The Film
There is perhaps no better demonstration of how thoroughly the teen movie dominated the 1980s than the fact that even Robert Altman made one. Altman was always an eclectic filmmaker, but this stands alongside Popeye as a movie that, at first glance, it makes no sense for him to have made.
High School juniors O.C. and Stiggs (Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry) are long time friends, seemingly outsiders at school, the film has them relating their summer break as a flashback told over the phone, ostensibly to someone in Gabon, who they are calling as a prank on a wealthy local family, the Schwabs, who they routinely target.
To say that Altman’s style does not mesh naturally with a zany teen comedy would be to dramatically understate things. Though made and first screened in 1985, it didn’t get a commercial release until 1987, at which point the people who saw both would almost certainly have noted that the film often appears to reach for the same kind of satirical surrealism as Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead. The influence can’t have been direct, as the films were likely made around the same time, but Altman’s attempts at extracting laughs from odd prop gags, like the various presentations O.C. and Stiggs have made about the Schwab family never approach the incongruous hilarity of Holland’s work, and rather than surreal the random series of events and characters just feels disconnected. Only one joke consistently connects; the unsubtle places that Mrs Schwab (Jane Curtin) hides her alcohol (her drinking out of an oven mitt is a typically funny example).
The film is further undermined by its leads. Teen movies provided a training ground in the ’80s for many screen presences who remain indelible today; Sean Penn; Tom Cruise and John Cusack to name just a few. While Jenkins and Berry have both worked intermittently in film and TV since O.C. and Stiggs, neither is an especially familiar name, and on this basis it’s not hard to see why. I can imagine that Altman, already close to 60 by the time he made this film, might have had something of a ‘get off my lawn’ approach to teenagers and wanted to depict them as irritating (even as he agreed with their politics), he is arguably too successful in that pursuit. Both O.C. and Stiggs are grating presences, their eat the rich attitude may chime better with our times than with Reagan’s America, but the bullying of the Schwab’s nerdy son (Jon Cryer) and the effect of their juvenile pranks seems to cause no reflection. They’re assholes, assholes with a cause, perhaps, but they don’t seem particularly serious about it beyond having an excuse to be assholes.
Attempts at verbal gags flow thick and fast, as you might expect with Altman’s style, but again they’re rather flat. A run of jokes about a used car dealer who may have murdered her husband, who was known as Bugs Bunny, is especially weak, ending with a whimper “She got off with a hung jury” “They hung the whole jury?” In this case, the aim of the overlapping dialogue that Altman is known for seems to be to attempt to capture something close to a screwball style, but the dialogue has none of that snap, and the punchlines seldom if ever hit. For a filmmaker whose work is often so dextrous, the timing here is that of a smashed cuckoo clock.
The whole thing comes off as a series of bits thrown against a wall. The ideas aren’t always bad, and the satire of the teen movie and of O.C. and Stiggs as figures whose politics are simplistic and under-informed. The last twenty minutes concentrate the satire a little more. The problem is that it’s all so busy, so disjointed and, in the persons of Jenkins and Berry, so utterly charmlessly executed, that none of it drew me in. It becomes a deeply wearing experience, an irritant, long before the film hits any of its major points.
If the jokes hit for you, then you can probably add two stars to my grade here, but I found O.C. and Stiggs a deeply annoying watch. It’s a film with promising and intelligent ideas, but it never sticks the landing because Altman appears to have such contempt for the genre he’s playing in that he never satisfyingly meshes it with the screenplay’s jokes and analysis. I imagine it will be hard work, even if you like the film more than I did.
★★
Made 11 years later than Thieves Like Us, this is the better looking of Radiance Films’ two new Altman releases. The print damage issues that crop up from time to time on that disc are nowhere to be seen here (perhaps because O.C. and Stiggs is less frequently screened) and the film is presented in a clean and pleasing looking encode, with grain retained but never overwhelming the picture.
At first glance, the selection of extras here is slender, but the first item: The Water is Finally Blue, is a 129 minute documentary. Based on an oral history article, it goes in depth on both the making and the themes and aims of the film. Early on, it’s described as “A real fuck you anti-John Hughes picture”. It reinforces all the thing I could see the film was going for, and fans will appreciate that, but it doesn’t make the film itself work any better for me.
Being based on an oral history article, it’s visually dull, with interviews being presented as audio only, with stills of the speakers, background images, clips from the film, and sometimes wave forms of the sound serving to give us visuals to focus on. It’s much more video essay than documentary. Overall, it will be fascinating for fans, but it’s absolutely just for them.
The only other extra is an 11 minute interview with the film’s camera operator (and Altman’s son) Robert Reed Altman, which is informative, but I think I’d rather hear a wider ranging interview with him, as he worked on 17 of his father’s films.
