Reviews

If you liked Memento, Caddyshack is worth seeing. The same technique of forgetting what you were doing thirty seconds after you begin doing it, and perpetually restarting from scratch seems to be the operating technique here. Except that it applies not to the characters in the film, but to the writer and director, Harold Ramis.

Caddyshack is a series of sketches that claim to be a movie, but are really far less than the sum of their parts. There are a few good comedy bits – surprisingly, Chevy Chase is good in an understated way that is cumulatively funnier as time goes by – and Rodney Dangerfield brings the frenetic quality and smart-alecky trademark schtick up front and center that is occasionally pretty good.

But the whole film never gets going. Now, I'm not someone who thinks that you have to have a John Sayles plot in a comedy. I'm fine with any amount of utterly improbable nonsense if it moves the comedy along. But that doesn't happen here. Stars are perpetually arriving, doing their little set piece, and then disappearing: so much so that I found myself saying, "it sure was funnier when ----------- was on screen – say, whatever happened to them anyway?" about a dozen times. Then, at some point with no relation to anything, they'd appear in a different scene and the process would repeat.

Part of the problem is that it's a damned GOLF MOVIE. What the hell? A movie aimed at the Animal House crowd about GOLF??? And the problem there is that there's no template to lampoon. Airplane! is, without a doubt, the funniest film in the last 40 years, mostly because it took the mickey out of all those turgid Airport movies that preceded it, and the whole disaster movie thing. It meant that the jokes could be quick, ceaseless and merciless, and it meant that you kept missing jokes because you were almost crying with laughter from the previous one.

In Caddyshack, the whole thing is endless setups for a single lame joke. Ramis does try the parody thing with a little incident in a swimming pool that references Jaws, but it takes five minutes to get through, and the joke has come and gone way before the punchline, which is then totally anticlimactic.

Probably the best way and reason to watch Caddyshack, apart from ninja training to learn to overcome suffering silently, is as a perspective on Groundhog Day, which is the SECOND funniest movie in the last 40 years, and for reasons that are entirely due to its own genius. It brings together three elements from Caddyshack: Ramis, again as writer producer; a groundhog; and Bill Murray, who, if you want to see evidence of progress of a great comedian, you need do no more than compare these two films, made 13 years apart.

In Caddyshack, Murray is a kind of template for what Jim Carrey started out as: a Jerry Lewis style goof that get laughs from, well, people who think Jerry Lewis is a genius, and gags that depend on what one can only call a "retard" persona, which is not funny. All three of these comedians managed to demonstrate at some point in their career that there was some brilliance and control in their comedy, and got way, way better results out of it: Murray in many films, especially Groundhog Day, Lost in Translation, and Broken Flowers; Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Truman Story and a few others; and Lewis in The King of Comedy – in its own way the THIRD funniest movie in the last 40 years. Somehow the effect of each of these was to make everything they'd done earlier all the more intolerable.

This is a very good film that tries to do something deceptively difficult. As a result, it may tend to be judged wanting by those looking for an historical recreation of a period not much known outside Brazil.

Carlos Diegues tries to convey something of the roots of the cultural collision that is Brazil. Think of it: you are a slave that has freed themselves from your bondage, but home is thousands of miles away, and no serious possibility of return exists. The choice is to make a new life out of what is before you, in the context of your belief systems, music and language that belong to the inaccessible mother country. What do you do? In the backwoods, the slave colony or Quilombo called Palmares is something between myth and promise.

Rather than focus on the practical struggles and a realist approach, Diegues takes a theatrical, even operatic approach. One reviewer dismissed the music, which is by Gilberto Gil, one of Brazil's greatest pop musicians, and a major force in the defining of afrobrazilian identity in Brazil since the sixties, not to mention Brazil's Minister of Culture as of this writing, calling it cheesy disco. It's true that to anyone who comes to this movie without any awareness of Brazilian attitudes to culture, and particularly the eclecticism of the tropicalia movement that Gil helped form, the anachronism of the terrific samba might seem mystifying. But it is worth saying that the rock and disco soundtrack of A Knight's Tale, led no-one to assume that the director was naive. Here, Brazil anticipates that cleverness by a decade, and uses it to make a point about the continuity and importance of African rhythm in Brazilian culture.

The film has also to be seen in the context of the brutal dictatorship that ruled Brazil until 1985, just one year after the film was made: the obvious commentary on the regime, and the danger of open criticism necessitated the theatricality and probably discouraged realism as a narrative approach in a film that tells the story of violent and brutal masters, and people who want only to be free.

Many cultures find it hard to accept that other cultures share sophistication with them, and in part this movie as about creating a history of the transfer of black African culture from Africa to the Americas. This in not presented as a primitive or 'atavistic' enterprise, but as an enormously inventive and creative period. The institution of slavery, which lasted longer in Brazil than most colonies, created myths of inferiority that are too familiar, and still lead too often to assumptions about black culture. This movie is about stating the opposite. Of course, life in the wild west wasn't really the way John Ford depicted it, and this is in the same spirit of mythologizing and celebrating, of inventing a past to replace the other fictions that also pass for history.

The depictions of the interaction of the Orixas with the protagonists is startling, as is the appearance of the dead. Watch for the great sequence when Xango first is seen to enter Ganga Zumbi, a sequence with overtones of the modern practice of Candomblé, Brazil's second religion, and the syncretic creation of the freed afrobrazilians. The use of colour, both in the body painting and sets, and the lighting is clever, beautiful and disciplined, and conveys something important about the difference in consciousness of the Portuguese masters and their oppressed slaves. Diegues manages to move smoothly from near-realism to utter artifice throughout, but most wonderfully in these sequences.

That said, and without softening the recommendation, this film is a product of its time and place. It just happens to be a time and place not tied to the banal conventions that mainstream film often imposes.