be uplifted to wealth, the truest measure of worth in our day. Argue with it as you will, or disdain such a puny conception of the ultimate happiness, for we would not be our accustomed self-righteous American selves if we didn’t submit to the temptation to put poor Melvin down: still, the man is completely of our time and wholly an exemplar of our real value system, more than merely Melvin, something rather on the order of Man. Not for Demme the simple telling of one story when two, in his hands, are as easily told. And he does it with such infectious grace, such certain comprehension of the shared aspirations of subject and audience, that he even permits himself a lovely, absolutely fitting daydream as coda. The cinema, like sit-com television, panders to our wishes; how else could an abysmal bit of TV drivel like _“Fantasy Island”_ endure, season after season, except that all of us can effortlessly will ourselves to cheer on the folks who disembark on that place out of time and mind in search of their dreams? That the Mormon will was never admitted to probate, that the consensus is that Melvin is at best an ingenious faker, that the tale is happier as sustained put-on than as remotely possible fact: all this granted, the will to believe that a mad prank is actually a semi-madman’s way of rewarding a good deed, coupled with the audience’s hopes for Melvin — because if it can happen to Melvin it can happen, who knows, to me—make Melvin and Howard the swellest sort of contemporary comic film. It dashes our hopes at the last moment, but then we knew all along that Melvin Dummar didn’t get Howard Hughes’s money. Yet along the bumpy, funny trail it lets our imaginations soar, it invites us to hope, it tells us that however prosaic the present may be, tomorrow the sun may shine forever. Nice stuff if you can get it. The dream may elude us but the hope springs eternal. Get thee behind me, _me_; I’m not just little ole me, _me_; I am ME. That’s the ticket. ## Oh God! Book II So who says that any man’s dream of transcendence can never be fashioned into life? The major religion of the West is grounded on precisely this. God becomes Man, then Man reunites again with God, this God-Man cheats death, is resurrected and offers to those who follow Him eternal life. But we aren’t very much in the habit nowadays, at least not in general audience movies, of taking that straight, without at least a jigger of something to lower it a notch or two from the august heights of theological mystery. We like our God on screen not as a burning bush, not as Jehovah from the Sistine ceiling. We are comfortable with George Burns as the Lord, even in so slight an item as _Oh God! Book II_, a pallid sequel to the wispy 1977 film of half the same name. You could hardly come up with a simpler or more p.r.-activated slogan than “Try God,” and you can get buttons saying just that, in the precious or worthless metal of your choice. So we have here to make do with “Think God,” the slogan little Tracy (played by something called Louanne, who lacks not only a last name but also a personality) dreams up to satisfy Him when He comes among us once again, pissed off that the world has forgotten Him. _Oh God! Book II_ is good for a few laughs, little throaty, tentative giggles, if not for any hearty belly-shakers, and probably its adequate success at the box office insures us a third installment, assuming that George Burns can bear the cutesy stuff once more. The film’s implicit message, however, is what concerns us: God’s a nice old geezer with a nice sense of humor, and He might just as well appear to a moppet as not. It rather swiftly makes away with such bothersome considerations as dogma and such nuisances as redemption, not to mention the casual way it dispenses with really worrisome matters, like sin. We hunger for easy street not only in the material but also in the spiritual world, so why not God as a variation of Howard Hughes before he became a hermit with long fingernails? Why not think God, if thinking God brings us God with horn-rimmed glasses and an adequate toupee? ## Somewhere in Time Every culture has its share of romantic young swains who’ll trudge through fire and ice, who’ll climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest ocean, and on and on, to get the girl. _Somewhere in Time_ adds a new wrinkle to the routine, positing a handsome, successful, dreamy chap who falls in love with a photograph taken in 1912 and who, having put two and two and two together and come up with time travel as the answer, wills himself back to that year and finds her, woos her, wins her, and, all because of a shiny new penny, loses her. When last we met Christopher Reeve he was _Superman_; now he’s Richard, without a ’phone booth in sight, though amply armed with a mania to meet that lovely lady in the photograph on the wall. Things like _Somewhere in Time_ are condescendingly called “women’s movies” because they are supposed to activate the tear ducts in sentimental females. All you need is the right megadose of beauty in the lovers, oodles of gushy romantic music, the prettiest of costumes, and, of course, an appropriately bittersweet ending, and you’ve got it made. I suppose that even to subject this mindless trash to a critical glance is to pay it too much attention, though we are considering the ways recent films help lift us out of ourselves and this one is tailor-made for that merry elevation. Jane Seymour is exquisite, and Christopher Reeve, though he is the least sexy of dashing leading men, is suitably clean-cut, perfect of face and form, and the forlorn, wistful look fits him as well as his _Superman_ tights. Watching the young man pine for love, strive to get through time for love, connive for love, and so dramatically expire for love, one wants only for him to disappear forever for love. It is not to be. The film expresses a couple of very dearly held aspirations of our age: to get back to “the good old days” and to risk everything for tender (or at least carnal) bliss eternal. If your present lot is insufficient, however healthy, admired, attractive, accomplished, and successful you may be, there are, after all, only two possible ways to better things. One is lowering your expectations and being content with what you’ve got; the other is discovering, seizing, and incorporating into your very being the missing element in your life. The first way is that of mere boring mortals like us, and the movies aren’t designed for us to sit and look at us as us, they’re designed to get us to rise above mere us-ness. _Somewhere in Time_, although it stars the wrong man—Reeve is lovely but vacant—and suffers from a script that wrecks it at every turn is, for all that, on the right track if what you’re after is a couple of hours of utterly preposterous escapism. ## Resurrection Some people dream of riches, others of having cozy chats with God, still others of finding Miss Right, and then there are those who dream of playing God, at least of doing God’s work. Consider Edna Mae (Ellen Burstyn), who suffers a near-fatal automobile accident—a fatal accident, we are to believe, from which she is somehow granted a reprieve—and after this develops the healing power. This is _Resurrection_, an oddly disjointed movie that soars beautifully in some scenes of healing and compassion, then sinks to the sil-liest depths as it attempts to reconcile the power this lady possesses with her total absence of any understanding of—or even willingness to pretend that she has an understanding of—its source. While her odd boyfriend (Sam Shepard) goes off the deep end, convinced that if she isn’t possessed by God then it’s the other guy who’s giving her the healing ability, Edna Mae just keeps on healing, radiating love and goodness and sincere unconcern about ultimate questions of origin or consequence. This is the perfect example of having it both ways: we are able to thrill to a swell gal graced by a most congenial ability (imagine, no need for the intercession of those nasty old physicians), and at the same time we don’t have to crease our brows over any puzzling questions. She’s got the power, like some wonder detergent, and that’s that. Resurrection halfway revives the miracle movie but stops short of requiring anything of us but admiration. No adoration, as we were once thought likely to bring to movies about god-like power in the gentle hands of mortals; no theological quibbles; nothing but here’s the healing and ain’t it fine? It is a fine thing, to be sure, and so effortless to appreciate when all the more brooding questions are whisked away. Believe in God? Fine, just fine. Don’t believe in God? That’s cool, too. Edna Mae could be gone over with a psychoanalytical comb and be found easily enough to have some screws loose. But she’s such a well-meaning lady, whose father never loved her, whose mother died on her, whose rustic background sat awkwardly on her shoulders. Best just to accept the grace of healing and not muddy the waters with thoughts. When uplift’s the game, nitpicking’s a shame. ## The Stunt Man The movies remain our modern magical mystery tour. We want to squeal in terror when the fiend comes slashing his way through the coeds’ dorm with his machete. We want to hide our eyes when the child is crushed under the diesel truck’s wheels. We want to gasp in amazement as the hero jumps twenty feet from precipice to precipice. And we want to believe and at the same moment to know that we’re ninnies when we believe that the guy going up in flames is hurting, bad. Comes then _The Stunt Man_ to play a wonderful game with us. We’re going to see how it’s done, how un-dangerous those derring-do scenes are for the stars and how dicey they are for the agile hired hands who for a few hundred bucks will provide us with the thrills and the chills. If you can get over the memory of Peter O’Toole loathesomely diseased in _Caligula_, welcome him back to the more dashing mode as Eli Cross, perfectionist director willing to risk life and limb (somebody else’s life and limb) for the greater glory of the cinema. Cameron (Steve Railsback), a Vietnam veteran fleeing from the police for a reason that adds up to very little indeed, falls by accident into Cross’s clutches. Hide out with us, muscular young man, the director says; all you have to do is fill in for our recently deceased stunt man Bert. _The Stunt Man_ inches carefully around the periphery of some rather somber questions, perhaps expressed adequately if not very well like so: What Is Reality? What Is Delusion? When Does Reality Become Delusion? You can see how far that sort of line will take us. To embarrassed titters. Which is why _The Stunt Man_ shoves the action into the foreground and treads lightly on the dark, gloomy philosophizing a more ambitious, more intense movie would likely accentuate. Here our young hero is permitted to worry that the movie director might be angling to slaughter him; he is allowed a doubt or two about the fidelity of his newfound lady; and he gets to screech now and again as the stunts multiply in complexity. Buttressing a somewhat anxious ego is not one of Eli Cross’s specialties, but, wonder of wonders, he turns out to be a jolly good man after all, and our very happy young stunt man makes the happiest of happy endings almost believable. Railsback falls a tad short of what’s required when he has to say something; this is an actor who is to be seen, not heard. But what he lacks in vocal imagination he makes up for with animal sinew, and O’Toole takes up the slack in the dialogue department quite handily. _The Stunt Man_ only hints at the possibilities for something resembling a profound examination of the subject at hand. The director, Cross, knows that the audiences for his pictures want to be amazed, and the neophyte stunt man knows that he doesn’t know much except, as he puts it in some sort of supposedly deep euphemism for avoiding being blown to bits in ‘Nam, how to “get home for Thanksgiving.” He does know that six hundred bucks for a good leap and a thousand for a plunge off a bridge in a swanky old car is better than eating dandelions, and that pretending to be what he’s not will keep him out of the hands of the law. He’s a sensible lad indeed. He wants to be free, and that, in these perilous times, is as good a desire as any and better than most. Melvin probably never met his Howard, but Cameron sinks and lives to swim to the surface again. He also gets the girl. Happy endings are not common in real life. Now you know why we have movies always with us. □ LR’s film critic also reviews for WNAC-TV (CBS), WHDH Radio, and _The Boston Herald American_. He hosts “The David Brudnoy Show” on radio and “Nightscene” on television, writes a newspaper column for national distribution, and reviews books for a number of journals. © Copyright David Brudnoy, 1981