NORTH
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Elijah Wood, Jon Lovitz, Mathew McCurley, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Bruce Willis. Screenplay: Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman. Director: Rob Reiner.
In 1987, director Rob Reiner brought to the screen a satirical fantasy that was thought to be unfilmable, William Goldman's THE PRINCESS BRIDE. Though uneven, it basically worked thanks to a genuine sense of whimsy and Goldman's own clever adaptation. The relative success of THE PRINCESS BRIDE would seem to suggest that if anyone could make a movie out of Alan Zweibel's goofy fable NORTH, it would be Reiner. Wrong. Instead, he has turned out a smug, tedious and wrong-headed mess which wraps the moral of THE WIZARD OF OZ in a thoroughly unappealing package.
NORTH is the name of a multi-talented eleven-year-old (Elijah Wood) who feels that he is being ignored by his self-involved parents (Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). He decides that he deserves better, and declares himself a free agent, offering himself to the most attractive pair of parents. A judge grants North's request under the condition that he make his final choice in two months or face being sent to an orphanage. North then sets off on a globe-spanning quest for the perfect parents which inspires a kid's rights movement, masterminded by North's devious classmate Winchell (Mathew McCurley) and an ambulance-chasing lawyer (Jon Lovitz). Along the way, North receives advice from a ubiquitous man (Bruce Willis) who acts as his guardian angel.
For a few moments at the very beginning, NORTH looks like it might be on the right track. There is a clever little sequence showing North as a brilliant student, a top athlete and a budding star of the musical theater, pitched at just the right level of low-key surreality; a bit later, a series of parents chastise their children with all the things that "North wouldn't" do. But very early on, NORTH takes a precipitous dive into near-unwatchability. North's encounters with his prospective parents (including Dan Aykroyd and Reba McIntire as "How-dee" Texans, and Kathy Bates and Graham Greene as Eskimos) are repetitious and annoying, all variations on the same theme. In order for the fairy-tale one-dimensionality of these parents to work, they all need to represent something unique, not interchangeable levels of stupidity. Most surprising, Reiner paces everything at a crawl, including a production number in the Texas sequence which should have pumped some life in the proceedings. Instead, it's just another part of an 89 minute film which feels 85 minutes too long.
There is yet another massive misstep with an emphasis on the subplot involving Mathew McCurley as the miniature Machiavelli and Jon Lovitz as his attorney-toady. McCurley is allowed to chew the scenery, lisping ruthless-beyond-his-years dialogue and mincing about in suspenders and slicked back hair (as sure a sign of cinematic evil as a "666" tattoo). Cringing is Lovitz's forte, and he gets to do a lot of it, playing to all of his worst instincts. The youth revolt might have worked with a lighter touch, but Reiner makes it too nasty, darkened further by a murder plot which engenders a pointless chase.
Where did so much talent go so dreadfully wrong? Reiner has been box-office gold; co-screenwriters Zweibel (an original "Saturday Night Live" scribe) and Andrew Scheinman (this summer's pleasant fantasy LITTLE BIG LEAGUE) have some great product under their belts. Elijah Wood, a talented young actor, is a rather obnoxious North, taking the book's more measured nine-year-old protagonist and turning him into an adolescent packing a serious attitude. Reiner probably called in every favor he had to pepper NORTH with cameos, but they serve only to show that it's possible for an entire supporting cast to be as bored making a film as the audience is watching it.
Perhaps the biggest mystery of NORTH is for what audience it was intended. It's too slow and full of dopey in-jokes to keep kids interested, and too simplistic for adults. Rob Reiner had better check his compass; he got dreadfully lost trying to find NORTH.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 sets of parents: 2.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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