Guilty Pleasures - It's Pat: The Movie
By Samuel Hoelker
December 3, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
My girlfriend from freshman year in college came up to visit me one weekend and we were going to watch a movie. I was wondering what movie she was going to pick, and since it was early into our relationship, a lot in our relationship was riding on her choice. I realized I had made the right move in my choice of women (for the time, at least) when she decided that we should watch It’s Pat: The Movie.
I’ve never been a watcher of Saturday Night Live; my generation pines for the good ol’ Adam Sandler days. Whenever I’ve watched it, I’ve not seen a sketch that I have thought was too short at six minutes long and needed to be stretched into 90 minutes. The sketch of androgynous Pat should not have be made into a 77-minute movie, and its $60,822 gross shows that America thought the same way. Even for an SNL movie, the premise is stretched thin. Is there really enough to create a plot about androgyny? No. Does that mean it’s not funny? Hell no.
Julia Sweeney’s Pat is an arrogant and wholly unlikable character, which, I am told, differs greatly from the SNL version of Pat. Pat’s snoopy (Pat’s fired from being a mail carrier because Pat opened other people’s mail), racially insensitive (when working as a sushi chef, Pat yells at everyone in there to speak English), and a stalker (Pat breaks into his/her neighbor Kathy Griffin’s apartment to tell her that Pat’s not going to fix the clock on her VCR). Pat also doesn’t recognize the fact that Pat’s androgynous, and that isn’t helped when the equally-unknown Chris (Dave Foley) enters Pat’s life.
Everyone in Pat’s life is hoping that this newfound relationship with Chris will bring out clues about Pat’s gender, no one more than Pat’s new neighbor Kyle (Charles Rocket). This disappointment only drives Kyle deeper into insanity as he obsesses over Pat – and eventually falls in love with Pat. Pat’s jerkiness increases (much to Chris’s chagrin) and Kyle’s love grows. What a love triangle!
Most movies have humor that exists on different levels, and that’s often why they work. That’s probably the best part of It’s Pat: The Movie. At least 90% of the jokes (if not more) are about Pat’s androgyny. Literally. Jokes about nuts (as in the food) and pussycats are abound, and it should become unfunny in about four minutes (as in, the length of an SNL skit). For an almost inexplicable reason, though, it doesn’t. This one-note joke sustains itself a lot longer than it should, and that’s something to be lauded.
The campiness of Sweeney and Foley, and the subsequent chemistry between them, allows the humor to reach a level above where obvious, one-note humor usually lies (such as Macgruber, a failed return-to-form attempt for SNL movies). Pat and Chris are truly androgynous (Sweeney and Foley don’t know what genders they actually are), and it’s kept as a secret throughout. While some characters do find out (like everyone at the Ween concert that Pat crashes [which also seems to take place at noon…]), it’s deliberately hidden, and in ways that are refreshingly not contrived. The only time this falters is when a group of street toughs explicitly ask Pat about Pat’s gender; other than that, the film’s surprisingly not obviously self-referential, which would be the easiest route to take.
The character of Pat, brought out with a characterization of douchiness, helps It’s Pat: The Movie become something a little more than it should have been. Instead of a bland character who’s androgynous, Pat’s an asshole who’s androgynous, and despite how much we may hate Pat, that’s a major aspect of what makes It’s Pat: The Movie somewhat special in terms of cheap, broad comedy. It’s almost as if Pat deserves to be ridiculed and unknown about his/her androgyny due to Pat’s awfulness, and that makes the movie more fun – since Pat will obviously be redeemed in the end, it also makes the fact that Pat’s gender is unknown at the end more deserved. We’re not cheated in the end, and that’s something that I would think would be inevitable for a comedy like this.
Based on the average ticket price in 1994 ($4.08), 14,907 people saw It’s Pat: The Movie in theaters. Although Saturday Night Live was no longer the juggernaut it had originated as, more than 14,907 people watched it on a weekly basis. Why the difference? Certainly the popular Pat could fill enough seats to make the production worthwhile. Maybe if people had just given the film a chance (and with an open mind), they could have seen the film more for what it was than what they assumed it would be. I think it may be a little much to call It’s Pat: The Movie “daring," but…why the hell not? It’s Pat is a daring movie. And it works.
I’m proud to love It’s Pat: The Movie.