SATURDAY, MARCH 1. Howard Stern, whose success has been based on his unwillingness to stand for celebrity sanctimony, has now turned sanctimonious, and therefore he must be destroyed. I walk out of Private Parts, his autobiographical movie, in a state of bewilderment. It’s a nice, unmemorable little movie. Stern proves a remarkably adept physical comedian, and there is an astounding comic turn in the last hour by the young actor Paul Giamatti that is alone worth the price of admission.
And yet Private Parts is appalling, and not for the reasons you might think. The movie says it’s about the life and times of Howard Stern, the most notorious radio personality of our time. It stars Howard Stern, the most notorious radio personality of our time. And yet Private Parts gives you no sense why Howard Stern is the most notorious radio personality of our time — why anybody would listen to Howard Stern, why anybody would like Howard Stern, or why, for that matter, anybody would really hate Howard Stern. Instead, it turns Howard Stern, the only remaining spokesman for the defiantly “unevolved” American male, into Tickle-Me Howard.
The bowdlerization is all the more remarkable because Stern has deliberately done it to himself. In the relentless prerelease publicity for Private Parts, Stern and his team retailed a line of bull Stern himself would find intolerable if anybody else tried it. The movie is a love letter to his wife, Alison, Stern says. His producer, Ivan Reitman, describes Private Parts as the story of a Woody Allen-ish nerd who found his true calling by speaking truth on the radio.
Stern is the most fearless celebrity interviewer the world has ever seen, and if he were paying a promotional call to the “Howard Stern Radio Show,” Howard the radio personality would never let Howard the movie star get away with it. Howard the radio personality would force Howard the movie star to admit that Private Parts is a deliberate effort to file off the rough edges that make him interesting, to soften him. Howard the radio guy would try to provoke Howard the movie star by telling him that any man who spends as much time publicly protesting his love for his wife must have a chick on the side. And Howard the radio personality would make fun of Howard the movie star for making cynical use of his three children as softening devices when he isn’t brandishing them as weapons in his battle against those who initiate million-dollar proceedings against him with the FCC. (Stern claims he doesn’t let his daughters listen to him on the radio. How could he know whether they’re listening or not, since he’s not in the house when he’s broadcasting?)
There is something horribly disheartening about the idea of Howard Stern changing sides in this fashion — that a man who became famous for his defiance of modern liberal politesse now cravenly becomes yet another suck-up to the Soccer Moms.
It is a great pleasure, a few weeks after my bewildered viewing of Private Parts, to discover that Stern’s gambit has not paid off. After a big opening weekend and an unbelievably generous critical response (Howard Stern gets overpraised? Howard Stern?), Private Parts has fizzled at the box office. Maybe the Soccer Moms aren’t so stupid after all. Or maybe his fans heard Stern’s spin and decided to punish him for his betrayal by staying away. Either way, justice has triumphed. Stern may not have been destroyed, but he’s not going to be a movie star.
SUNDAY, MARCH 9. What’s this? A sophisticated, left-of-center audience in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood laughing at (I’m sorry to be cruel, but I don’t know any other way to put this) fag jokes? That is what is happening as I watch Waiting for Guffman, a funny, deeply patronizing comedy featuring the prissiest sissy since the character actor Franklin Pangborn swished his way through the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s.
Waiting for Guffman is a mock documentary set in a small Missouri town called Blaine that was once the Stool Capital of the World. Blaine is celebrating its 150th year, and the local theater impresario is asked to stage a musical tribute to the town called “Red, White and Blaine.” His name is Corky St. Clair, and he is a spectacularly untalented former chorus boy whose musical version of Backdraft led to a fire that burned the local community theater down. No matter. Everybody in Blaine is sure Corky is a genius and a fine fellow — though he speaks of a wife whom no one has ever seen and goes to great pains to seek out a local muscle boy to play one of the parts in the show.
Corky resigns in a huff when the town council won’t give him $ 100,000 to fulfill his vision of “Red, White and Blaine,” but he quickly gets over his hissy fit. And when a New York talent agent responds to his letter by promising to come to the opening, Corky and the cast — a local dentist, a Dairy Queen server, and married travel agents Corky calls “the Lunts of Blaine” — prepare themselves for greatness.
There hasn’t been a movie this biting about small-town morons in many years, and Waiting for Guffman does seem annoyingly superior to its characters at times. But it is often hilarious nonetheless, and director/ co-writer Christopher Guest plays Corky in a performance so daringly fey that it serves as yet another reminder what a wimp Howard Stern proves to be on film. Evidently, you can still get away with this. I wouldn’t have thought you could.
MONDAY, MARCH 10. Johnny Depp is the best American actor under the age of 40. There can be no question after watching his stunning performance tonight in Donnie Brasco. He can do anything, and he will do it, moreover, without a trace of vanity. The weird, ethereal hero of Edward Scissorhands gave way to the crushingly burdened young man in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which then was superseded by his amazing transformation into the insanely chipper transvestite movie director in Ed Wood. And now, in Donnie Brasco, he shows us the way in which a college- educated FBI agent finds himself slowly changing into a crude, lowlife gangster when he is called upon to infiltrate a mob family. He is riveting, and heartbreaking, and he makes you fear and worry for his character’s spiritual health as well as his physical well-being. Among his contemporaries, only Daniel Day Lewis is his equal.
Depp is also a remarkably generous performer. He is willing to stand aside and allow his co-stars to do the flashier work that gets the attention. In Gilbert Grape, Leonardo DiCaprio got an Oscar nomination for playing a retarded kid when Depp offered a far more challenging and memorable depiction of a young man slowly suffocating from the responsibilities placed on him by God.
In Ed Wood, he slipped so artfully into the skin of a cheerful hustler that he helped Martin Landau win an Oscar for his flamboyant portrayal of Bela Lugosi. And now in Donnie Brasco, he gives the entertaining scenery- chewer Al Pacino renewed gravity and purpose. Pacino has the showy turn in Donnie Brasco, playing a Mafia flop who will never rise from the third tier for the same reason he never suspects the man he has brought under his wing is a cop. This is a part Pacino could have phoned in; with Depp at his side, he has to work. And he does. Donnie Brasco is terrific, even though it makes no sense; an hour was cut out of it before its release, and if you wanted to follow the plot in the last half, you would be unable to. But the atmosphere, the writing (by Paul Attanasio), and the acting make it easy to overlook the confusion.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12. Sometimes, it’s fun to walk out of movies. Take Absolute Power, the new film starring and directed by Clint Eastwood. I hightailed it out of there as soon as I noticed my fiancee had fallen asleep waiting for yet another endless shot of Eastwood walking down a hallway, or up a staircase, or across a sidewalk, to end.
There’s a lot of talk about how Eastwood is a no-nonsense director who brings movies in under budget, likes to work fast, and knows what he’s doing. But why doesn’t anybody point out that he’s a really horrible director with no sense of pace, timing, casting, or character? (The movie for which he won an Oscar as best director, Unforgiven, had one of the best screenplays of the last 20 years, and though he almost ruined it, David Webb Peoples’s writing masked Eastwood’s incompetence.)
How did Clint Eastwood, of all people, become critically sacrosanct? What could be the explanation? The guy is so cheap he won’t even turn on all the lights when he’s filming! Did anybody see Bird, his movie about Charlie Parker? I did, unfortunately, or rather, I didn’t; there was nothing to see except a black screen and occasionally the mild glint of a saxophone piercing through the darkness.
Oh, and by the way, he’s been a movie star for 30 years now. Do you think he could maybe recite a line without taking a weird pause in the middle like he’s trying to remember the next word?
THURSDAY, MARCH 27. Sometimes, you feel noble for walking out of a movie. Two weeks after decamping from Absolute Power, my fiancee and I walk out of The Devil’s Own, the new Brad Pitt-Harrison Ford movie about the Irish Republican Army. You know the IRA. It’s the gang of murderous terrorists who deserve to be treated with all the scorn and contempt liberal democracies can express toward those who take up arms against the principle of majority rule. Needless to say, The Devil’s Own is a paid commercial announcement for the IRA, and therefore offensive on its face.
But that’s not why we find ourselves leaving after an hour. We look at each other and stand up and go because the movie is so bad Corky St. Clair of Waiting for Guffman could have directed it. And the prospect of having to continue listening to Brad Pitt speak his dialogue as if he were doing the voiceover for the leprechaun from the Frosted Lucky Charms commercial — I almost expect him to start singing “Stinger shoulder-launched missiles, they’re magically delicious!” — is enough to make me consider checking into Maze Prison for a nice, long, restful stay.
John Podhoretz is deputy editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
