THE MONEY PIT
Your Random Movie Club Results Are In!
Tagline: For everyone who's ever been deeply in Love or deeply in debt.
Pizza: Papa John's
Preshow Entertainment: GET REAL
"HOME CRAP HOME"
-WALTER FIELDING (TOM HANKS) IN THE MONEY PIT
-WALTER FIELDING (TOM HANKS) IN THE MONEY PIT
I saw THE MONEY PIT in the theater in the 80s and hated it. Then, for some reason that I can't recall, watched it again a few years later on video and liked it. At RMC's screening, I fell right down the center. I think this means that if you know what you're getting into, you can appreciate it more, so I'm going to testify for the record - THE MONEY PIT is a funny movie. Another thing I realized on this third viewing is that THE MONEY PIT is carried on the shoulders of one Thomas Jeffrey Hanks.
Hanks was the breakout star on the very funny sitcom BOSOM BUDDIES, so his transition into big screen broad comedies was natural, filling the 80s with films at an average of one every six months. Movie after movie, Hanks was the funny guy next door that you felt like you knew. Hell, maybe he was even a little bit you. He made a big SPLASH and then attended a BACHELOR PARTY. Sure, there were clunkers (I'm not even sure Hanks himself saw EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE), but really, he was a cannonball. And instead of being stuck in Broad Comedyland, Hanks shot for the moon like an Apollo astronaut, making some of the most famous movies of our generation. But we're not here to talk of astronauts, Aids victims and metaphors about boxes of chocolate, we're here to talk about:
THE MONEY PIT (1986) is sort of an update of the classic MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE. I'm not betting, but if I did, I'd wager that if you've never heard of THE MONEY PIT or BLANDINGS, you can put it all together just by reading the titles of both films.
PIT follows formula like a chemical engineer. In the first four minutes, we learn everything...and let that be a lesson to writers everywhere (Are you listening, me?). Walter (Hanks) and Anna (Shelley Long), who doesn't want to get married because of "one bad experience" she had, are being thrown out of their apartment because it's not their apartment, it's Max's (Alexander Godunov). He's Anna's ex-husband, the One Bad Experience. Being apartment-less in NYC...that's a death sentence. And although Walter is a lawyer and Anna plays in an orchestra (and Max is the Maestro), the couple is broke. 14 minutes in, they have found the house and by minute 22, they're moving in. Nice and clean. Unlike the house.
And so begins the onslaught of "things that go wrong while trying to fix the fixer-upper." It starts small, off camera, with garage shelves falling, creating a dust cloud worthy of 1935 Oklahoma. Hanks emerges with tools and...an oar, which he'd somehow picked up while blinded. Then the doorbell shorts out and the bathtub spews brown gunk. It's as if the entire house is one giant booby trap. Anything in this anything-but-safe house can, and probably will, fall apart, sometimes seemingly just by looking at it. But will Walter and Anna's relationship also unravel?
It's the age-old metaphor; life as a house. In case we didn't get that, a character actually tells it to us near the end. But honestly, we don't give a damn about the relationship. Subtext is too much to think about when you get to watch Tom Hanks swallowed in a rug that fell through a hole in the floor - his legs dangling like a chandelier from the ceiling on the lower level while his upper torso, hands stuck in front of his chest like a T-Rex, screams for help on the second floor. I know, it's silly, but it sure made me laugh.
The problem with PIT is that we're way ahead of the homeowners. It doesn't take us long to know that if they touch something, it'll break, usually in some creative fashion. Sometimes even in a Rube Goldberg way. It almost gets to the point where it's a horror film, where you watch thinking, "No! Don't light the stove!" But it'll fall apart, and we observe shadenfreude-style, laughing as Hanks and Long watch helplessly as things go awry.
And the contractors? They're of no help. Just the opposite. "Two weeks" is a running gag, and lowballed estimates hit the heavens. The plumbers are right out of MAD MAX and carpenter Arty Shirk (Joe Mantegna) gets away with groping Anna because "do you know how hard it is to find a really good carpenter?"
There are tons of small character parts also worthy of laughs, like Maureen Stapleton's turn as the woman selling the house. Just the way she drinks her drink (pausing the scene to swallow) is enough, but the way she rails on the "bloodsucking lawyers" in front of Walter (who, remember, is a lawyer). She's selling the house because her husband is being extradited since authorities discovered he was Hitler's pool man. And then there's Josh Mostel as real estate agent Jack, all schvitzed up jogging on a track in his headband and sweats...with Hanks casually strolling next to him as he runs. By scene's end, we smashcut to Josh in an ambulance.
Executive Produced by Steven Spielberg, PIT was directed by Richard Benjamin, who began his second career (actor was first...which he now does infrequently) with the now classic MY FAVORITE YEAR. With an assist by the uncredited team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, PIT was written by David Giler. Its both cool and hard to believe that Giler wrote THE MONEY PIT as well as THE PARALLAX VIEW and the first three ALIEN movies.
But as I said up top, this is all about Tom Hanks, because in another's hands, this movie might have fallen down faster than the house itself. Hank's boyish charm mixed with his oft-perplexed silent film reactions are superb. He lets things breathe when alone as well as with other actors. It's a look, a glance, a twitch. It's how he didn't want Anna to know he hit his fingers with a hammer. It's this portrayal of innocence that led him to command the character Josh Baskin in BIG.
Again, this movie is funny. And again, don't expect a good movie. Just expect to laugh. Just not as hard as Walter after the bathtub falls through the floor.
PRESHOW ENTERTAINMENT: GET REAL
About 15 years ago (it's 2013 now), Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway played brother and sister (debut performances for both) in a (perhaps a little too) hip television series called GET REAL. It's no surprise it was PARKER LEWIS-y (remember that cool show?), as it was created by LEWIS co-creator Clyde Phillips (now on Dexter). It only lasted one season, and I barely remember it, but I had an episode on an old VHS, so we watched it while waiting for the pizza to arrive.
I liked it. With its seemingly endless swishy camera moves, repetitive music cues and characters BUELLER-ing to camera, GET REAL walks that fine line of clever and cloying. It blazes through multiple arcs (daughter tells parents she's not going to college, younger son arrested, older son feels meaningless, parents aren't connecting anymore, widowed grandma's scared to go to the doctor) in record time, which is never easy for a pilot.
Though Coke was featured in the dialogue and in the shots, it was amusing to see Jesse Eisenberg's kid sister Hallie on a Pepsi commercial between acts. Remember her??
