GOD SAID 'HA!' A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1999 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
Although it is a bit easier in a stage play than a movie, few people can single-handedly carry an almost hour and a half production with a single unbroken monologue. The brilliant orator Spalding Gray can do it, as he did in SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA and other movies. His rapid-fire delivery and his fascinating material mesmerizes his audiences even if his overabundant exhilaration can exhaust them.
GOD SAID 'HA!,' written and directed by and starring Julia Sweeney, is a one person play that was filmed in front of a live audience and is being released to movie theaters. The live audience supplies the equivalent of an annoying television laugh track. As Julie talks non-stop, the studio audience guffaws at her every phrase. You begin to feel guilty for not laughing on cue, and you find yourself subconsciously looking around the movie theater for one of those obnoxious, neon "Laugh!" signs found in some old television studios.
Julia Sweeney, while a completely likeable and utterly confident actress, is no Spalding Gray. Her delivery and her script can hold a viewer's attention only for the length of an extended television comedy sketch (she's a veteran of the "Saturday Night Live" TV show). A little of her routine goes a long way.
Julie tells an apparently true story about the time after her happy divorce when her dying brother and her parents came to live with her. With minimal stage props and with two relatively fixed camera angles, she looks the camera in the eye and tells her story through a series of vignettes. Wandering slowly around the stage, she speaks in one of two monotonic voices, her own and one mimicking her parents.
Her only slightly quirky brand of humor does produce several smiles albeit few laughs. She tells, for example, about the time that she wanted to be rebellious while her parents were staying with her. She decided to smoke a cigarette and get the latest book by the Pope, with whom she always disagrees. Another time she talks about the 50,000-piece puzzle of Sarajevo that her father got for a 50-cent donation to PBS and how it had taken over her dining room table.
Her best pieces concern sex. She tells a sweet and funny little tale about a boyfriend coming to visit. Feeling like a Catholic schoolgirl again, she played footsie with him under the table and generally hid her sexual escapades with him from her parents. She had forgotten how exciting forbidden sex can be.
Trying to move a play to the screen without making any changes is almost always a bad idea. The mediums are different and require different approaches. Although there are the exceptional performers like Spalding Gray who can pull this off, it is a feat better not attempted. Julia Sweeney gives it her best shot but only sporadically succeeds.
GOD SAID 'HA!' runs 1:26. It is rated PG-13 for mature themes and some drug references and would be fine for teenagers.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: www.InternetReviews.com
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