My Year of Flops (36 page)

In flashbacks, we learn that Beatty's Lyle Rogers was once a humble ice-cream-truck driver, while Hoffman's Chuck Clarke tickled the ivories at a restaurant where the clatter of utensils and squawking diners drowned out his crooning. Separately, Lyle and Chuck aren't much. But when they join forces, they become even less than the sum of their negligible parts.

By the time Lyle is teetering along the ledge of an office building to try to keep Chuck from killing himself,
Ishtar
has become more than just a buddy comedy; it's a heterosexual romance, the sunshine flip side of
Mikey & Nicky
. Chuck and Lyle feed into each other's fantasies. They're miserable, but they aren't alone. That's tremendous comfort. When Chuck concedes that he lived with his parents until he was 32, Lyle tenderly tells him, “It takes a lot of nerve to have nothing at your age. Don't you understand that? Most guys would be ashamed! But you've got the guts to just say, ‘The hell with it.' You'd rather have nothing than settle for less.”

Ishtar
smartly exploits the softness at the core of Beatty's persona. Without that dreamy vulnerability, it would be easy to hate Beatty for being too goddamned goodlooking, too goddamned successful, too goddamned perfect. But that cockeyed innocence renders Beatty human and allows him to fully inhabit the soul of a loser without irony.

Beatty and Hoffman decide to take their show on the road, hightailing it to the fictional kingdom of Ishtar for a gig only slightly less fraught with danger than the death-squad-riddled booking they're passing up in Honduras. CIA agent Jim Harrison (a wonderfully deadpan Charles Grodin) recruits Chuck in Ishtar. Chuck's naïveté makes him an easy mark for Jim, who discusses the brutal pragmatism of Middle East realpolitik with the studied nonchalance of a grill salesman pontificating about propane. It's all just a game to the CIA veteran, who hides his relentless scheming behind a perfect poker face.

In the crazy world of
Ishtar,
the U.S. government and CIA prop up a brutal Middle Eastern dictator/torture proponent because he provides a bulwark against Communist expansion. Isabelle Adjani costars as Shirra, a mysterious left-wing operative whose brother left her a map with the power to destabilize Ishtar and throw the nation into chaos and civil war.

Ishtar
offers a sly,
Duck Soup
–like take on the last days of the Cold War and a spy-vs.-spy milieu where KGB agents dress as Arabs, Arab agents dress like Texans, CIA operatives sport fezzes in addition to the regulation black shades and dark suits, and Turkish agents wear
Bermuda shorts. Oh, and the people in the Hawaiian shirts? Those are just tourists.

In a prescient scene, Jim meets with the emir of Ishtar, who demands that Lyle and Chuck be killed by next weekend, before they're hailed as saviors or martyrs. Jim responds with a droll, “The United States government will not be blackmailed. However, I see no difficulty in meeting your timetable.” The CIA, as embodied by Jim, doesn't flinch at cosigning off on the deaths of two American citizens; it just doesn't want to get its hands dirty. Appearances are everything; reality is irrelevant.

Jim won't be blackmailed, just as George W. Bush wouldn't negotiate with the terrorists his dad and Ronald Reagan supplied with weapons throughout the '80s. The emir of Ishtar even utters the old aphorism, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” recycling the logic that led the United States to arm Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, and the Taliban during their righteous struggle against the Soviet Union.

Equal parts sly political satire, oddly poignant buddy comedy, road movie, and showbiz spoof,
Ishtar
runs into serious, if not fatal, third-act problems as it devolves into the movie its detractors accuse it of being, a borderline sadistic farce wherein Chuck and Lyle wander the desert for a seeming eternity after being led astray by both an angry, blind camel and the CIA. Also, it would have been nice if one of our most brilliant female filmmakers had written her female lead some funny lines. Or a character, really; Adjani is on hand exclusively to move the plot forward. Yet the film's exquisitely jaundiced take on the oily, malevolent pragmatism behind so much American foreign policy sustains it during its dry patches, as does Beatty and Hoffman's lived-in chemistry.

In her conversation at the Walter Reade Theater, May concedes that, in a fit of paranoia, she feared that the toxic buzz that sank
Ishtar
well before it opened to paltry box office and vicious reviews emanated not from enemies within Columbia but from the CIA. That's giving herself and the film entirely too much credit; nobody at the
time seems to have noticed that the film was a sharp political satire, let alone a potentially dangerous one.

In its own strange way,
Ishtar
stumbles onto penetrating truths about American foreign policy and our willingness, even eagerness, to get in bed with murderous dictators when it suits our objectives. And it's fucking funny. As the protagonists warn us in the film's very first scene, telling the truth can be dangerous business; honest and popular don't go hand in hand. Amen.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success

How The West Was Sung Case File #50: Paint Your Wagon

Originally Posted July 17, 2007

An entire generation knows the 1969 musical
Paint Your Wagon
as the movie the Simpsons rent expecting a typical Clint Eastwood bloodbath, only to discover, to their shock and horror, a toe-tapping musical about the fun of painting wagons. Bart cheers up upon Lee Marvin's arrival, proclaiming, “Here comes Lee Marvin. He's always drunk and violent!” only to watch in disgust as Marvin begins singing about painting wagons as well.

The Simpsons
' deliciously literal-minded spoof of
Paint Your Wagon
has usurped Joshua Logan's film in the public imagination, but it turns out the real
Paint Your Wagon
is far stranger than the
Simpsons
parody suggests, and it involves considerably less wagon painting.

Paint Your Wagon
represents an odd marriage of convenience between the manliest cinematic genre (the Western) and the girliest one (the musical). It's a ragingly homoerotic film about a three-way marriage and two cowpokes who just can't quit each other, even after a fetching little lassie gets in the way of their partnership.

In a rambunctious lead performance, Lee Marvin plays drunken, lovable scoundrel Ben Rumson. Rumson teams up with Pardner,
played by Clint Eastwood, after he discovers gold while burying Pardner's brother. Rumson makes it clear from the get-go that his conception of partnership is as much emotional as financial. So he expects Pardner to “solace” him when he's feeling melancholy, pick him up when he's lying in the mud dead drunk, and lovingly caress his muttonchops while wearing a purty dress when the black dog of depression is hot on his trail. Okay, that last part is an exaggeration, but the homoerotic subtext to Rumson and Pardner's friendship is so glaring it barely qualifies as subtext. In this relationship, Marvin is clearly the dominant one. Eastwood's nickname conveys his fragile state of dependency: It's as if he'd shrivel up and disappear if he didn't have a strong-willed friend to rely on.

In No-Name City, 400 lonely, horny men pine desperately for the civilizing touch of a woman's hand. So when a Mormon shows up with his two wives in tow, the entire town gathers to leer at them. A muscle-bound, shirtless brute offers to pay $50 worth of gold dust just to hold the traveler's baby, although it's unclear initially whether he wants to drink in its unspoiled innocence or devour it whole as an afternoon snack. Another lusty fellow gazes at Jean Seberg's Elizabeth with a look that says, “Ain't you the filly what betrayed Jean-Paul Belmondo in
Breathless
? We don't see your likes much 'round here.”

Four hundred men. Two women. That's a gender imbalance of Smurfian proportions. The fellas don't think it's right for one man to have two wives while they have none, so a surprisingly game Elizabeth agrees to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Rumson isn't too drunk to recognize the deal of a lifetime, so he purchases the rights to both Elizabeth and her “mineral resources” for $800.

Rumson then sets about transforming his podunk mining town into a dazzling mecca of sin and moral dissolution by kidnapping some French harlots for a two-story brothel, complete with moonshine, card games, and vices of every imaginable stripe. The seeds of No-Name City's spiritual ruin are sewn when Rumson successfully completes his mission, only to learn that Pardner and Elizabeth have
fallen hopelessly in love following a brisk getting-acquainted montage and a tender ballad that Eastwood croons through clenched teeth. Ah, the getting-acquainted montage, that deathless crutch of the lazy filmmaker. Why bother writing dialogue conveying characters' growing attraction when you can use a few soft-focus shots of leads gazing moonily into each other's eyes as glib shorthand for the complicated dance of courtship and consummation?

Rumson is angry at first, until it's decided that he and Pardner can
both
be Elizabeth's husbands, social conventions be damned. Why should Mormons have all the fun?
Paint Your Wagon
dramatizes how the West was civilized, then hopelessly corrupted. No-Name City becomes a boomtown Sodom and Gomorrah where bears fight bulls for the depraved enjoyment of the townfolk and whoring and gold dust thievery represent promising growth industries.

While No-Name City is devolving into a cesspool of depravity, Pardner and Elizabeth discover the joys of conventional morality when they play host to strangers hung up on the “one man, one woman” concept of matrimony. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, No-Name City ends up facing a profound reckoning when underground tunnels dug in part by Rumson and Pardner cause the entire city to collapse in on itself while Rumson stumbles obliviously, drunkenly through the wreckage like a muttonchops-sporting Buster Keaton.

Paint Your Wagon
arrived at a time when musicals were rapidly losing favor with increasingly divided audiences. While the youth explosion that would soon transform Hollywood dug unconventional antiheroes like Marvin and Eastwood, they weren't eager to see them in antiquated musicals.

The
Paint Your Wagon
DVD thankfully includes an intermission, as if to say, “Sorry this movie is so fucking long. Here's five minutes for a quick smoke break.” Beyond its elephantine running time, the film suffers from forgettable songs and a deathly vacuum at the center of its love triangle. Elizabeth is betrothed to Rumson because he paid $800 for her. Pardner and Elizabeth's bond, meanwhile, is cemented during the aforementioned getting-acquainted montage. Neither
provides a solid foundation for either a love affair or a $20 million, 164-minute-long epic.

The fuzzy passivity of Eastwood's character proves equally problematic. Marvin gets to deliver a big, brawling, funny, cantankerous star turn, but Eastwood is stuck playing a wimpy role that Ricky Nelson could probably have played just as well. Audiences watch Clint Eastwood movies to see him kick ass or take brain-damaged female boxers off life support, not play house or defer to his more charismatic life partner.

Paint Your Wagon
divided audiences and critics. With its central three-way marriage, debauchery, polygamy, and unconventional stars, it was too damn weird and adult for family audiences, and too old-fashioned for stoners. Nevertheless, I can imagine that at least a few acid freaks stumbled out of the theater wondering if they'd merely hallucinated seeing a three-hour-long movie where Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin sang and danced and were married to the same woman yet seemed kind of into each other. I can also envision them freaking out hardcore when No-Name City began falling apart under the weight of its sins. It'd be enough to put them off the brown acid permanently.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco