Post by StevePulaski on May 14, 2018 20:41:18 GMT -5
Don't Drink the Water (1994)
Directed by: Woody Allen
Directed by: Woody Allen
Woody Allen and Julie Kavner (right) are stuck in Europe during the Cold War in Don't Drink the Water.
Rating: ★★½
NOTE: Part of "Woody Allen Mondays," an ongoing movie-watching event.
Woody Allen's made-for-ABC movie Don't Drink the Water — his only directorial effort for television after the unaired Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story — is a remake with a real purpose. Allen was motivated to make it after the 1969 film starring Jackie Gleason, which was based off Allen's 1966 Broadway play, left him disappointed and lamenting the possibilities such a story could merit. His efforts are not as misguided as one might assume; at times, this is a very funny movie, buoyed by the commitment of its cast to highlight the absurdities that run amok in the screenplay. But the constraints come in the form of its stageplay setting breeding redundant jokes and tiresome banter even as the film barely makes it to the 90 minute mark. Allen fans might say I missed something. Those indifferent or opposed to Allen's work would potentially not even make it to the halfway point.
The film is set amidst the Cold War, and the opening scenes describe the flaring tensions and rising uncertainty of Russia's actions. We zero in on Magee (Josef Sommer), a US Ambassador working in Europe behind the Iron Curtain, and his son Axel (Michael J. Fox), whose kind-intentions are outweighed by his persistent incompetence at the simplest tasks. Before going out of town, Magee appoints Axel to head the embassy. Shortly after, the Hollander family, comprised of husband Walter (Woody Allen), wife Marion (Julie Kavner), and teenage daughter Susan (Mayim Bialik), seeks refuge in the embassy after Walter is mistaken for a spy when taking a photo. The Hollanders are Americans, vacationing in Europe and have their chance at a blissful period of relaxation hampered when an angry mob of police officers, renegades, and whoever else camps outside the embassy waiting to arrest them.
The family's unexpected stay throws a wrench in the comfortable lives of Axel and everyone else residing in the safe-house. One of the dwellers, Father Drobney (Dom DeLuise), who has stayed in the embassy for six years, finds his life particularly disrupted seeing as his self-taught magic tricks don't seem to amuse the family, most notably Walter, who bitterly shuns him from the start. Oscar (Austin Pendleton), the chef, is insulted when the limited menu options, complete with duck and other exotic options, don't suit Walter either, and when Axel and Susan begin to find one another attractive, this puts the wedding between Susan and her fiancee back home in serious question.
If I was the head of studio, or in this case, an ABC entity with desire to turn this into a television movie, there would be few filmmakers to whom I'd entrust this script before Woody Allen, notwithstanding the fact that it is his property. While often criticized for relying on neurotic characters and plots with similar tropes, Allen's ability to make workable a premise others would likely over-complicate or undermine with specifics is a strong point for which he's scarcely given credit. The intricacies of the embassy's doings, Axel's responsibilities and his very presence at the facility, Magee's whereabouts, and most importantly, who exactly is outside the embassy harboring ambiguous motives is of little concern to our writer/director. He's more entranced by the rising tensions between Walter and the embassy staff, who are all put in a thankless position of trying to accommodate a family they had no prior knowledge was in for an extended stay. In addition, Allen's comfort with Julie Kavner, one of his mainstay actresses, makes their husband and wife dynamic an ideal pairing of wit because not only do they serve as one another's closest confidants, but like many couples who have been together long-term, they are one another's toughest critics.
While your mileage may vary in regards to Allen and Kavner's argumentative chemistry, you're likely to find more than one performance here amusing. Michael J. Fox is as compelling as a bumbling straight-man as anyone, something that is accentuated very well when he delivers a self-deprecating remark. Dom DeLuise channels Brendan Gleeson in making a character who could've been an insufferable louse charming given somewhat offbeat material, and Austin Pendleton is low-key reactive to the escalating lunacy. Quite possibly the only character miscast in all of this is Mayim Bialik, and this is because her character is made too impressionable. Her scenes with Fox's Axel are cordial enough to suggest the potential for courtship, but do not amplify the mood enough to the point where we, as audience members, could believe there's something really there besides passing infatuation. For me, it just got in the way of a great instance of combative discussion between Walter and Father Drobney.
Don't Drink the Water is a too repetitious in its humor and sequence of events to be listed among Allen's greatest comic achievements. Given its present reputation as perhaps the only Allen film without a reputation, it's decisively middle-of-the-road quality serves it well. It's a competently paced exercise in slapdash variety, the kind Allen favors in between films like Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite, which caught him in a giggly yet philosophical mood. On that note, however, its larger vapidity is suspect to some misbegotten potential as a political satire.
Starring: Woody Allen, Julie Kavner, Mayim Bialik, Michael J. Fox, Dom DeLuise, Austin Pendleton, and Josef Sommer. Directed by: Woody Allen.