Each week, Richard Brody picks a classic film, a modern film, an independent film, a foreign film, and a documentary for online viewing.
In memory of Jerry Lewis, the great comedian and filmmaker, who died on Sunday, this week’s streaming recommendations focus on movies that reflect his influence. Shira Piven’s hectic, nearly ecstatic 2014 comedy, “Welcome to Me,” (Amazon, YouTube, and Google Play), starring Kristen Wiig, may not completely realize its extraordinary realm of ideas and emotions (in fact, the script, by Eliot Laurence, occasionally dilutes them), but it’s nonetheless one of the most inspired comedies of recent years. It captures the spirit of Lewis in its extreme vision of radical democracy—of the stardom that inheres in even the least heralded and most overlooked of neighbors. This populist ideal is embodied in a form of television that reveals the overformatted cheat of so-called reality TV. Wiig stars as Alice Klieg, an agoraphobic talk-show addict who compulsively records episodes off television, catalogues her tapes, and re-watches them incessantly. When she wins a huge lottery jackpot, she plows some of her winnings into producing a local public-access TV show with the title “Welcome to Me,” starring Alice Klieg, who uses the platform to reveal and to dramatize her own life with a shockingly intimate explicitness. The show, of course, becomes a major cult phenomenon. Wiig flings herself into the role both wittily and bravely, and the show-within-a-show is thrilling—as is some of the behind-the-scenes drollery, involving her producers, played by Joan Cusack and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
The notion of a classic isn’t only temporal; everyone’s got her own classics, and since I included “Norbit” (Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Vudu) in my recent BBC ballot for the top ten comedies of all time, it’s one of mine. Eddie Murphy’s performance in “Norbit” is one—or, rather, three—of the best comedic performances ever filmed. In the film, he plays the mild-mannered, sweet-tempered, good-hearted man of the title (a virtual Lewis borrowing, as from “The Bellboy”); Norbit’s wife, Rasputia, who tortures him physically and emotionally; and, strangely, Mr. Wong, a Chinese man who raised the orphan Norbit and has his back in adulthood. In the harrowing marital pairing of tormentor and tormented—and of man and woman—Murphy delivers a skein of psychodramatic horrors, of monstrosities pulled from deep within the core of his own being, and makes them uproariously, convulsively funny. As for Mr. Wong, the yellowface role is unpleasant (and I’d like to think that Murphy, were he making comedies today, wouldn’t repeat the role), but it’s done with a substantial personal point: in the drama, set in a small town, there’s a white community and a black community, but no Asian community. Mr. Wong is the despised outsider whose free-flowing bile and prejudices are inseparable from his sense of exclusion everywhere—and nonetheless, they don’t diminish his fundamental, principled benevolence. No less than Lewis does, Murphy, in “Norbit,” cuts loose with his comedic demons and finds whirlwind outlets for his better angels and his unsoothed pain as well.
Gregg Barson’s 2011 documentary “Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis” (YouTube, Starz) features, of course, Eddie Murphy as one of the comedic artists who pay tribute to, and attempt to explicate, Lewis’s genius—it even features a clip from “Norbit.” It’s not a hard-hitting or deeply investigative documentary—for a painfully full view of Lewis’s life and work, I’d recommend Shawn Levy’s biography of Lewis, “King of Comedy,” which is one of the best show-business books I’ve ever read. Rather, Barson’s film lets Lewis talk about his life and his art, and offers a generous batch of clips of Lewis’s early years and his rise to a literally unmatched fame, his middle years as a movie star and a director whose art was unrecognized by American critics, and his later times, when matters of health and business got in the way of his work. Most of all, it radiates Lewis’s devotion to the arts of cinema and comedy, the personal toll of that devotion—and its radiance nonetheless, in even the slightest of Lewis’s appearances, whether onstage or in this film itself.
One of the most remarkable of modern independent filmmakers, Wendell B. Harris, Jr., has made only one feature, “Chameleon Street” (Amazon), from 1989, and—whether Harris meant it to be so or not—that film virtually shrieks with the influence of Jerry Lewis. Harris is also the star of the film, but his performance is, for the most part, the opposite of Lewis’s childlike regressiveness: it’s, so to speak, progressive. He plays William Douglas Street, Jr.—based on a real-life person—who is a master impersonator, talking his way into Yale (where he wasn’t enrolled) and into a hospital to perform surgery (despite having no medical training). Harris’s Street is a sophisticate and an intellectual—as well as the son of a strong-willed father whose authority the young man finds oppressive. The blend of family frenzy and personal ambition, of boundless ideas and constraining circumstances—as well as the subjection to racial discrimination and prejudice that Street endures—sets the movie sharply within Lewis’s mighty and yet-unassimilated tradition.
Lewis, whose directing was appreciated first and most deeply in France, was friends with one of that country’s best comedic actors and directors, Pierre Étaix, who started as an actual clown and was also a cartoonist. He worked with Jacques Tati on “Mon Oncle” before turning to his own films, and I consider Étaix’s 1969 comedy, “Le Grand Amour,” (The Criterion Channel on FilmStruck) to be his comedic masterwork. (I recently mentioned his extraordinary documentary “Land of Milk and Honey” here, as well—a film so unusual that it literally ended his directorial career.) In “Le Grand Amour,” Étaix, who both directs and stars, plays a meek married man whose meekness is tested by the constraints of family life and a family business. It’s a comedy of sexual frustration, but it’s also a story of untapped dreams and the gap between the outward persona and the repressed inner life. Étaix may well have been emboldened by the example of Lewis to let his devils out in movies of his own; he was certainly in sympathy with Lewis regarding the pain of the art. In a 1969 interview in Le Monde at the time of the release of “Le Grand Amour,” Étaix said, “Maybe more than anyone, a comedian endures a sense of solitude, and I feel very close to Jerry Lewis, who said at a press conference, ‘If you love me, let me know.’ ”
P.S.: As for Lewis’s own films, they’re all worth seeing, but to get several vivid, divergent aspects of his directorial artistry, there’s a trio of films, all available on Amazon, Vudu, and other services: his first film, “The Bellboy,” about the common man; his second, “The Ladies Man,” about sex; and his last, “Cracking Up,” a.k.a. “Smorgasbord,” about death (here’s an amazing clip). It’s also worth highlighting a couple of films directed by Frank Tashlin (Lewis’s prime directorial inspiration and mentor), also on Amazon and elsewhere, that highlight other aspects of Lewis’s genius—as well as the directorial sensibility that inspired Tashlin’s own “Artists and Models” (co-starring Dean Martin) and “The Disorderly Orderly.”
