by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided, since I doubted
if the friend we had for dinner would want to sit through a whole bunch of
1930’s horror movies in dubs of indifferent quality, we needed something
lighter that was still Hallowe’en-themed and I found it in The Addams Family, the 1991 adaptation of Charles Addams’
marvelously macabre New Yorker cartoons and the great 1964-65 TV show that was adapted from them. The
Addams Family turned out to be the sort
of movie that missed a lot of the potential of the material but still was
entertaining and quite funny. The bad news first: Gomez and Morticia Addams
were played by Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston, who visually fit the roles well
enough (though some imdb.com “trivia” posters detailed just what Anjelica
Huston had to go through to fit herself into Morticia’s hourglass costumes and
corsets) but just didn’t have the marvelously free-spirited nature of the
actors who played them on TV, John Astin (who ironically is still alive, while
Raul Julia isn’t: Julia died in 1994) and Carolyn Jones. Also the best episodes
of The Addams Family on TV
showed them interacting with normal people, which happens all too rarely in
this movie; instead the Addams family’s principal antagonists are just as weird
as they are, and small-time grifters to boot. Accountant Tully Alford (Dan
Hedaya, doing his best to channel Danny De Vito) owes a good deal of money to
some sinister people, and as his wife Margaret (Dana Ivey) keeps reminding him,
the only way he can get the kind of money he needs to pay his debt and get the
ferocious Abigail Craven (Elizabeth Wilson) off his back about it is to swindle
it out of his one paying client, Gomez Addams (Raul Julia).
He goes to the
Addams family home, the crumbling Victorian manse that will be instantly familiar to anyone who
remembers the TV show (though the producers of this film spent $100,000
building the sets), just after a group of Christmas carolers who made the
mistake of knocking on the Addamses’ door got oil poured on them. Gomez
instantly challenges Tully to a swordfight and does some spectacular backflips
(Raul Julia’s stunt double got quite a few workouts on this movie, though I
suspect some of the stunts were done with early CGI), establishing the whole
macabre moral reversal that was at the heart of the TV show and of Addams’
original cartoons. (My favorite of the cartoons: the Addams children, Pugsley
and Wednesday, are furiously stoking a fire in their fireplace on Christmas
Eve, and Morticia turns to Gomez and says, “The little dears! They still
believe in Santa Claus.”) The plot turns on the disappearance of Uncle Fester,
Gomez’s older brother, in the Bermuda Triangle 25 years before (one imdb.com
contributor noted that 25 years was the time that elapsed between the end of
the TV show and the release of this movie, and in the TV show Fester was played
in a marvelous middle-aged comeback by Jackie Coogan, Charlie Chaplin’s
five-year-old co-star in his 1920 masterpiece The Kid and the biggest child star of the 1920’s, only his
parents ran through all his money and eventually the California legislature
passed a law saying that a child entertainer’s earnings had to be placed in a
trust fund so they’d still be there when the child became an adult, and it was
even called “Coogan’s Law”), and the determination of Abigail Craven to get her
hands on the Addams fortune (in the original TV show Gomez Addams was a stock
speculator and was often shown looking at his ticker-tape machine, but there’s
no hint in the film of how the Addamses made their money) by passing off her ne’er-do-well son
Gordon (Christopher Lloyd) as Fester.
The bulk of the movie — directed by Barry
Sonnenfeld (in his first feature) after the original plan to use Tim Burton
(who would probably have done better, except he would have likely insisted on
casting Johnny Depp as Gomez and he would have been even more miscast than
Julia!) fell through, from a script by Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson —
deals with Gordon’s attempt to pass himself off as Fester and his growing
attachment to the people he’s there to swindle, much to his mom’s disgust. The
Addamses, especially Wednesday (a young Christina Ricci, who later would play
Charlize Theron’s girlfriend in Monster), are suspicious of him from the get-go, but Abigail disguises herself
as psychiatrist “Dr. Pinderschloss” (the name is a mash-up from an Old English
word meaning “peanut” and the German for “castle”) and convinces the skeptical
Addamses that they’re merely going through a “displacement” disorder that’s
causing them to doubt that Gordon is the real Fester. At one point Gordon, as
part of his mom’s scheme, gets himself ruled as the legitimate holder of the
Addams fortune — it helps that the judge in the lawsuit is Womack (Paul
Benedict), a neighbor of the Addamses whose windows keep getting broken by the
golf balls Gomez hits through them. This sets up one of the most delightful
scenes in the film, in which the Addamses move to a motel and Wednesday and
Pugsley set up a lemonade stand to help their parents make more money. An
officious little girl comes up and asks if their lemonade is made from real
lemons, explaining, “I only like all-natural foods and beverages, organically
grown, with no preservatives. Are you sure they’re real lemons?” Then the girl
tells them, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll buy a cup if you buy a box of my
delicious Girl Scout cookies. Do we have a deal?” — and Wednesday deadpans, “Are
they made from real Girl Scouts?”
That’s one of the two best scenes in the film
because it’s one of the few times the script juxtaposes the Addamses’ weird
lifestyle with normal human existence; the other is one in which, performing
the final scene from Hamlet as part of a school program, Wednesday and Pugsley rig themselves up
with fake limbs they sever and spurt blood, much like the Green Knight scene in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, until everyone in the first four rows or so of the audience is covered
in blood. (Remember that in Shakespeare’s time the actors who did fight scenes
wore bladders filled with pig’s blood so they, too, would “bleed” on cue when
stabbed.) While everyone else is shocked Gomez and Morticia stand up in the
audience and give their kids a standing ovation. Eventually, with the movie
having to end sometime, the
writers — instead of having the real Fester show up and expose the impostor,
which is what I was expecting — pull [spoiler alert!] the old Poppy trick of having Gordon turn out to be the real Fester after all,
abducted from the Bermuda Triangle years before by Abigail and raised as her
son — which doesn’t explain why he didn’t know how to free himself from the
Chinese finger trap (a cylindrical device that, when it locks into place, traps
your two index fingers together so you can’t separate your hands, or do much of
anything with them, until it’s released) when Gomez recalls that was a present
to Fester from their parents on his 10th birthday and the real
Fester would have known how to open it harmlessly. Though a stronger plot and a
more personable set of leads would have made it even better, The Addams
Family as it stands is still a
very funny movie — there are nice gags like the Addams bookshelf, in which when
you open their copy of Gone With the Wind a wind actually blows, and when you open The Sun Also Rises you get, natch, a sunrise, as well as the booby
traps the villains keep getting caught in as they try to loot the Addams fortune.
