Post by StevePulaski on Jul 8, 2018 20:00:08 GMT -5
The Freshman (1990)
Directed by: Andrew Bergman
Directed by: Andrew Bergman
Rating: ★★½
"Kid, here in New York we have three distinct social classes," Bruno Kirby's Victor tells the young and impressionable Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick) as he tries to coerce him into accepting a ride to his freshman college dorm. "A: People who make a billion dollars a day and get laid in some tower every night. B: People who live in Times Square and eat Yankee Doodles on the sidewalk. And C: Guys like me. Guys who I like to call the glue in society. We go —fugetaboutit, all hell's gonna break lose!" After this information dump, the next valuable lesson Clark learns; never trust a New Yawker who falls in the "C" category.
It's one of the many life experiences to which Clark gets treated in The Freshman, a film that's part-comedy, part-crime-drama, and part-parody all at once. Normally, a hybrid of three distinctive genres could fall flat if it lacked the timing and wit necessary to make it effective, but The Freshman delivers a marginally amusing story in conjunction with likable performances that prevent it from going down a misguided path.
The selling point of the film is Marlon Brando, who plays Carmine Sabatini, a Xerox of his Vito Corleone character from The Godfather, and it's worth noting that on most days, I'd rather watch this film and treat it as the third part of The Godfather than the faithful conclusion to the trilogy. Clark is introduced to Carmine through Victor after the petty crook steals his college belongings, and it's during their initial meeting that Carmine makes the young NYU film student an offer he can't refuse. He proposes a lucrative arrangement that would have Clark running a series of errands for the wealthy, respected mob boss, the first of which involves obtaining a special package from JFK Airport for transport to another nearby location. Clark enlists in the help of his roommate Steve Bushak (Frank Whaley), who takes a few hours off from incessantly hairspraying his shapely do to assist his pal. Soon enough, the two attract wind of a rival family who intends to make both Clark and the Sabatini's family difficult.
The Freshman is less a film beholden to a plot and more one built around several supporting characters. Aside from Whaley, who is always a welcomed addition to any film, there Penelope Ann Miller, who plays Tina, Carmine's only daughter. Tina is smitten with Clark and informs him early on that one of the inevitabilities of working with a high-profile man like Carmine in the position he's in is that he will eventually accept her hand in marriage. Clark, who can hardly pass his classes or complete one of Carmine's unorthodox tasks, is perplexed by this notion, but doesn't have a lot of time to combat it given the time crunch in which he frequently finds himself. Another supporting player is Paul Benedict, who plays Clark's eccentric film professor Fleeber. In his lectures, Fleeber plays clips from The Godfather: Part II and is currently working on a piece dissecting Forty Second Street while making the freshman's life difficult as he tries to adjust his critical thinking and answering skills to the stressful speeds of college. Benedict doesn't add much to the plot-progression, but fittingly, he's a fun character.
The film was directed by Andrew Bergman, whose filmography has been a stew of workable dramas and better-than-average comedies: It Could Happen to You, Striptease, Honeymoon in Vegas, and Fletch, which he wrote. Bergman works off his own screenplay, which is built on a foundation of love for movies and a "what if?" scenario taken beyond the cocktail napkin and into the three-act film. One has to laud him for trying and mostly succeeding on a premise I personally wouldn't have dared to take past the drawing board without erasing first.
Here's the ironic part about The Freshman. Broderick is good, Whaley is good, and Brando is as good as you could ask him to be in a role that is a shameless copy of one of the most iconic perfomances in the history of film (nonetheless the very one he pulled off in 1972). While this is the case, the film finds itself in a slump whenever both Clark and Carmine are on-screen together largely due to the fact that Carmine's presence and dialog is predicated upon one joke — the mob boss is Vito Corleone to a tee. Because this joke is made so readily apparent from the start, your response to these unusually lengthy dialog sessions will be determined by your appetite for watching Brando mumble his lines, swallow his syllables, and spoof one of the most spoofed fictional characters. You might find it funny. I found it funny to a point, and once I reached that point, I enjoyed Brando's scenes much less.
I found the most effective material to be both Clark and Steve stumblebum their way to success in trying to retrieve Carmine's prized possession. The scene, which is buddy-comedy formula enticed by a splash of road movie and slapstick sentiment, is very amusing in a sense that it escalates at a pace where energy tops antics. It's not the outrageousness of the sequence that's funny, but the speed at which it unfolds and to what degree both young men respond at a pace that makes themselves dizzy. The Freshman could've benefited from that kind of electric, young person spirit rather than the smirk-inducing, somewhat misguided material that only muddies its target audience.
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Marlon Brando, Penelope Ann Miller, Frank Whaley, Bruno Kirby, and Paul Benedict. Directed by: Andrew Bergman.