Chapter Two: Addams Family Values
By Brett Beach
September 2, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
So this is how it once was, part two. The day the summer movie preview and fall movie preview issues of Entertainment Weekly (again during my adolescent and early teen years) would arrive was just about the closest thing to Christmas for me. I would gather several sheets of lined notebook paper and set about a two-fold process. First I would determine what was opening (limited and wide) each week and then I would proceed to rank each film, based partly on what the preview had to say and partly by my own self-determined brand of buzz, on a scale of 1 to 5+. In the years before Internet chatter, "buzz" would be centered on actors/actresses, writers and directors whose previous work I had liked, or plots that sounded intriguing. A "1" would go to the film that I would least choose to watch of my own volition but that I would get around to "someday" (someday taken to mean if I lived for an infinite number of years, I would eventually get around to it). A 5+ ranking would be awarded to a film that I would be there for on opening day. If a weekend had several films with rankings in the 5s or even high 4s, watch out! That would be a heavy movie-going day, indeed.
So this is how it once was, part three. The summer of 1988 (age 12) was a big year for me in terms of breaking into the world of music and movies on a pop culture level. I began subscribing to both Premiere and Rolling Stone and I remember they both had Tom Cruise on the cover around the same time promoting Cocktail (a film I am open enough to admit I loathe). Rolling Stone turned me onto bands whose work I could seek out in the independent record store Paramount Records, 45 minutes away in Bend. More than a few of my all-time favorite albums (including Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation", Camper Van Beethoven's "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart", and De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising") were introduced to me over the next few months in the pages of RS. I liked Premiere more than RS but less than EW. There was a certain column in Premiere I loved to read although, it was revealed to me in retrospect, I was clueless as to how to "read" it. This was because as a preteen growing up in rural Oregon, I had no indicators with which to scan for camp or satire. One Libby Gelman-Waxner penned the column in question. If the silly illustrations that accompanied her writings each month were to be believed, she was a glamorous, though perhaps tad heavily made up, rich Upper East Side woman, married to a dentist and with one child. It would be years later when I discovered the truth about the matter. The focus of today's Chapter Two column review received a 5 on my buzz meter back in August of 1993 and was penned by Ms. Gelman-Waxner's real-life alter ego, gay playwright Paul Rudnick. This was Rudnick's first screenplay (he has since gone to pen In & Out and the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives, among others) and since the primary cast, producer (Scott Rudin), director (Barry Sonnenfeld) and a number of key technical collaborators all remained the same the second time around, a lot of what makes the sequel different and in some cases, better, can be directly attributed to him.
Addams Family Values is a great title. It's short. It's snappy. It avoids resorting to Part 2 or a subtitle tucked in behind a colon. It's indicative of the much snarkier wit and satire lying just below the surface of the feature itself. The ad campaign and poster art are only slight variations on the first film's. While the initial tagline is "weird is relative", Family Values informs us that "the family just got a little stranger" and Morticia can be glimpsed holding up a dark-pated mustachioed little baby boy. How was the film received? Critically, it did manage to improve upon its predecessor. And at the box office?
Released almost two years to the day after The Addams Family hit theaters in November 1991, Family Values performed much like the first film in terms of week to week declines and final gross to opening weekend ratio (helped in both cases by the second weekend falling over the Thanksgiving holiday) but to a final result that was a significantly smaller fraction of the first's end gross. While The Addams Family launched with $24 million and wound up with just over $110 million, Addams Family Values opened at $14 million and wound up falling short of the $50 million mark when all was said and done. (I find it interesting to note that that same month also marked the depressingly underwhelming performance of Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World, which barely cracked $30 million despite featuring Eastwood coming off of Unforgiven and In the Line of the Fire, along with Costner at the height of his popularity. It isn't audience-friendly but is better than a lot of Eastwood's late '90s and early '00s output, Mystic River included).
Why the significant drop from one Family to the next? Certainly, as we advocate here at BOP, it could be a case of the quality of the first impacting the reception of the second. As a subset to that theorem, I would offer up the Analyze This maxim, which states that even if a film turns out to be both a surprise success and well-received, this doesn't mean large number of people are clamoring for a sequel, specifically if the film is a comedy. Horror, action and the like are perhaps easier targets for luring customers repeatedly. Maybe there was somewhat of a backlash to watching the repeated scenes of Wednesday and Pugsley attempting to murder their new sibling? The Addams Family was essentially a series of one-liners and sight gags tied around a dumb plot involving the attempted theft of Uncle Fester's fortune by his crooked lawyer. It was visually astute (as would be expected from a film helmed by Joel and Ethan Coen's early cinematographic collaborator) and had a screenplay by Caroline Thompson, who had shown a flair for dark tales of outsiders with Edward Scissorhands. But it also had to take its time and introduce unfamiliar viewers into the Addams universe. Such is the curse of many a first film in a series.
Addams Family Values is essentially a series of one-liners and sight gags tied around a slightly less dumb plot involving the attempted theft of Uncle Fester's fortune by a "black widow" divorcee. It also features swirling camera angles and excessive visual flourishes, but wastes no time in plunging us into the Addams' world. Rudnick's conceit, which he aims to skewer from every angle, is to show the Addams family - who would seem to be the ultimate outsiders with all of their death obsessions, BDSM quirks and occasional homicidal behavior - as a paragon of all those "values" that we claim to uphold as exemplars of proper American behavior. Gomez and Morticia are deeply in love. To even imagine one of them cheating on the other is unthinkable. They deeply value time with their children, Wednesday and Pugsley, live in the lap of luxury (after a fashion), treat their servants like members of the family, have a number of extended family members living with them, and, one imagines, would pine away to nothing if they were separated from each other or their kin. Debbie, the murderess (a game Joan Cusack who gets to be sexier and more evil than she normally is allowed) who sets her sight on Uncle Fester, is not a villainess so much because she is a killer, but because she threatens to tear the family apart. Well, that and her love of pastels.
The one-liners are more plentiful and more venomous the second time (all on par with the great "Girl Scout cookies" exchange in the first film) and most have them have been given to Christina Ricci, who used Addams Family Values as her coming out party (as it were) before moving on to more adult roles - though she did have to make it through Casper and Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain first. With her dead face and flat delivery, Ricci delivers one priceless line reading after another, and in one scene goes through the most incredible range of facial expressions, as, for very specific reasons, she must form a smile.
Rudnick's masterstroke is to have Debbie convince Gomez and Morticia that the children secretly want to be sent to summer camp. These scenes take up a large portion of the film and Rudnick lampoons everything from cheesy musicals to first love. It's interesting to consider how Ricci's handling of the scene where Wednesday hijacks the camp director's Thanksgiving musical foreshadows her turkey day diatribe as Wendy Hood in The Ice Storm. Also, her skill with these sarcastic bon mots made her the perfect choice for the lead in Don Roos' The Opposite of Sex, where she approximates a comic, sexed-up, not-so-dumb-blonde femme fatale riff on her Addams character.
In rewatching Addams Family Values, I was reminded of how deeply the film is littered with great character actors in roles large and small. Nathan Lane has a cameo as a put-upon cop. A young David Krumholtz plays Wednesday's crush and matches her for deadpan weariness. Christine Baranski and Peter MacNicol are the too-chipper-for-their-own-good camp directors. Mercedes McNab (later to gain fame as Harmony on Buffy and Angel) returns from her cameo in the first film and nails the rich young blonde diva/bitch caricature perfectly. Tony Shalhoub and Cynthia Nixon are there for blink-and-you'll-miss-them bit parts.
At the heart of the tale, however, is the passion between Morticia and Gomez. Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston still seem so perfectly chosen and matched it's hard not to consider it stunt casting. Their tango dance is both comic and sensual and encapsulates their relationship in a perfect moment.
The drawbacks of the first film are also recreated in Family Values. Uncle Fester remains a resolutely annoying character and putting him front and center again lets him bring down the energy quite frequently. Grandma and Lurch and Itt and especially Pugsley all seem like window dressing, though if you consider what Ricci does with all of her great lines, perhaps this is for the best. The film ends with another inappropriate rap theme song and other R & B songs that play over the credits. I understand that albums need to be sold, but really?
I had fonder memories of the film than what played out in front of me this time around. I guess for all of its bite, for all of its wonderfully mean-spirited satire and observations, I still never believe the Addams as murderers and a lot of their other behavior that gets off-handedly referenced in the dialogue and gags. They end up seeming, well, normal. This may be the ultimate proof of what Rudnick achieves in his screenplay. The final homage to Brian DePalma's Carrie suggests, at the least, that following Wednesday as she grew up might not have been a bad path for the series to tread.