CABIN BOY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Chris Elliott, Ritch Brinkley, James Gammon, Brian Doyle-Murray, Brion James, Melora Walters. Screenplay/Director: Adam Resnick.
A couple of years ago, Chris Elliot and writer/director Adam Resnick teamed up for a Fox television series called "Get a Life" which lasted, oh, about three weeks. I enjoyed its silly humor, but if the microscopic ratings were any indication, the audience for Elliott's fey goofball character was severely limited. It's therefore hard to figure why a studio would green-light a project like CABIN BOY, particularly assuming anyone actually saw a script before shooting started. CABIN BOY is dumb even by the standards of a Chris Elliott project, depending almost entirely on Elliott's dopey grin and taking far too long to get to anything with any real wit.
Elliott plays Nathanial Mayweather, an obnoxious and overly- sheltered lad just out of prep school. Looking for the ship which will take him to his father's Hawaiian hotel, he instead mistakenly ends up on board The Filthy Whore, a fishing boat with a considerably less cultured crew: Captain Greybar (Ritch Brinkley); Skunk (Brian Doyle-Murray); Paps (James Gammon); and Big Teddy (Brion James). The salty fishermen are none-too-pleased with their prissy stowaway, but they're even less pleased when he inadvertently causes the ship to end up in Hell's Bucket. There many dangers await, which Nathanial must overcome to win the respect of his new comrades and the love of the girl he pulls out of the ocean (Melora Walters) ... who, incidentally was trying to set a world record for swimming across the ocean.
CABIN BOY gets off to a bad start from which it never really recovers. This includes a prologue at the prep school which seems to last about twice as long as the ten minutes it actually is. Elliott adopts a supremely annoying quasi-Brahmin accent that makes most of his dialogue grating, and makes about twelve jokes too many based on Nathanial's condescension toward common folk. Then we get a bizarre cameo by David Letterman, which is almost funny simply for its bald refusal to disguise his regular TV personality. In a film which runs under eighty minutes, a tedious set-up is more than a hindrance ... it's a pre-emptive first strike.
Once CABIN BOY hits open water (or at least as open as it gets on the sound stage), it's no longer actively annoying. It's also not much more funny. Elliott's schtick always tends to the surreal, but as weird as things get, they remain curiously uninteresting. Among the loopy perils of Hell's Bucket are a stop-motion living glacier, a giant appliance salesman and a half-man/half-shark called Chocki (played by Russ Tamblyn). If any of that sounds funny on paper, well, it did to me, too. It's the execution that fails. While the bargain basement production values might be endearing to some, I found the visual gags in CABIN BOY painfully unfunny. Some of the verbal bits work, but in their rarity I hesitate to spoil them.
I think one of the main reasons CABIN BOY comes up short is that it is so obviously a Chris Elliott vanity project. The four fishermen are virtually interchangeable characters; not one of them is given a distinct comic personality out of which some humor could arise. There is a glimpse of what could have been in the character of the impossibly dense first cabin boy, who has a few brief scenes worth a chuckle or two, but he soon disappears. Melora Walters as Trina is only asked to react, which is fortunate because she has about as much presence as a slight breeze. Almost every punch line is Elliott's, and a little of him can go a very long way. His comic vision is certainly unique, and viewers perfectly attuned to a mind that concocts a giant talking cupcake that spits tobacco might have much more fun with CABIN BOY than I had. However, I suspect a larger percentage will find it slow going, and exceedingly short on solid laughs.
Like caviar, Chris Elliott is an acquired taste. Also like caviar, he should probably only be digested in very small portions. CABIN BOY was just too much for me to swallow.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 talking cupcakes: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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