Danny DeVito is brilliant and decent: a guy who has worked hard on himself, who has invested in the right projects, who has a remarkably strong legacy to show for it. Like many of my generation, I got to know him first as loathsome Louie De Palma, the dispatcher in James L. Brooks’ landmark television series Taxi. More recently, his turn as another toad, though admittedly from a different genus, Frank Reynolds in the caustic, hilarious, longest-running live-action comedy series of all time It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In between, there were big splashes as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s twin brother in Twins and the fly in the soup of the Romancing the Stone movies. But a different narrative began to emerge for DeVito in the ’80s concurrent to his distinctive, frequent presence in front of the camera: with Throw Momma From the Train (1987), DeVito lodged himself in my mind as a formidable directorial talent. Paired with cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (who, in addition to DeVito’s film in 1987, lent his distinctive, fluid, style to Phil Joanou’s underestimated Three O’Clock High and the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona) DeVito discovered a visual panache otherwise missing in his pay-cable debut from three years previous, The Ratings Game (1984). What was apparent from the start, however, is DeVito’s interest in portraying characters who, driven by undisguised cupidity, mortgage their morality in pursuit of wealth and/or power. He’s similar to Billy Wilder in that both see the world as a dark place where outsiders and dreamers do their best to get the keys to the executive washroom only to find that their opportunism has turned their own lives into a cautionary tale.
Throw Momma from the Train is a remake of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (or perhaps more precisely an alternate adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel), a darker than dark comedy about struggling writer Larry (Billy Crystal) and a disturbed student in the writing class he teaches, Owen (DeVito). One day, after watching Larry have a public meltdown, he hatches a plan to bump off Larry’s ex-wife Margaret (Kate Mulgrew) and in return, Larry will kill Owen’s monstrous mother (Anne Ramsey). DeVito has extraordinary empathy for his misfits and social pariahs – enough so that it’s tempting to draw a parallel to DeVito’s childhood suffering from Fairbank’s disease (the cause of his diminutive stature) and an alcoholic father who was part of the calculus in DeVito leaving home at fourteen. Whatever the source, as an artist he has an unusual ability to articulate what it feels like to be frustrated and ostracized.
Take, for example, a scene in Throw Momma from the Train where DeVito’s Owen shows his coin collection to Larry. After a careful cataloging of them, Larry realizes that there’s nothing special about them. It’s a wonderful gag paid off when Owen reveals that each of the coins represent a time when Owen’s dead father has let him keep the change from special things the two had done together. It’s a beautiful moment in a film that is otherwise broad, Mack Sennett-inspired slapstick. Characters are hit with frying pans and a climactic sequence on a train’s caboose only makes sense in a Looney Tunes kind of way, but it’s all built on a bedrock of human moments.
He next reunited with his Romancing the Stone co-stars Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses (1989), a dazzling, pitch black portrait of a marriage on the rocks. It’s one of the most pointed, and nihilistic, films of a decade in which films like Reds and Wall Street were taking aim at the dreadful toll of Capitalism and neo-Conservatism during the Reagan Administration – a picture that said our culture of acquisition is the patient zero to the erosion of individual morality. Paired with cinematographer Stephen H. Burum, a frequent Brian De Palma collaborator, DeVito formulates a nightmare of artificially-constructed exteriors and carefully-curated interiors: just like the antiheroes of the film.
When Douglas’ Oliver Rose first beds Turner’s Barbara, as one example, DeVito sets the scene with a look through Oliver’s dorm room window out into an “outdoors” lit and dressed exactly like a soundstage exterior from a Douglas Sirk film. It screams “ROMANCE” but the story is anything but. The framing device has divorce lawyer Gavin D’Amato (DeVito) warning a prospective client against pursuing matters of the heart in a court of law by relating the sad tale of his friends, the Roses. The events of Oliver and Barbara’s courtship, union, rapid climb into the upper strata of social and financial comfort are presented as the darkest sort of fairytale wish fulfillment. The Roses are happy and in love and then Oliver gives his life over to work. He devalues Barbara’s role as mother and homemaker as our culture of filthy consumption has taught us to do. Car ownership, promotions, real estate: all of the things we are conditioned to value are none of the things that are actually valuable. Oliver is a cad, there’s no question, but Barbara essentially lies to a grieving stranger to get a sweet deal on her dream home. In the immediate aftermath, she wonders aloud if this is who they really are. It’s her last opportunity to choose to be a better person and she chooses ownership of a thing instead.
The War of the Roses is absolutely uncompromising. Oliver and Barbara are so vile it would be unwatchable but for DeVito’s gift for finding value in people. We empathize with Barbara’s desire, however misguided her tactics, to create an identity for herself independent of her controlling and emotionally distant husband – and we empathize with Oliver’s belief, however misguided it is, that the more successful he is in his work the better a husband he’ll be. It’s not a novel concept for a domestic melodrama, but DeVito’s execution is as perfectly-timed as it is relentlessly foul. How curious that this blackest of black comedies is essentially a plea to live in the moment and to not take the things that are meaningful in your life for granted before it’s too late. DeVito is a sweetheart, but it takes a little digging to get there because he presents himself, even as a director, as a puckish asshole, trickster god – lovable but dangerous. Consider a scene where Oliver is reading a deathbed note to Barbara, an emotional moment for him, and how DeVito lights and shoots Turner as though she were an old Hollywood ingenue: like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief or Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Barbara, in this moment, despises Oliver and is conspiring a divorce and DeVito shooting her this way is a twisted, hilarious, joke. Not the frying pan to the face kind of gag, but rather the kind of quiet in-joke a jazz musician might throw into an extended riff. You get it if you get it, but it’s not for everybody.
DeVito followed up this film, his masterpiece, with a stately, mournful biopic of Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, titled, simply, Hoffa. Largely dismissed at the time, its story of labor organizing to address massive income inequality and abuses by the ownership class has become current again. DeVito’s approach, sedate and serious in what is a sharp turn from the technical delirium of his first two theatrical features, is polished and confident: prestigious. That doesn’t meant there aren’t a couple of clever match cuts (like one from a bed frame to the grill of a truck), but that DeVito intends to tell this one straight. He plays Hoffa’s right hand Bobby Ciaro, beginning the film as a beleaguered long-haul truck driver who picks up Hoffa (Jack Nicholson) on the side of the road against his company’s hitchhiker policy. Seeing him again the next day picketing his place of employment, Hoffa outs Bobby as having given him a ride the night before, costing Bobby his job. To make amends, Hoffa takes him on as a functionary in the fledgling union.
It seems like a departure, but really Hoffa is another of DeVito’s chronicles of how the best intended beginnings for good people often lead to the worst possible outcomes. As Jimmy rises through the ranks of the Teamsters with increasingly-shady tactics and backroom deals with the mob, Bobby becomes a trusted lieutenant who falls in line behind every unsavory turn. Buried by Nicholson’s other 1992 prestige piece, A Few Good Men, Hoffa features the better Nicholson performance. In a fake nose and a rough accent, he’s wonderfully dangerous, feral, and matched – I should say counterbalanced, step-for-step by an uncharacteristically-reserved DeVito. The key to the film is DeVito’s decision to play the role essentially of Hoffa’s Robert Ford: the little guy who through his ambition to be big, ruins everything. Bobby goes into a diner to use a payphone, bullying a sullen Union driver (Frank Whaley) in the process. TIme passes and he decides to show off his power to the driver, telling him to call headquarters and give him his name to speed the dispatch of a repair vehicle. Then, Bobby puffs himself up even more by revealing that the one and only Jimmy Hoffa is waiting for him in the car in the parking lot, and if the kid wants to meet him, well, Bobby is so well-connected that he can make that happen. Bobby, the nobody who gets everything he thought he ever wanted, finds the only person in the world who might be impressed by him is the assassin hired to kill his best friend. Power begets corruption in DeVito’s world, and no one is immune to it.
Not even tiny Matilda (Mara Wilson) in DeVito’s Roald Dahl adaptation Matilda. She’s born into the despicable Wormwood family comprised of dad Harry (DeVito), mom Zinnia (DeVito’s wife Rhea Perlman) and older brother Michael (Brian Levinson). They’re ordinary in the most disgusting way. Matilda, on the other hand, already a prodigy in math and reading, learns at the tender age of six when she starts school that she might also be telekinetic. Indeed, Matilda is a children’s version of Carrie, and DeVito is the perfect artist to navigate the tissue rejection such a union suggests.
The Wormwoods scoff at the idea of education and are addicted to television and the petty grift. Matilda is an alien among them: a Lisa Simpson who spends her time at the library and in the company of kind schoolteacher Ms. Honey (Embeth Davidtz) who recognizes her specialness where her family does not. Beset upon and harassed by evil Principal Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), Matilda realizes that rage activates her powers and in a chilling (and somehow adorable) sequence, provokes her abusive dad into making her angry enough to unlock her ability to move things with her mind for good. Wish-fulfillment fantasies are DeVito’s stock and trade. What happens when your wildest dreams are fulfilled? What have you given up of yourself to achieve them? Though the implications of Matilda are as disturbing as suggestions of domestic violence and institutionalized corporal punishment, DeVito shoots it like a “Three Stooges” bit. Yes, it’s disturbing, but only if you think about it. When the dust settles, Matilda vows never to use her powers again but then immediately uses them again to fetch Moby Dick from her bookshelf. Melville’s novel, of course, being about the search for meaning in a capricious universe where an individual’s hopes and aspirations sour to obsession and are doomed to mortal disappointment.
DeVito carries the theme into his next film, Death to Smoochy, in which a beloved kid’s personality Rainbow Randy (Robin Williams) is caught taking bribes and thrown into disgrace to be replaced by good-natured Sheldon and Sheldon’s alter-ego Smoochy the Rhino. A vegan who’s into holistic medicine, yoga, and toxic positivity, Sheldon catches fire with the kiddos to the delight of producer Nora (Catherine Keener) and mob boss Tommy (Pam Ferris, Ms. Trunchbull from Matilda) who has a grown son with developmental issues, Spinner (Michael Rispoli) who adores Smoochy. DeVito lays into corporate television programming with the gusto of his showtime flick The Ratings Game and the corruption of the same by venal advertisers and corporate interest groups, non-profit and for-profit alike. The next year’s Elf (2003) tackles similar themes against a backdrop of kid’s publishing. All the while, Randy conspires to destroy Smoochy’s reputation by tricking him into performing at a neo-Nazi rally while forces from within Smoochy’s own network hire a professional hitman to assassinate Smoochy for refusing to monetize his brand to their satisfaction. As presented by DeVito, it works as a bridge between two Coen Brothers films: The Hudsucker Proxy with an affable dolt placed in a position of power, and the later Intolerable Cruelty which replicates some of the emotional broadness and an intrigue involving a klutzy killer. DeVito reminds me a lot of the Coens – not just in the flourishes, but in the centering of flawed people in calamities of their own making. The key distinction, I think, is I’m not always sure the Coens like their characters very much and I never doubt DeVito does. Death to Smoochy is a tightrope between absurd on the one side and despairing on the other. That it manages to land as somehow hopeful about the essential good of people, even after they’ve sold their souls for a handful of silver, is the key to DeVito’s gift.
It didn’t do well. Though Matilda has become a fondly-remembered cult classic, none of his films since War of the Roses have been profitable. I think DeVito is a tough sell: too broad for the intelligentsia and too bleak for the rabble. His last feature to date as director is 2003’s Duplex – a film he came to late in the process starring Ben Stiller as Alex Rose (no relation?), a struggling writer like Throw Momma from the Train’s Larry, who decides along with his wife Nancy (Drew Barrymore) to invest all of their savings in a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone. The catch is they have an upstairs, rent-controlled tenant Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell) who can’t be evicted until she passes into her eternal reward. It’s the confluence of DeVito’s favorite things: the blocked writer (and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a better depiction of writer’s block than in DeVito’s films – the perfect metaphor for frustrated ambition), the nice people who start to do bad things to get what they think they want, the slapstick violence, the murder plot badly-mishandled.
Duplex is like an Ealing comedy beyond its obvious connections to The Ladykillers (which the Coens also remade), in its attack of class and the privilege that attends it. It also tackles issues of elder abuse and the challenges that arise when one generation in an essentially selfish society is forced to become the caretaker of the previous one. Mrs. Connelly is unbelievably irritating, but Alex and Nancy are selfish and spendthrift. It’s hard to like any of them but, as it typical of DeVito’s work, you do like all of them. I think Duplex is underestimated. It’s a handsomely-shot film with a distinct vision driving it that fits in well with a body of work that reveals itself to be a sharp critique of systems of power. If DeVito’s masterpiece is The War of the Roses, he has yet to make a bad movie. Hoffa is badly deserving a serious reconsideration and though I didn’t like Death to Smoochy the first time through, it has since been a film I’ve returned to for, of all things, its kindness. DeVito is largely known as a comic actor; it’s past time for him to be acknowledged as a vibrant, even important American director with a fascinating and principled body of work.
Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.