Back to the Future

Steven Spielberg has his fingers in about everybody's pie these days, and now he is executive producer of this Robert Zemeckis picture, a film that snatches an extremely slender victory from the gaping jaws of abject defeat. For about the first hour I was appalled by how abysmally unfunny and uninteresting it was. I couldn’t understand how it had gotten such good notices. It played like a poor parody of “The Munsters,” except that “The Munsters” is much funnier. Things finally pick up when we get into the heart of the story; that is, the one about the hero traveling back in time, where he meets his mother as a young girl. Now, I am a sucker for any story about time travel and the paradoxes it produces, but if this picture hadn’t started doing better than it had at the beginning, even that would not have been enough.

But I have to admit that it did manage to come up with some good jokes, some good gags, and a few nifty ideas, so that by the end I was reasonably satisfied. (The catch is that this is all ground that was covered much more artfully by Nicholas Meyer's “Time After Time.”). This movie has one distinction, however--it is the first movie to derive MOST of its humor from pre-existing masscult--it should be obvious, since most of the jokes spin off of the juxtaposition between hip 80's culture and "square" 50's culture (example: when his mother as a young girl meets the hero, she thinks his name is Calvin. Why? Because he has “Calvin Klein” written on the back of his jeans).

I could keep giving examples until I was blue in the face, but you get the point. As the lead, Michael J. Fox (from the TV series “Family Ties”) is barely adequate; the only thing he does well is breathe hard to indicate that he is freaked out, and his physical comedy his wooden and unconvincing. As the mad scientist, Christopher Lloyd overplays frantically; as far as I'm concerned, the only line he delivers well is the last one (though he does give a few good facial expressions). Overplaying may be written into the role, but part of being a good actor, as far as I'm concerned, means rising above the limitations of a role, instead of falling prey to them. Overall, this was a film that had some good ideas but got so caught in the modern film dilemma of desperately trying to cater to the 14-year-old mentality that it dilutes just about all of them right out of effectiveness.

At the big ending of the picture, the suspense is dragged out well past the utility point, with not one, not two, but three seperate climactic twists in a row, just in case any of the teens in the audience were to miss the point that this was indeed the climactic sequence. How long will this sort of cinematic sycophancy be with us? Probably forever. In this movie, Huey Lewis and the News do the big song, and the soundtrack "is available" on such-and-such a label. Surprise.