RENAISSANCE MAN
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Danny DeVito, Gregory Hines, Kadeem Hardison, Mark Wahlberg, Stacey Dash, Khalil Kain, Lillo Brancato, James Remar. Screenplay: Jim Burnstein. Director: Penny Marshall.
It was inevitable that RENAISSANCE MAN would be compared to DEAD POETS SOCIETY. The 1988 Robin Williams vehicle was a critical and commercial success, and the comparison makes for ready-made epithets (DEAD POETS PLATOON, "Oh drill sergeant my drill sergeant"). But the comparison is really rather specious; once you get beyond the classroom setting, there really isn't all that much substance or tone in common between the two. It's much more useful to think of RENAISSANCE MAN as SISTER ACT 2 on an army base--as well as much more depressing. Constructed around pre-fabricated emotion and a premise that's sporting liver spots, RENAISSANCE MAN is only slightly more entertaining than last year's Whoopi Goldberg debacle, and twenty minutes too long besides.
Danny DeVito stars as Bill Rago, a Detroit advertising executive whose creative cold streak and chaotic personal life land him on the unemployment line. There they find Bill a temporary job at the local army base, and it's not advertising. Despite no previous teaching experience, Bill is assigned the task of teaching basic thinking skills to a group of eight under-achieving recruits know as the Double D's. Bill seems content just to put in his time, and to needle the drill sergeant (Gregory Hines), until a lesson on "Hamlet" seems to spark the interest of his charges, as well as Bill's own interest. One by one the Double D's are able to confront their problems, and even the teacher learns a few lessons.
It's indicative of how sloppy the writing is that Jim Burnstein anticipates the film's key credibility question--why doesn't the Army just kick the Double D's out--without bothering to answer it. Maybe the base commander (nicely played by Cliff Robertson) could have confessed that he was once like those troubled kids, or something of the sort. But Burnstein offers little more than a shrug of the shoulders. "I've given you the movie," he seems to be saying; "you fill in the motivation." And so it goes in a script that's like a Chinese combination platter: one from Column A, one from Column B. Only without any of the flavor.
That goes for a meticulously integrated collection of Double D's, craftily acted to a one but established from their sledge-hammer opening confessionals in the broadest possible terms. Hobbs (Khalil Kain) is the Smart One; Jamaal (Kadeem Hardison) is the Jive-Talking One; Junior (Peter Simmons) is the Sensitive One; and so on. They play their parts, then dutifully emerge on the other side of the film as Better People. The Sweathogs were given more depth.
Then there is Danny DeVito, who is all wrong as Bill Rago. He should have been much slicker, a hustler who discovers his heart like Steve Martin in LEAP OF FAITH. DeVito never looks for a minute like someone who is obsessed with money and career, which makes his "transformation" virtually indiscernible. With his Ewok hugability, DeVito can't pull off the hard-edged Rago of the film's early scenes.
Nuances of character aside, RENAISSANCE MAN is simply an unfunny, earthbound comedy. There are at least three too many Double D's, each requiring a personal epiphany of varying magnitude, and Penny Marshall has to spread the film far too thin to accomodate them. There is no spark, no energy, no anything to RENAISSANCE MAN's laboriously staged set pieces but musical crying cues. Marshall's old-fashioned brand of sentimentality doesn't play without characters the audience cares about, and RENAISSANCE MAN chugs to its conclusion without an ounce of genuine humanity.
RENAISSANCE MAN is the kind of film that wears its emotion in such lines as "Victory starts here" (accompanied by an emphatic gesture to the head), and exchanges between Rago and his daughter like: "Do you want your pennant?" "No, I just want you to believe in me." Usually I respond to such films in spite of myself, but not this time. RENAISSANCE MAN is a glossy mess that, like its young protagonists, just can't shoot straight.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Double D's: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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