STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Al Franken, Laura San Giacomo, Vincent D'Onofrio, Harris Yulin, Shirley Knight, Lesley Boone. Screenplay: Al Franken. Director: Harold Ramis.
Lorne Michaels must die. It is really as simple as that. Yes, he bought himself a temporary reprieve with the dumb-but-still- funny TOMMY BOY, but Michaels has foisted so much horrible product on American television and film audiences in the last five years that such a minor success was the artistic equivalent of Charles Manson buying a few boxes of Girl Scout cookies. We can only find evidence of a benevolent God in the fact that HANS & FRANZ THE MOVIE and COFFEE TALK THE MOVIE were scrapped in development (that is not a joke). Unfortunately, STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY slipped out before Paramount stopped handing Michaels blank checks. Not only is this latest "Saturday Night Live" character spinoff incoherent and unfunny, its basic idea and tone are just appallingly wrong-headed.
Al Franken stars as Stuart Smalley, caring nurturer and host of the public access cable program "Daily Affirmation." That is before the program is cancelled, leading Stuart into a shame spiral which causes concern among his cadre of 12-step sponsors led by Julia (Laura San Giacomo). To make matters worse, the death of a beloved aunt forces Stuart to confront his singularly dysfunctional immediate family: his alcoholic father (Harris Yulin); co-dependent enabler mother (Shirley Knight); pot-smoking unemployed brother (Vincent D'Onofrio); over-eater and thrice-divorced sister (Lesley Boone). As family strife commences over trouble with the aunt's inheritance, Stuart tries to be the peace-maker, while also trying to revive his show on another cable network.
To state the obvious about the recent spate of SNL-"inspired" features, the five-minute sketches on which STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY is based weren't all that funny to begin with. They had their moments, primarily because Al Franken is one of the few performers associated with SNL in the last decade who doesn't appear to have had all his subtlety surgically removed; indeed, his sing-song delivery is good for the film's few laughs. But where on earth was he going to come up with a 90-minute concept for a movie? The answer is that he didn't. Instead, he took two 45-minute concepts and fused them together into a disastrous whole. One plot, in which Stuart attempts to take his Illinois public access show to the big time (shades of WAYNE'S WORLD, anyone?), is supposed to be the funny part. It is not, with the exception of a cameo by Julia (IT'S PAT) Sweeney as a timid receptionist who becomes a guest on "Daily Affirmation." Mostly, it's just deadly slow.
What is _unintentionally_ funny about STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY is the movie-of-the-week melodrama of the Smalley family segments. Although there are a few flashbacks to Stuart's youth which are played strictly for laughs (unsuccessfully), the majority of the interactions are intended to be poignant or serious. This decision is baffling, because Franken appears to have forgotten the premise behind the "Daily Affirmation" sketches. They were parodies of the touchy-feely self-help movement, deriving most of their humor from goofy over-reliance on new age mantras like Stuart's ubiquitous "and that's ... okay." But STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY is practically a love letter to self-help, and the problems within the family are treated with a ridiculous earnestness. The schizoid combination of humorless comedy and misplaced sentimentality (including a score by the ever-more-saccharine Marc Shaiman) makes for a truly uncomfortable ride.
It is clear that Al Franken had two basic choices when it came to making a STUART movie: keep Stuart a caricature in an episodic story, or make him more real in an actual narrative. He managed somehow to get Harold Ramis (GROUNDHOG DAY) to direct, so he went for the human, feel-good angle. Big mistake.
I said Franken had two basic choices. Make that three: he could have chosen not to do the movie at all. _That_ would have been the smart choice.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 daily affirmations: 2.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews