Review of Housesitter (1992) by Edith N — 07 Apr 2010

See, Why Can't He Do More Movies Like This?

I have begun, of late, to feel vaguely ashamed of my continuing love of Steve Martin as an actor. He's a fine writer, of course; his autobiography is well worth checking out. He's a very talented banjo player, and I keep thinking about buying his most recent album of bluegrass. But his movies . . . . Frank Gilbreth, Sr., would be deeply annoyed if he knew that he'd been transformed from the comical but dignified figure of the original book by two of his twelve children to being the not comical but trying figure portrayed by Steve Martin. (Did the filmmakers just take the name? Because nothing else is the same.) In fact, most of his movies since the early '90s have been so painful that I haven't actually seen more than the trailers. (I do have [i]Shopgirl[/i] and will get to it soon.) He is a man of great wit and great comedic timing, and you wouldn't know it by the crap he's been churning out for nearly twenty years. And then I watch things like this, and while it's not his best work, it's so far above his worst that it makes me sad.

Newton Davis (Martin) has been in love with Becky Metcalf (Dana Delany) since grade school. He borrows and scrimps and saves, and he builds a beautiful little house, ties a big red ribbon around it, and takes Becky out to ask her to marry him. And, of course, she says no. Several months later, he confides all of this to Gwen (Goldie Hawn), who works at a restaurant not far from the architectural firm where he slaves in obscurity. They end up sleeping together, and when he's gone when she wakes up the next morning, she decides to step into the idyllic town and house and life he described, moving into the beautiful little house. In order to make it work, she tells everyone there that she and Davis are married. He discovers this, and somehow, instead of it being a problem, things seem to be getting better and better for him. He's even gotten Becky's attention back. And all that's necessary is to keep the web of lies he and Gwen are telling from tearing, which of course gets harder and harder as the movie progresses.

I think the issue is that Steve Martin got someone to turn him down. Not off, but we don't need off. What we need him to do, and what he used to do very well, is be a man whose world is slowly getting crazier and crazier around him. With Gwen, he is completely out of his depth, and he knows it. And he keeps getting further and further out of it as Gwen lies more and more. And she keeps prompting him to join in the lying--"no, you tell them!"--even though she knows he's bad at it. So the stories get more and more elaborate and less and less intelligent. In short, the plot has run away from him. That is where Steve Martin works best. However, the place this movie hits where a lot of his more recent ones don't is that we are not supposed to be laughing at him. This isn't slapstick. The whole point here is wit. Even the characters you think are going to be laughingstocks aren't; the movie respects them, too.

It is also easy to see why Gwen wants to live in the world Davis described to her. I don't much care for the house itself, or anyway not to have the slightest interest in living in it, but it is interesting, and it's certainly better than the crappy apartment she's living in at the beginning. Likewise the town. It's everything you think of when you think of a charming little town. Little white church, village green--the works. If your whole life has been as unsettled as Gwen's, as miserable as we later find it out to be, there's something appealing about the idea of stepping into a postcard. It's the kind of small town where it's possible to know everyone. There are stores which let the locals have things on account--and no one has to show identification. Come to that, the house must have been unlocked, or at bare minimum, Gwen must have some pretty impressive lock-picking skills. Given the town, though, it actually seems more likely that the house is unlocked. It's that sort of place. Heck, Davis leaves a convertible out with the top down, and here, it's actually believable, unlike in most movies.

Oh, of course the whole story is completely ridiculous. Romantic comedies almost always are. It's their job. In reality, Davis would pretty much call the cops as soon as he discovered Gwen in his house. Assuming things worked out the way they did to that point in the first place, of course. But I do like the realistic response to the grand proposal gesture. We talked about this some, when I was in high school, after someone paid the school to let him put his proposal up on our marquee, which he and his girlfriend passed every day on his way to work. The next day, it got changed to "She said yes." But what if she'd said no? If you're going to make a gesture like that, you'd better be sure of the answer you're going to get. Otherwise, you're likely to be left with a giant red ribbon tied around your house, slowly succumbing to the elements, a symbol of the fact that she didn't love you that much after all.