Deflating Arizona

Movie Review:
O.C. and Stiggs

1985 / 1 hr., 49 min. / R

Director: Robert Altman

This review is part of my quest to see every Robert Altman film available in an attempt to discern what it is that made him a renowned director.

There is a reason that John Hughes lives on as a great writer and director of 1980's teen comedies, and Robert Altman does not. And O.C. and Stiggs is that reason.

O.C. (Daniel Jenkins) and Stiggs (Neill Barry) are two high school buddies who have a general disdain for their middle-class lifestyle in Scottsdale, Arizona, and a more specific hatred for local bigwig Randall Schwab (Paul Dooley). Schwab is the area’s insurance monarch, complete with a low-budget commercial that is almost too painful to even laugh at. And it seems that Schwab has turned down a claim filed by O.C.’s grandfather (Ray Walston), leaving O.C. no choice but to put Gramps in a nursing home and move himself off to a southeastern state to live with another relative. I can’t say exactly how Schwab’s declination topples the string of dominos – the film was a little unclear on that – but that is probably beside the point anyway.

The boys spend their free time – and they pretty much make sure free time is all they have – finding ways to harass, embarrass, and torment Schwab and every member of his extended family. They run up huge overseas phone bills on Schwab’s line, steal his barbequed dinners, crash the wedding of Schwab’s daughter, convert Schwab’s home into a drug rehab clinic fund-raising event, and blow up Schwab’s survival shelter, all with as much gleeful abandon as a couple of malcontent slackers can muster.

The teen comedy genre is capably populated by hits that fans still talk about, like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, and Porky’s. Not only does O.C. and Stiggs fail to place on that list, but I can’t even recall anyone ever mentioning this film when chronicling Altman’s list of achievements.

The foundational problem is that Altman didn’t even like teen comedies. He saw in the script a chance to satirize the genre, not complement it; and yet I don’t feel like he even succeeded at satire. Altman would have been wiser to craft his own script with that agenda, or drop the agenda entirely, rather than distort what the studio wanted and what writers Ted Mann and Donald Cantrell handed him.

The result is a meandering series of misadventures with almost no framework holding them together. Some of the pranks seem to have nothing to do with the Schwabs, so far as I could see. A summer river trip down to Mexico has no apparent connection to anything whatsoever, nor do the various subplots involving cheating husbands, bridezillas, or homosexual teachers. The film as a whole has little forward momentum or any sense of drive toward a climactic moment. The last prank, blowing up the bomb shelter, may be the most devastating one; but we are left with the feeling that this was just one of many, and not the grand conclusion of the boys’ scheme to ruin their archenemy.

The experience is made even messier with Altman’s trademark directing style involving overlapping dialogue. It worked in MASH, Gosford Park, and others, but here it feels overused and overmixed – conversations get layered so deeply upon each other that entire scenes are rendered helpless in moving the plot forward because we can’t hear anything relevant to the plot. And if there is indeed nothing relevant to the plot in those scenes anyway, then by the unwritten rules of storytelling, those scenes need to be cut. The wandering, noisy mish-mash makes the film feel even longer than its nearly two hours.

The film is not hopeless, it’s just nowhere near Altman’s best. Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry are likeable onscreen presences. Barry is particularly charismatic in his attitude and delivery, with body language that is humorous in the way it just doesn’t care. I enjoyed their mutual repartee at several points, especially when they go to purchase a car. I can see where someone like John Hughes could have turned this same plot into a film that would have had Jenkins and Barry fielding larger offers than the sideline careers they both ended up with.

Altman recruits major stars to support our two anti-heroes, with more than a few of them playing parodies of their own earlier roles. Dennis Hopper’s character is lifted straight out of Apocalypse Now, for instance; and according to Altman, cameo performances by Martin Mull (Clue), Ray Walston (Popeye), and Melvin Van Peebles (Jaws: The Revenge) draw on their past cinematic lives as well. Paul Dooley (Strange Brew) and Jane Curtin (Coneheads) as Mr. and Mrs. Schwab are overblown exaggerations, but still manage to draw out some humor. All together, the cast delivers a light-hearted teen hijinx comedy, sometimes believable, sometimes too over-the-top to be at all convincing. If the overboard performances of some of the supporting roles is part of Altman’s satire, he missed and ended up with results that just look bad, not lampoonish.

I have a request of directors: If you just don’t like a genre, then when a studio offers you an opportunity to direct something in that very genre, just turn the offer down. To readers: You’ll definitely laugh more with Revenge of the Nerds, Real Genius, or any of a dozen others. How much more will vary, of course, but consider this warning as your opportunity to save yourself the two hours you would have lost.

My Score: 5