MY FELLOW AMERICANS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Warner Bros.) Starring: Jack Lemmon, James Garner, Dan Aykroyd, John Heard, Wilford Brimley, Everett McGill. Screenplay: E. Jack Kaplan & Richard Chapman and Peter Tolan. Producer: Jon Peters. Director: Peter Segal. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, sexual situations) Running Time: 101 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
MY FELLOW AMERICANS is a buddy comedy. It is a bickering buddy comedy. It is a bickering-buddies-on-the-road comedy. In short, MY FELLOW AMERICANS has about as generic a basic premise as there is in Hollywood. So how does it end up so improbably entertaining? Because when it comes to film-making, story isn't even half the story -- execution is king. MY FELLOW AMERICANS uses the familiar plot as a starting point, adds a script with just enough lively turns, and casts two consummate professionals in the lead roles. The result is a simple but engaging studio comedy, energized by the wonderful pairing of Jack Lemmon and James Garner.
Lemmon plays Russell Kramer, a one-term Republican president now spending his retirement giving speeches at corporate luncheons and writing cookbooks; Garner plays Matt Douglas, Kramer's Democratic successor and long-time adversary. Three years after losing to Kramer's one-time V.P. Bill Haney (Dan Aykroyd), Douglas finds himself with another shot when a scandal prepares to break involving a kickback to the Kramer-Haney administration. The party's support awaits Douglas if he can get evidence to nail his old foe, but Kramer is equally keen to prove he knew nothing about the deal. Both men discover that the plot is thicker than they realized when a key witness turns up dead, and a helicopter they were supposed to be on blows up over North Carolina. With no one they can trust but each other, the two ex-presidents make their way towards Kramer's presidential library in Ohio for evidence implicating Haney and find that only a bi-partisan effort will get them there alive.
You're going to see a lot of critics referring to MY FELLOW AMERICANS as GRUMPY OLD PRESIDENTS, and it's not just because Jack Lemmon is on board that comparisons to the GRUMPY OLD... films are appropriate. The most notable similarity is that MY FELLOW AMERICANS also bases much of its humor on the notion that senior citizens spewing forth profanities are intrinsically hilarious; no fewer than nineteen separate expletives season the dialogue of Lemmon and Garner. It is an unfortunate decision, if for no other reason than that it is unnecessary. Political rivals should have more personalized gibes at their disposal, and indeed the script features a few nice zingers aimed at the stereotypes of each party. It would have been nice to see more -- and more pointed -- barbs, particularly like those aimed at Haney's dim-witted vice-president (John Heard), whose mispronunciation of a single word may provide the film's biggest laugh.
Insult humor only goes as far as the slingers of the insults, though, and MY FELLOW AMERICANS rises well above its material simply because Lemmon and Garner bring out the best in each other. Lemmon's Kramer is the more complete character, a politician who so desperately needs approval that he has become an over-eager joke. While Kramer is the guy you can be sure promised everything to everybody, Garner's Douglas is the charismatic charmer who probably didn't have to. Garner has long been one of the best actors around at playing the put-upon grouch, and it is a delight simply to see him in a leading role on the big screen again. When he growls out a withering one-liner in his gravelly baritone, it is delivered with unteachable timing, and Lemmon matches him with his best Felix Unger disdain. The two are both perfectly matched and perfectly mis-matched; there is something about their veteran interaction which makes the most mundane situations sing with comic confidence.
Director Peter Segal (who put Chris Farley and David Spade through similar buddy-bonding paces in TOMMY BOY) keeps the pace at a brisk clip, which counters some uninspired situations, like a journey on a University of North Carolina rooters train which provides little more than something to jump off. There isn't much Segal can do with the sentimental angle in the script, as the ex-presidents' encounter with an average American family leads them to ask the "Duh"-inspiring question of whether politicians may be out of touch with their constituents. All these problems MY FELLOW AMERICANS has, yet I laughed harder than I had any reason to expect. Handed the sow's ear of a standard buddy-caper script, Jack Lemmon and James Garner were able to turn it into a purse...perhaps not silk, but surprisingly smooth nonetheless.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 hails to the chief: 7.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email See details on the MoviePage
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