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 TICKLE ME DEADLY Analyzing Harold Ramis' sinfully funny "Bedazzled"
I meet Harold Ramis for lunch the day after the laugh-packed premiere of his remake of "Bedazzled" at the Chicago international Film Festival, and the restaurant has only just opened its doors for business. Menus are being rushed over from Kinko's, a waiter cuts us off as we try to plunge into the revolving door shoving a filing cabinet on a hand dolly in front of us. There are funny things on the one copy of the menu at hand: lots of material for laughing at the contrived little human interchange we're here to transact. But Ramis says he's oblivious after entertaining family and friends last night after the Music Box showing, bone-tired, ready for a diet Coke and a nice bowl of chowder. "Bedazzled" stars the always-charming Brendan Fraser as a cheery social misfit, a cubicle drone who can't even make jokes with co-workers. Enter the devil, the princess of darkness, in the solid form of Elizabeth Hurley, offering him seven wishes in exchange for his soul. What complications aren't given away in the trailers, I'll leave to your movie going enjoyment. Ramis is probably one of the most conscientious of successful, high-budget directors, being aware of underlying themes as well as comic timing and visual style. With "Bedazzled," he's taken on "Matrix" cinematographer Bill Pope and "Sleepy Hollow" production designer Rick Heinrichs: thoughtful situations, belly laughs and a good-looking image. Can this be comedy? "Bedazzled" is episodic, which works against its having the sort of emotional weight of Bill Murray's repeated travails in Ramis' masterpiece, "Groundhog Day." Yet it is both sincere and beneficent to its characters while eking out a elevated ratio of extravagantly large laughs. Adapted from the 1967 Stanley Donen production, written by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Larry Gelbart, Ramis and his "Analyze This" partner, Peter Tolan, it starts at a tear, with a charming, nibbly opening that skewers without undue unkindness, a visual style that's "Matrix" meets "Pop-Up Video." But Ramis makes deeper references. Nibbling at chips, the avuncular 55-year-old says, "I had a notion of doing some kind of 'Powers of Ten,' y'know, a reverse of the [Charles and Ray] Eames [experimental] film, the devil having a cosmic view and narrowing it down to one person on earth. It's been in lots of movies. We thought it was a little pedestrian. So we gave it to Imaginary Forces [which designed the titles to "Seven," among many others], a wonderful designer there had this idea. It reminded me of Wim Wenders' 'Wings of Desire,' going around and hearing people's secret thoughts, that whole first twenty minutes." Near film's end, the Devil has a speech that is as on-the-head as anything I've heard in eons, about as transgressively explicit as you can get about the meaning of a commercial movie. Then, Ramis rushes through a sweet wrap-up that makes you forget Liz "Satan" Hurley has told us these things. "A wonderful part of the process [of writing and directing] is the balance of instinct, inspiration and creativity, moderated by rational thought and analysis, self-criticism. Some things occur to you without any conceptual thought. You're not concerned with the thematic relationship to anything. But other things, you know you want to make a point but you want to be inspired in the way you make it." Yet he chose to be blunt in this case. "It was a conscious decision in the hope that young people are going to see this movie. I didn't want any ambiguity. I didn't want them wondering what it was about at the end. I wanted to say exactly what I felt it to be. Sometimes I want to grab anyone with tremendous religious certainty and just shake them! Say, 'Lose those ideas! They're just holding you back! They're preventing you from seeing the world the way it really is!' I cleave to this kind of lazy man's Buddhist thinking, and that's what I wanted to put out there, for young people. " We talk a bit about the abstraction of words in comedy and song lyrics, why some sounds are funny and how the sense of a thing will be evasive because a combination of elements is just right. Such as, when you're singing along with a pop song that's the stupidest thing on earth, it's great. "Sometimes the English language strikes me that way," Ramis says. "I just have to say one of the great Antoine Doinel moments in [one of Truffaut's sequels to "the Four Hundred Blows"] is when Jean-Pierre Leaud is in front of a mirror, just saying his name over and over until it's just nonsense, 'Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel." The waitress wants us to amp up on cappuccino. We pass. "Doug Kenney [the late National Lampoonist and co-writer of "Animal House"] was interested in a concept that he called, 'The Rectification of Names.' As I understood it, it was some ancient process, almost a quasi-religious process, that the meaning of things is of critical importance, not the names." But the name and theme I have to put to "Bedazzled"-and its turmoil for Fraser's everyman -- is male self-image. "Yeah, absolutely. It's about self-image in general," Ramis says. "I think that it's particularly poignant and explosively violent in teenagers, to the point where people are walking around Columbine shooting jocks. It's because it's all about frustrated self-image. It's one of the most destructive things about our advertising cultures, it makes us all feel lousy about the way we look, who we are, what we drive." We say good-bye, watching taxis pass.
Also by Ray Pride WEST IS EAST
THE FODDER OF OUR COUNTRY
HOW THE FEST WAS WON
DIRTY LOOKS & SMILES
RAGING HORMONES
THE WHITE ALBUM
IN THE COMPANY OF RENEE
VOICES CARRY
BENT
KISSER OF MEN
WINONA WEPT
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISARRAY
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