Film review by Kevin Patterson
HOME FRIES Rating: *** (out of four) PG-13, 1998 Director: Dean Parisot Screenplay: Vince Gilligan Starring Cast: Luke Wilson, Drew Barrymore, Catherine O'Hara, Jake Busey, Robin Williams.
If I had skipped the Farrelly brothers' THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, I think I could comfortably say that HOME FRIES is the strangest romantic comedy I have ever seen. As it is, it can't quite match the gross-out gags of MARY on the weirdness meter, but's actually a slightly better movie, if nothing else because its mix of light-hearted romance and dark humor never seems forced.
As HOME FRIES begins, Henry (Robin Williams) stops by the drive-in at Burger-Matic and speaks to Sally (Drew Barrymore), who is eight months pregnant with Henry's illegitimate child. On his way home, Henry is suddenly intercepted by a black helicopter that descends from the sky, chases him, and frightens him so much that he dies of a heart attack. Soon after, we learn that the helicopter was piloted by Henry's stepsons Dorian (Luke Wilson) and Angus (Jake Busey), whose mother (Catherine O'Hara) suggested the stunt when she learned of Henry's infidelity.
While piloting the helicopter, Dorian and Angus had crossed frequencies with the employee headsets at Burger-Matic, which means that Sally and some of the other employees may have overheard their conversation. Angus, who is extremely paranoid and fiercely loyal to his mother, prods Dorian, who had been reluctant to participate in the scheme in the first place, into taking a job at Burger-Matic in order to find out how much anyone there knows. There he falls in love with Sally, which is also a problem, seeing as Angus and his mother plan to kill her as well once they find out about her involvement with Henry. (Believe me, all of this makes much more sense on screen than it does on paper.)
>From this point on, director Dean Parisot and screenwriter Vince Gilligan use this setup for a number of bizarre confrontations and situations--some of them hilarious, some of them disturbing, and some of them both--while crafting the oddball romance between Dorian and Sally, who emerge as genuinely likable and believable. Aside from the romance angle, the characterizations are certainly interesting, though a bit puzzling at time. Dorian is somewhat of a dim bulb, but he turns out to be good-natured nice guy, so much so that one can scarcely believe he took part in the helicopter scheme (though it does seem that he may have thought the plan was only to scare Henry, not kill him). His mother is by far the most frightening and manipulative of anyone in the film, though she too is a little awkward in places: there's a scene at Henry's funeral in which she completely overdoes her fake grief, and I'm not sure whether she was supposed to seem hateful and nasty here or just kind of dumb and pathetic. Still, even the more uncertain scenes do not seriously disrupt the story, and they seem to flow naturally even if their purpose is unclear.
With its mix of humor both light and dark and its rural setting, HOME FRIES bears some resemblance to the Coen Brothers' RAISING ARIZONA, and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if that film was a direct influence: Gilligan, an admitted Coen-head, reportedly wrote this script back in 1989, only two years after RAISING ARIZONA was released. It's a tough act to follow, and Parisot and Gilligan certainly don't match the Coens' comic genius, but they have created some hilarious scenes here. The best is probably Dorian's first day at work at Burger-Matic, which is a laugh a second for anyone who's ever labored in fast food hell. He gets rapid-fire, impossible-to-follow directions on how to prepare people's orders ("This ain't a pickle burger!" another employee scolds him when he puts too many pickles on a hamburger), tries to change into the costume of the restaurant's mascot in the freezer, and finally beats the jammed freezer door open with a slab of meat, only to find that someone is now holding up the restaurant with a shotgun.
It's tough to say whether or not HOME FRIES is entirely successful, since I often wasn't sure whether it was supposed to be funny or just plain weird. But I was rooting for Dorian and Sally by the end, and I was certainly never bored or irritated with the film, and that ought to count for something.
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