SWITCH
In a review of Blake Edwards’s S.O.B. ten years ago, I was skeptical enough about his reputation as a trenchant social satirist that I called him the Perry Como of slapstick. Stylistically I think the comparison still holds–Switch, Edwards’s latest comedy, bears it out with a grim vengeance–but thematically the description may do Edwards’s work less than full justice. However Hollywood-style and boringly upscale the mid-life crises of the self-regarding womanizers in 10, S.O.B., The Man Who Loved Women, and Skin Deep may be, these are still troubled and neurotic movies; not for nothing did Edwards assign partial script credit to his own psychiatrist in The Man Who Loved Women.
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I’m not saying that this element of disturbance makes Edwards a better writer or director, only that it gives him certain characteristics that belie the Perry Como comparison, including a taste for the grotesque and a penchant for self-analysis. Victor/Victoria and That’s Life! show a certain sweetness in dealing with middle-aged characters, and most of Edwards’s movies at least flirt with troubled reflections about sex rather than simply coast along on their Malibu-style furnishings. The usual problem, though, is that Edwards’s movies exploit neurosis for easy laughs more often than they use it as a means for exploration. When push comes to shove, he’s seldom willing to pursue his hang-ups to the limit; so it’s hardly accidental that the biggest laughs in Skin Deep, his previous film, came from glow-in-the-dark condoms, trotted out whenever the action threatened to flag.
Properly speaking, however, the character Barkin plays isn’t a woman at all, but a man in a woman’s body–an important distinction, and one that immediately deprives this movie of most of the goofy and interesting effects it might have explored (and which were explored, up to a point, in such earlier reincarnation comedies as Goodbye Charlie and All of Me). Barkin does a fine job of parodying male body language, and her hobbling efforts on high heels provide just about the only visual wit in the movie–something Edwards may realize, because he brings this shtick back at every opportunity–but she can’t play a character because the script hasn’t provided her with one. Steve Brooks is not a character but a stock catalog of familiar sexist abuses; apparently the comic point is the incongruity of seeing Barkin spout these abuses, but because we never know anything about Brooks apart from this behavior, it’s a premise with diminishing returns. Not even King and Barkin combined add up to a single person.
