Saturday, August 12, 2006

Mary Steenburgen naked: "Melvin and Howard"

I hate to be blunt, but really, wrap your mind around that. It's pretty much all I can think about since watching this movie last night.

It's not that Steenburgen was soooo hot, although she did look good in her mid-30s. It's more that this is MARY STEENBURGEN. You know, the mom in "Parenthood." She always seem to be a nice, respectable woman. Maybe not "proper," but certainly not slutty. Yet here she is, tearing off her skimpy cocktail waitress outfit and storming out of a strip club, with boobs, then butt in full view. Seriously, I'm still not sure it actually happened. No wonder she won an Oscar.

If it seems like this overshadows the bulk of "Melvin and Howard" -- Steenburgen plays neither Melvin nor Howard -- you're right. Heralded as a unique comedy that helped put director Jonathan Demme on the map (eventually spawning the equally hilarious "Silence of the Lambs"), this movie wasn't a waste of time but turned out to be a bit of a letdown.

Our story opens with an old guy (Jason Robards) wiping out on his motorcycle in the middle of the Nevada desert, sometime in the early 1970s. He's discovered hours later by a younger guy (Paul Le Mat) who stops to take a leak on the side of the road and ends up taking the old guy all the way to Las Vegas. After all, the old guy says he's Howard Hughes.

As required when two people are in a car for a few hours, they talk -- well, the driver more than the old guy -- and forge a fleeting friendship that vanishes as soon as they part ways ... or so we're led to believe. While we never see the old guy again, our hero, Melvin, goes about his loser life -- breaking up and getting back together with his wife (Steenburgen), going about his milkman job, screwing up when his family finally comes into some money.

Then, one day -- after Melvin hooks up with another woman and is running a gas station -- we learn that Hughes has died and left 1/16 of his estate to lowly Melvin. That's about $156 million, and as you might guess, most people don't believe Melvin when he says it's because he was nice to that crazy old guy way back when.

It's a cute story, helped by the fact that it's true -- at least the part about a will turning up that named Melvin as a beneficiary. As for that fateful late-night ride shared by the two guys, we have only Melvin's word, and we learn at the end of the movie that the will was thrown out. Poor Melvin, again.

I liked the performances in this kooky tale. Le Mat is a guy who hasn't been in many big movies; there's "American Graffiti" and ... "Strange Invaders?" "Jimmy the Kid?" But he's solid as a hapless schmuck. Robards is in fine form, too, just not around very long. Of course, I've mentioned Steenburgen. Hubba hubba.

My problem is the pacing of the plot. It starts off OK with the two guys in the car, but I steadily lost interest the more I learned about Melvin's life. It's not a long movie -- maybe 90 minutes -- but the middle dragged as Melvin screwed up or got screwed out of something. I wanted to say, "OK, I get it. He's a loser." This went on long enough that by the time the will was discovered, it almost seemed an afterthought, and generally could have been handled better.

But hey, I can't complain too much about any movie that gives us Dabney Coleman as a judge and classic "that guy" Jack Kehoe as Melvin's boss. (Check his IMDB file to see what I mean.) And like I said, it's a cute story that was turned around pretty quickly, coming out in 1980 after Hughes died in 1976. Oh, and did I mention that you see Mary Steenburgen naked?

2 Comments:

At 12:15 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Always liked this movie, which is admittedly more offbeat than really funny.

Like LeMat, too, perhaps because he's such an anti-leading man. Check out "Handle With Care," perhaps the best CB radio movie ever made. Yes, I said it. Better than "Smokey and the Bandit," which I've found upon later viewings has a really bad case of the cutes.

Anyway ... the contemporary Utah/Nevada setting in "Melvin and Howard" is another plus. It's an interesting-looking movie. Plus, the real Melvin plays a counterman in the bus depot scene. So you know it's the official story. Uh, yeah.

And as you mentioned, there's Mary Steenburgen in all her glory. As Spencer Tracey once said about Katharine Hpeburn, "Not much meat on her, but what’s there is cherce."

 
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