Ah, Steve Martin. He’s a brilliant writer, a lover of fine art, a consummate player of the banjo. He’s a member of Mensa, possibly possessing an IQ of over 140. He has a taste for fine wine and a love of philosophy.

His latest movie opened this weekend: The Pink Panther 2. Highlights includes Clouseau falling off a balcony at the Vatican, Clouseau falling down a chimney, and Clouseau having trouble pronouncing the word “hamburger.” 

This has always been the dilemma of Steve Martin’s career, especially his post-nineties output – he makes the most money when he’s doing work that he himself wouldn’t pay to see. PINK PANTHER and BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE and CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN kept him bankable. SHOPGIRL and NOVOCAINE and THE SPANISH PRISONER might have hurt his career, had anybody seen them. 

A good example is A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE, Martin’s 1994 release about an emotionally distant man whose life is changed when he finds an orphaned baby at his house. Though it wasn’t touted much at the time, SIMPLE TWIST is a big screen treatment of George Eliot’s SILAS MARNER, the great novel most likely to be hated by students everywhere. You only make a movie out of Silar Marner for one of two reasons – you’re cocky and you think that somehow you can find a way to make people love the story even though you hate it like everyone else, or you are the only guy in Hollywood who actually is moved by SILAS MARNER. My gut feeling is the latter. 

Martin’s recent autobiography BORN STANDING UP is basically an explanation of the thinking that led to his phenomenal stand-up comedy act. Much of the freshness of that wild-and-crazy-guy persona came out of a desire to completely subvert the rules of comedy. It was based on logic. Typcially a comic would build tension with a setup and release it with a punchline. Martin reasoned that if you continually fed the audience setups and non-sequiturs, the laughs would come without punchlines. They’d have to. Thus the stupid jokes – the arrow though the head, the nonsensical songs, the tantrum leading up to the catchphrase “Well excuuuuuuuuuse me!” were all setups, rather than the punchlines. They became punchlines on the road as Martin discovered where the laughs were. Basically he let the audience structure his act for him.

And now he’s doing the same thing with his movie career. You guys like Queen Latifah? (”Or as I like to call her, Sequel Money” Martin quipped at the Academy Awards) then I’ll try to do another movie with the queen. You like Clouseau? Really? Okay then. More Clouseau. You guys didn’t like Sergeant Bilko? Me neither. At ease Sergeant.

Understand there’s nothing wrong with populist entertainment, just that the real Steve Martin is cranking out populist entertainment instead of the truly ground-breaking work he should be doing. He’s ransoming his immortality so he can run out and buy an armful of Monets and Picassos. This seems like a waste to me, and I hope at some point he reaches the same apotheosis that he did with his television writing and his standup career – that it’s great to have the money, but he’d rather chase his own esoteric bliss away from the dopey remakes. 

Me, I loved NOVOCAINE and THE SPANISH PRISONER. 

-daniel k

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 8:15 am and is filed under Acting, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.