LIFE STINKS
With Mel Brooks, Lesley Ann Warren, Jeffrey Tambor, Stuart Pankin, Howard Morris, and Rudy De Luca.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In fact, what seems especially precious about Life Stinks–a comedy about the homeless, and not one of Brooks’s best–is how beautifully and movingly out of date it is. I know we’re all supposed to be concerned constantly and exclusively with “now,” especially when it comes to Hollywood movies; the marketplace decrees that, and we’re expected to follow its dictate without complaint, like trendy, up-to-date sheep. But if this summer’s batch of entertainments is anything to go by–and contemporary wisdom and insight is what’s to be gleaned from Terminator 2, Boyz N the Hood, Regarding Henry, The Doctor, V.I. Warshawski, and Mobsters–I confess I’d rather be somewhere else, preferably sipping iced tea and laughing at Mel Brooks.
It might seem too generous to call Life Stinks Brooks’s version of Sullivan’s Travels, but the parallel is hard to avoid. Though the motives that propel Preston Sturges’s and Mel Brooks’s wealthy heroes voluntarily out of their mansions and into the ranks of the homeless are not even remotely the same, both heroes undergo a moral education through their poverty–especially after it becomes involuntary. Sullivan’s Travels arrives at a clear moral position about the relation of the rich to the poor, while Life Stinks disintegrates into an incoherent if good-natured barrage of half-assed bromides, a finale that evades nearly every question it manages to stumble over. (Charity is the basic thrust of the solution to the problems posed, but when hero and heroine drive off at the end, it’s significant that we haven’t the foggiest notion of where they could be going.)
This is a dumb movie in some ways because it harps on the obvious, ends certain scenes inconclusively with awkward fade-outs, and only suggests development in the characters without bothering to spell it out. But it’s a movie with heart and sincerity, and there aren’t many of those around. When critics applaud movies about “moral improvement” as blatantly insincere and phony as The Doctor and Regarding Henry–movies where narcissism and yuppie tunnel vision serve as both the opening premises and the desired end points–it seems that even a klutz like Brooks has something to teach us. Even if he’s only amusing us, he’s doing it with a human face.
