North (1994)

 

Director: Rob Reiner

Screenplay: Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman

Based on a novel by Alan Zweibel

Cast: Elijah Wood as North, Jon Lovitz as Arthur Belt, Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander as North's Father, Alan Arkin as Judge Buckle, Dan Aykroyd as Pa Tex, Kathy Bates as Alaskan Mother, Robert Costanzo as Al, Faith Ford as Donna Nelson, Graham Greene as Alaskan Father, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as North's Mother, Matthew McCurley as Winchell, Reba McEntire as Ma Tex, John Ritter as Ward Nelson, Lauren Tom as Mrs. Ho, Abe Vigoda as Alaskan Grandfather, Keone Young as Governor Ho, Alexander Godunov as Amish Father, Kelly McGillis as Amish Mother, Scarlett Johansson as Laura Nelson

Ephemeral Waves

 

Before North, a film whose reputation likely exists more than as a film people have seen, director Rob Reiner had a streak of films so highly regarded it would be seen as a golden run - This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally... (1989), Misery (1990), and the film before North which was a huge box office success, A Few Good Men (1992). After North, his career still continues, but it is with much obscurer films, with North considered a film so notorious its negativity was spoken in shudders when I first heard of it.

The vivid toys of our titular lead's room, played by Elijah Wood, nods to the strange and whimsical story ahead, an adaptation of a novel by Alan Zweibel, co-writer and co-producer for the adaptation, an intentionally strange children's tale with the high concept you would expect for that audience. North is stressed out, and whilst he could be seen as an egotist, who is so good in school and life other children's parents use him as the guilt inducing symbol for asking their children why they do not floss their teeth like North does, it is clearly meant to be an exaggeration for a gag. Whether it works or not, at least Wood himself, before going on legendarily with the Lord of the Rings adaptations, showed his charisma here as a child actor, which is needed for this quirky premise. His story is still a universal one, that fear any child has where they feel their parents ignore them in their busy lives, even the smartest and most talented here finding himself so distant from them it even starts to knock his talents off course badly. He crosses path with Bruce Willis dressed as a pink Easter Bunny, and whilst it is explained he is an employee at an Easter holiday special at a local toy store, the strangeness of the meeting is certainly a set up for the whimsical tale where, when trying to let North know he should accept his parents as they are, Bruce accidentally plants the idea in the kid's head instead to divorce his parents and get new ones.

The film's reputation for being bad is overdone, with all its issues I have seen in comedies and family films, the saccharine touches and jokes not landed universal among them. The one true negative we sadly will have to get to, the stereotypes and jokes which have aged horrifically as time as past, are that bad with time passing, but most of the film is not beyond these scenes as pointless as I had always presumed it to be. This is not that hair pulling nightmare I had been told it was, and blasphemously, I would go to say the most infamous opinion, that of acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert, was melodrama with hindsight. His reaction was clearly sincere, justified in his legendary comment on North that "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it."¹. The review itself however is still spoken from a critic famous due to his published but also television film review opinions, so a person who would have made snappy one-liners to sell or dissuade his viewers and readers over films without taking too long to dissect the thing he hated hated hated. In truth, the sins of North are ones we did not dog pile as harshly as other films, and beyond those stereotypes which are awful and cannot be defended, the rest of this comes off with the earnestness of a whimsical tale.

It is telling, to spoil the plot entirely, this is all a dream of North's, that old and sometimes despised cliché in cinema, but the set up if like a milder form of Alice in Wonderland sets up that the exaggeration of a feverish mind in at hand here, naive and viewing the world with the peculiar gags as envisioned by adult men in the co-writer and director's seats, imagining the circumstances when he goes about separating himself from his parents. His father literally works testing trousers in a variety of ways, even with a rabbi in one booth bowing to see if the seams tear in a variety of different scenarios the product could be worn within, setting up this sense of colourful absurdity from the mind of a child, and thus in this world, it is set up this is not a serious or realistic take on child divorce in the slightest, but the perception of what a child would presume would be possible. S child divorce is far easier to pull off then it should be when Jon Lovitz as a sleazy lawyer suddenly drives up to him in a car out of nowhere and can get all the ticks marked for the trial to be a success, quickly as North comes up with the plan. It comes with a hitch though - North has until Labour Day to choose his parents (or go back to his biological ones) to avoid going to an orphanage, and whilst he goes off into the world to find them, Lovitz and the bright but evil kid in charge of the school newspaper take advantage of this. As the children of North's town start rebelling against their own parents in response, this pair decide that even if getting rid of North has to be done, the power they now have with Lovitz potentially up to becoming the US president is too important for North to realise he always loved his biological father and mother. The obvious cliché that North will realise he loves his parents is something we find in so many family films in structure, so I cannot dismiss this as a hoary cliché either.

The premise, as the kids back home start to mutiny against their parents for their right to freedom, definitely is based on a fun sounding young teen/children's novel, and unfortunately where the problems I have with the film begin and end are the stereotypes that make up the meat of the film, the absurd takes on all the families that make themselves known to North they would take him as their adopted son. At first, there is more a playful absurdity to Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire being so Texan as a potential new family, their limoscene is longer than some trains, and includes an abrupt musical number about everything being big in Texas to the Rawhide theme. There is definitely a children's film dream logic at play here to, welcomed, more so as, following its final punch line of North waking up and how Bruce Willis both sets this up and is the narrator, he constantly re-appears seemingly as different people with the same face in every location North ends up at trying to find new parents. It is one of the aspects which works, and sets up someone thing if as fluffy and quick to consume as candy floss, which is not a bad thing, especially if the jokes about the parents North chooses between could play to the jokes of stereotypical nuclear family dynamics.

Where the problem lies comes with the idea that, in a grimmer work, you could touch on the uncomfortable subject of how stereotypes are ingrained in kids and thus their imaginations are imbued on them, a theme that could have been tackled with sensitivity if this had been not a straightforward children's film, but a grim comedy. That is not the case however, as these are played as straight forward jokes that you are supposed to enjoy; it is the moment I do agree with Gene Siskel, who brings this up in his review with Roger Ebert on the Siskel and Ebert review, where he said the "ethnic stereotyping is appalling"², and they have aged like a fine murder. Parents from Hawaii leads to typical Hawaii imagery for a governor and wife unable to have children, if getting into the weird joke about the new promotional sign including North's butt crack being expose by an octopus for an uncomfortable gag. Worse however comes in Alaska and an Inuit couple, not called that, which involves Kathy Bates and others in brown face, which is absolutely cringe inducing when the joke could have worked. Beyond the grim one of sending grandpa out to freeze to death, which does continue into the stereotyping, there is a playful joke here of imaginary Inuit suburbia, where one needs to mow the icy lawn and the dog sledge goes into the garage of the stereotypical igloo suburban house, a production design joke I think is not offensive if it was mocking the stereotypical image of Inuit culture from their side positively. Sadly, that is clearly not the case, and more of these jokes get worse. By that point, then you get the African tribe joke about the women being topless, which fall into this type of terrible humour that we sadly still got into films decades after and other films should be found guilty of, especially as they are lazy as they are dreadful. China is reduced into the least expected reference to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1988), and even the joke about the French wearing berets and Jerry Lewis films appearing on every TV channel just emphasise the lazy, toe curling tone of a film made for kids but clearly absorbing its adult creator's worse tendencies. That is the side of North which is as bad as it sounds, and is just bad comedy in general, especially as the obvious joke about an Amish family North considers just reminded me why "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody song Amish Paradise was actually funny.

This is all a shame as, whilst syrupy in the truest sense, a weird and sometimes sick humoured fantasy exists in this premise, literally the fevered dream of a young boy, which could have worked. Ebert's anger of how the film glibly plays with the idea of a child could with ease dispose of his parents¹ does ignore that the point of the film, whether it succeeds or shoots itself in the foot by not hitting the tone successfully, that this is meant as a perverse fantasy from the perspective of a nine year old. He is angry at his parents, concocts the idea, plays it out and it is as ill-conceived as you would expect from a child still yet to fully mature, and develop through his teenage and adult years the weight of the ties to his parents. The narrative arch, whilst gleefully enjoying the idea, when North's divorce succeeds, of parents kowtowing to their children's every needs in role reversal fears, is about why North's divorce is not a good idea at all, conservative as a conclusion in its final but with that obvious, saccharine realisation the thing most of us, even the cynics, would admit is the right ending. Some may argue for a more twisted conclusion, but as a family comedy, the point is the humour from its weird journey until North realises his mistake.

When his parents are shocked by his actions and end up frozen in place, positioned behind glass at the Smithsonian Institution for exhibit for the momentous event they were part of, you see how none of this is anchored in conventional reality, but a picture book for the more quirkier of humour. Tellingly, the original author and co-writer Alan Zweibel was also a writer on Saturday Night Live from when it originally began, and a consulting producer on Curb Your Enthusiasm among his long career, so the more bizarre and more adult moments of humour fit the sense this is a stranger concoction of these earnest themes of loving your parents with the eyebrow lifts at the more twisted jokes.

The production design when allowed to play with this kid's logic in the real world, exaggerating the locations, works when allowed to be, even if one moment is a pop, in the evil corporate headquarters where the evil kid and Jon Lovitz are scheming, just because you get to see then-1992/4 arcade videogame cabinets all in a row to show their true decadence, including a bizarre (but great) animated cartoon tie-in from Konami called Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa (1992). Bruce Willis, who did come from comedy originally and was once viewed as a weird choice for Die Hard (1988), fits as a phantom shape shifter who appears everywhere, as a beach comber to being a chain-smoking stand-up comedian hired for a smoke alarm manufacture's convention, one of the strangest jokes but in hindsight working for that reason it shouldn't. The Clarence Odbody/Guardian Angel role to push North to the obvious message at the heart of the film works, and when the North film itself plays to this whimsical tone, I think its reputation is not as deserved. Even when it gets really twisted, North ending up in New York City with a hit man hired to try to murder a child, the tonal shift fits as part of this era of mainstream nineties cinema which had these tonal shifts and sense of playful weirdness at their heart.

All my problems is that, at its centre, you have to suffer through jokes which are dreadful, but we can also look to films which were not failures and loved at the time, like the Ace Venture Pet Detective films I grew up with as a kid with Jim Carrey, and see that problematic and offensive jokes were everywhere. I deliberately choose an example with jokes far worse than those in North to point that out, even if I will not defend North's either. This feels like, for the most part, when a director in Rob Reiner managed to create so many films now considered iconic and beloved, and in a variety of genres in a row, eventually when made the one which falters, it gets a shock reaction from viewers who loved everything before. Were it not for the jokes which are problematic, the sin of North is that it is ill thought-out, the best version of this never coming to be when I find moments which work beautifully, but all from an idea that needed to be properly fleshed out. Maybe it needed to even offend Roger Ebert more by playing with the idea of a child gladly divorcing his parents, startling a target child audience and their parents with the fantasy even in a kid film friendly tone, before reaching that warming ending, like a perverse fantasy comedy take on when It's a Wonderful Life (1946) got to the Potter's Field version of its central town. The nineties, even in children's TV animation I grew up with, relished the more overtly adult and cynical sense of humour, and whilst North was clearly made with the theme of loving one's parents, the joke of children rebelling against their parents, and the wackier production design choices, should have been lent on.

North instead is a film we never got a DVD release of in the United Kingdom, let alone Blu Ray, a lost Rob Reiner film which was not a box office success at all even without the negative reviews, so thus quietly buried like a few of the more notorious films from the nineties which, due to coming from the VHS era, you cannot find a second hand DVD copy unlike the 2000s and 2010s equivalents of notorious pictures from major studios. Naturally it is a film tied to the Golden Raspberry Award, a contentious award ceremony for "bad films" in the sense they come from a more ironic time before, starting in the 1980 when Michael and Harry Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards was also published, but somewhat lost to how in the internet era now you can not only dig up much more "bad" cinema, but you get weirdoes like myself on blogs defending a couple of them as actually things we enjoyed. Hilariously another Bruce Willis film stole the Golden Raspberry Award from North at the 15th event in March 26th 1995. That would be the erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), which will not be elaborated upon as it would be inappropriate to in a review of a film targeted to a family audience, and because that film needs its own review to unpack.

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1) Roger Ebert's review of North, published July 22, 1994

2) Siskel and Ebert, Season 8 Episode 44, The Client/Lassie/It Could Happen to You/North/Barcelona, aired July 23rd 1994.