Friday, December 18, 2020

Forrest Gump Builds His Dream House

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the very 1980s comedy The Money Pit. It's on DVD and is going to be on multiple times in the near future, starting with tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM on The Movie Channel (three hours later if you only have the west coast feed).

The movie starts off in Rio de Janeiro with the weddng of Walter Fielding Sr., who on being asked about his son not being at the wedding, comments that his son knows way. Cut to a scene of Watler Fielding Jr. (Tom Hanks) readnig a letter from his father revealing that Dad has been embezzling from the law firm and has taken a powder to Brazil, leaving our Walter with a seven-figure debt for the him to repay.

Walter is a lawyer in Manhattan, which has a severe housing crunch in the go-go 80s. He's married to Anna (Shelley Long), a concert violinist who is on her second marriage, having formerly been married to an extremely temperamental conductor, Max Beissart (Alexander Godunov). Apparently part of the divorce settlement let Walter and Anna stay in Max's (well, it would have been Anna's as well before the divorce) apartment while Max is in Europe. The couple think they have several months before Max returns, but he's cut his work in Europe short, so he's returning now.

With that, Walter and Anna need a place to stay. Finding one is going to be difficult, not only with the high rents, but the fact that Walter is trying to pay off all those debts. Walter has a friend who's a real estate agent, but doesn't realize that the agent has any number of properties that it's important for him to get off the books, no matter what. There are a lot of properties that are no good, until the couple gets to the one that's clearly too good to be true.

Estelle (Maureen Stapleton) and her husband were supposedly wealthy, living in a million-dollar mansion, but circumstances forced the husband to leave, leaving Estelle in the lurch and needing to sell her grand old house right now, at a pittance of its actual assessed value. This ought to set off all sorts of warning lights and sirens in a good lawyer's mind, but either Walter is so clouded by his need to find a place to live as quickly as possible, or he's just that dim, that he doesn't get a contract that would allow him to back out of the deal within 30 days if things with the house aren't up to snuff. Amazingly, the couple buys the house.

With the plot so far and a title like The Money Pit, it should be no difficulty to guess what happens next, which is that the house starts displaying all the problems that it miraculously didn't have the first time Walter and Anna were visiting. First it's the doorbell and the front door itself, then the electric, and the water, and the grand staircase, and on and on. And none of the contractors really want to help Walter; apparently he's developed a bad reputation. Finally one, Curly (Philip Bosco), and his team do. But their constant presence in the house while the couple are still trying to live there puts yet another strain on the couple's marriage.

It would be easy to see a plot synopsis of The Money Pit and immediately compare it to something like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. But that wouldn't be quite fair; after all, movies about moving out the the suburbs and a better house not being all it's cracked up to be go back to the beginning of the 20th century with a short called The Suburbanite (and I wouldn't be surprised if there's an even earlier one). But the two movies are deliberately different in tone. Blandings is more of an intelligent comedy while The Money Pit isn't intending to be anything more than a broad physical comedy displaying all of the stereotypical excesses of the 1980s.

And it's in that vein that The Money Pit largely succeeds. It's not the world's greatest movie by any means, but the comedy mostly works, and it'll certainly entertain you for the 90 minutes or so that it's on. It's easy to forget that Hanks started out with comedy before the 1990s, and he was pretty capable at it too, as The Money Pit shows. Long is OK, and Godunov is hilarious. It's a shame he died much too young.

So if you like 80s comedy, then you'll definitely love The Money Pit.

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