Moviegoer Diary: You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Mandingo

YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN

Plot In A Nutshell
Adam Sandler is an outrageously virile Israeli Special Forces soldier who fakes his own death so that he can go to America and pursue his dream of becoming a professional hairstylist.

Thoughts
This must have been a difficult one for critics to wrestle with. Which would win out: their collective disdain for Adam Sandler (who used up all the critical goodwill he earned with Punch-Drunk Love with last year’s gay-panic comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry) or their fading-but-still-strong affection for co-screenwriter Judd Apatow? And would the fact that TV comedy guru Robert Smigel also had a hand in the screenplay tip the reviews in its favour?

I was under the impression that Zohan had gotten generally favourable reviews, so I was surprised to see that its Rotten Tomatoes rating is a measly 35% — not much higher than bombs like Babylon A.D. and Bangkok Dangerous, which I didn’t think anybody gave a positive review to.

Now, I know I have a weakness for really stupid comedies — my enthusiasm for Semi-Pro, Step Brothers, and the scenes with the monkey in Speed Racer are a matter of public record — but I got a lot of genuine laughs of out You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, and I don’t think alone. When the commercials for the film started playing on television, I was taken aback to hear my mother (who is not exactly Adam Sandler’s target audience) tell me that she was thinking of seeing it. “It looks kind of funny!” she said with an embarrassed laugh. I forget exactly how I responded to her, but it was probably somewhere between a skeptical snort and an incredulous guffaw.

I haven’t seen I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, but I gather from reviews that it goes out of its way in its early scenes to establish Sandler’s character as an ultra-heterosexual pussyhound — as if to make absolutely certain, critics suggested, that no one in the audience would question Sandler’s masculinity in the later scenes where he and Kevin James pretend to be a gay couple.

Weirdly, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan seems to follow that same template (only in a much funnier, less defensive way). Zohan is arguably at its funniest in its first 20 minutes, when it’s establishing Zohan as the most virile, casually indestructible man on the planet, punching through walls and catching bullets in his nostril — basically, Superman with jean shorts and a Jewfro. (There’s a blissfully silly moment where Zohan celebrates a moment of triumph by high-fiving a passing seagull.) But once Zohan arrives in New York, having restyled his hair into a pompadour-like configuration that his 25-year-old Paul Mitchell stylebook calls “the Avalon,” one of the film’s few understated jokes is the way Zohan’s fashion sense (lots of shorts, shiny shirts, and Mariah Carey tees) makes him look gay. Refreshingly though, unlike Chuck and Larry, that confusion isn’t the end of the world, and Zohan takes it all in stride. The friendly, confident, laid-back Zohan is easily one of Sandler’s most likable characterizations, free of that seething undercurrent of sociopathic anger that Paul Thomas Anderson tapped into in Punch-Drunk Love.

Sure, the film has the weaknesses that plague so many Adam Sandler comedies: the shameless product placement, the pointless celebrity cameos (John McEnroe, wrestling announcer Michael Buffer, Mariah Carey... who actually is pretty funny — much funnier, in fact, than John Turturro), the presence of Rob Schneider. But the milieu of the film (transplanted Arabs and Israelis who find themselves operating businesses in New York City on the very same streets) is an unusual one for a mainstream Hollywood comedy — the scenes set within an Israeli-owned electronics store that’s perpetually “going out of business” are particularly sharp. (A sign in the background of one scene advertising “Eiweew” brand speakers cracked me up.)

And I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I did at the scene where Zohan has dinner with his parents — at one point, his father (Shelley Berman) nonchalantly, inexplicably dips his eyeglasses into a tub of hummus and eats it up. And then, at the end of the meal, he takes a spoonful of hummus and casually stirs it into his coffee. Here's an interesting question for students of comedy: which of these two gags is funnier... the surrealism of Berman using his glasses as a spoon, or the subtler hummus-as-coffee-additive joke? Or am I an idiot and neither joke is amusing in the least? Share your theories in the comments section!

RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

MANDINGO

Plot In A Nutshell
Director Richard Fleischer’s notorious 1975 potboiler involving rape, miscegenation, murder, incest, and infanticide set on a plantation in the antebellum South and starring James Mason as the sickly, racist patriarch and Perry King as his crippled, nominally more sympathetic son.

Thoughts
It was an old issue of Movieline that sparked my interest in seeing Mandingo: the issue’s theme was the ’70s, and the editors had included a good article where they asked various actors and directors to name their favourite ’70s movie. I can’t remember now whether it was David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, or maybe Richard Linklater who picked Mandingo, but I do remember that whoever it was said that you could learn more about American race relations from watching Mandingo than from any more “reputable” source.

I didn’t know much about Mandingo going in. I knew that it was “about” a slave who has sex with a white woman, and I had heard about the film’s most outrageous image, James Mason resting his feet on a black child’s stomach as part of a crackbrained plan to alleviate his “rheumatizz.”

Both of those elements are there in the movie, but not in the way I imagined — the relationship between Susan George’s plantation wife and Ken Norton’s slave, which I had assumed would be the main focus of the film, doesn’t arise until the final 15 or 20 minutes or so, and then only as part of George’s desperate, insane attempts to avenge herself on her husband (Perry King), who much prefers the company of his compliant black “wenches.” (I also thought, incorrectly, that “Mandingo” was the name of the slave — I didn’t realize it was a variation on “Mandinka,” the West African ethnic group, which apparently was especially prized among slaveowners.) And while I had assumed Mason would have only one scene with the black kids under his feet, in fact, unbelievably, he continues this bit of business throughout the movie. The jaw-dropping scene where Mason is shown in bed with a naked black boy curled up at his feet is particularly creepy.

But the biggest surprise about Mandingo, a movie so disreputable that a lot of people nowadays even seem embarrassed to say its name, is how thoughtful and powerful it turns out to be. Sure, it’s a potboiler. Sure, the situations are tawdry and sordid. Sure, some of the performances (especially Susan George) are a little undisciplined. But Mandingo is uncannily vivid in the way it shows how a sick, hypocritical system corrupts everyone it touches — from Perry King’s loathsome cousin, who we see whipping a black girl before he forces himself on her, explaining blithely that “It gets a man excited... and she likes it too!”, to Agamemnon, the house slave who can hardly decide whether he’s more disgusted with his masters or with himself for obeying them.

The movie also contains several fascinating examples of what you might call “stereotype inversions,” where the white characters demonstrate character traits that racists have ascribed to blacks. It’s the white characters, for instance, who are obsessed with sex — we gather from several offhand bits of dialogue that Perry King has fathered dozens of “suckers” with various female slaves and has sold off most, if not all, of them. (And he’s the most sympathetic white character in the movie!) The whites are also more credulous when it comes to rumour and folk wisdom — witness James Mason’s rheumatism “cure.” And I’m not sure if this was the intention of screenwriter Norman Wexler (who also wrote Serpico and Saturday Night Fever), but the climactic scene, in which King forces Ken Norton into a gigantic pot of boiling water is like a grotesque parody of those racist cartoons about jungle savages boiling missionaries into soup.

In the year 2007, there almost seems to be something indecent about a movie like Mandingo, which derives so much of its power from the twisted interracial sexual mores of the plantation world. But that fascination is undeniable — I was very struck by the recent interview with critic/filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire on the blog The House Next Door, in which he observed that the bestselling American novel of all time (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), the most popular silent film of all time (The Birth of a Nation), the most popular sound film of all time (Gone With the Wind), the most popular American play of all time (the stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and the most popular TV serial of all time (Roots) all deal with plantation life and slavery. And yet the essence of slavery, in all its horrible, dehumanizing awfulness, is rarely captured on film. (Kevin Willmott’s superb, bitterly funny 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America did a good job of it by putting the tropes of slavery into a modern pop-cultural context.)

Mandingo recently came out on DVD, albeit in a distinctly low-rent, no-frills edition that probably won’t do much to rehabilitate its reputation. Susan George, Perry King, and Ken Norton are all still alive and presumably available to do interviews, and it would be fascinating to hear a commentary track featuring the likes of Toni Morrison or Spike Lee or Armond White. I have no idea if any of those people even like this movie, but I’d love to hear their opinions of it. Special edition DVD — get on it, Paramount!

RATING: 4/5