FATHERS' DAY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Warner Bros.) Starring: Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Charlie Hofheimer, Nastassja Kinski, Bruce Greenwood. Screenplay: Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, based on LES COMPERES by Francis Veber. Producers: Ivan Reitman and Joel Silver. Director: Ivan Reitman. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, profanity) Running Time: 101 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I don't even need to have seen the infotainment show interviews of Billy Crystal and Robin Williams to know the substance of them. "Well," Billy/Robin would say, "Robin/Billy and I have been looking for a long time for a project where we could work together, and FATHERS' DAY seemed like the perfect opportunity." "Yeah," Robin/Billy would then chime in, "we had a great time making it." Whereupon would ensue much good-natured riffing between the two, guaranteed to have the hosts chuckling merrily as we returned to the studio. For those uninitiated in promo-speak, allow me to provide a translation. The real plot of FATHERS' DAY has nothing to do with two men -- attorney Jack Lawrence (Crystal) and struggling writer/performer Dale Putley (Williams) -- who are both told by the same ex-lover (Nastassja Kinski) that one of them is the father of her runaway 17-year-old son Scott (Charlie Hofheimer). The real plot of FATHERS' DAY is Robin Williams and Billy Crystal running around being Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.
That plot shouldn't have been too hard to pull off. Crystal and Williams are funny, talented men, and the screenwriting team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel has produced charmers like SPLASH, PARENTHOOD and CITY SLICKERS. FATHERS' DAY, however, isn't merely disappointing. It is one of the laziest and most ineptly constructed comedies of the decade. I spent 101 minutes staring at a screen in blank-faced astonishment, waiting for this group of talented people to show me something remotely entertaining. I wanted someone, anyone, to explain to me what in God's name they were thinking when they set this beast in motion.
Of course, I knew the answer to that question. They were thinking that they had Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, and that everything else would just sort itself out. FATHERS' DAY is filled with scenes where it looked like the script consisted of the phrase "Robin does something crazy here." You can see it when Williams tries out different ways to greet his new-found son; you can see it when Williams pretends to be a German record producer for the express purpose of rattling off a string of car names in a funny accent. It is the rare film which has made good use of Williams' improvisational skills -- GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM comes to mind. More frequently, a careless creative team like this one will use Williams as a comedic "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida" drum solo, filling time between "Fade In" and "Fade Out." Without a structure to contain him, Robin Williams becomes a train just looking for a place to jump the tracks.
Crystal isn't even _that_ lucky, consigned with the rest of the cast to picking up whatever scraps Williams leaves behind. He plays the Felix Unger in this odd couple road show, maintaining the same vaguely perturbed expression for roughly the entire film. You might think FATHERS' DAY would be built around the conflict between the opposing personalities of the two leads -- Crystal as the uptight lawyer and Williams as the unhinged creative type -- but you'd be wrong. Williams and Crystal hardly raise their voices to one another, perhaps fearing that the audience only wants to see them as funny chums. The film is so desperate for some kind of conflict that it drags in a couple of drug dealers, as well as Scott's _other_ father (Bruce Greenwood). Respectively, they provide the opportunity to watch a mosh pit full of head-butting and a Port-a-Potty sliding down a hillside. Thanks for coming.
Most critics tend to reserve their greatest outrage for films featuring Pauly Shore, Chris Farley or even Jim Carrey, perhaps believing that moronic physical comedy is what's wrong with modern film-making. I consider FATHERS' DAY more contemptible by far. Whatever else one might think about Farley or Carrey, they give everything they've got to a role. No one involved in FATHERS' DAY even seems to be trying. The performances are lifeless, the plot incorporates that over-used trope of the workaholic who gets religion about family life, and the dialogue is so devoid of creativity that it re-cycles a gag about the odds of Lou Gehrig dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease (comparative stories about how long ago you first heard that one mailed to this address, please). I'm sure the stars had a wonderful time making FATHERS' DAY, just like Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise and company had a wonderful time making those CANNONBALL RUN movies. As the credits started to role, I began to hope that FATHERS' DAY would include out-takes, something to justify my time. They also would have provided a fitting post-card coda for a film which amounts to a working vacation for Robin Williams and Billy Crystal at our expense: "Having a good time -- glad you were there."
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 paternal stinks: 2.
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