Rainbow Randolph: Robin Williams
Smoochy: Edward Norton
Nora: Catherine Keener
Burke: Danny DeVito
Stokes: Jon Stewart
Merv Green: Harvey Fierstein
9 February 2003
by Jasmine Park
Not since Ron Howard's depressing and toxic take on How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) has a movie been as ugly and repugnant as Danny DeVito's latest film, Death to Smoochy. The two films share the same twisted, nightmarish takes on childhood themes, as well as over-the-top performances by Hollywood's most grating comedic actors. Like its star, Smoochy bashes its audience on the head with amateurish physical humor and obvious comedic foils - everyone knows Barney is annoying; why waste an entire movie on it? But to recognize the uselessness of this movie would have taken self-awareness and just a bit of restraint, which is apparently lacking in anyone remotely responsible for bringing this film to the screen.
Williams plays Rainbow Randolph, a children's tv show host with a rainbow-colored coat of sequins and a dancing line of midgets. When Randolph is caught taking bribes from parents seeking to get their kids in his show, he's dropped by the network and replaced by crunchy do-gooder Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton) in a purple dinosaur suit (the making of which is depicted in one those obligatory montages of Norton frolicking among the fabrics to a cutesy song). Unlike Randolph's nasty persona, Smoochy urges children to obey their parents and croons the virtues of sugar-free snacks. As the ratings soar, Randolph finds nasty ways of getting back at his successor, including replacing the snacks on Smoochy's show with phallus-shaped cookies and tricking him into performing at a neo-Nazy rally.
The love interest of both Randolph and Mopes is Nora, a KidsNet exec played by Catherine Keener in yet another nasty-bitch, made-to-order-for-Catherine-Keener role. Her KidsNet boss is played by Jon Stewart, wincing whenever he delivers a line and sporting an inexplicably bad haircut. As Mopes, Edward Norton is downright insipid; in so many scenes, he shows the strain of an actor who has absolutely no idea how to redeem a cloying, two-dimensional character whose sole purpose in the film is to be dumb and sweet. He is relegated to pointless lines like "somebody throw me a beachtowel 'cause my head is swimming" and singing songs like "stepdaddy's not mean, he's just adjusting" (by far the closest to funny thing in the film - and it's not even that funny). Harvey Fierstein also shows up as a mobster (!) and does his best Liza Minnelli-in-drag impression.
This is the first film that ever made me feel that the set decorator and production designer should be publicly flayed. The only other film in recent memory that looked this bad was Joel Schumacher's atrocious Batman and Robin (1997) - the sets of both films take garishness to new heights; and on top of it all, you get the feeling that these guys felt really felt good about their work and thought those sets looked just fabulous.
Death to Smoochy depicts a world where characters get thrown against brick walls and actually stick to them, then slide down in cartoonish anguish, their faces twisted in mock pain. This kind of physical exaggeration represents what is most offensive about Smoochy: its smugness, its absolute certainty of its satiric brilliance. At the same time that it is painfully, astoundingly unfunny, the film oozes arrogance in every shot and in every scene, and no more so than in the end, when Mopes and Randolph make amends, and the audience is subjected to the scene of them and Nora escapading on ice, the rainbow colors of the set inflicting a final parting punishment.
Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Danny DeVito. Written by Adam Resnick. Running time: 109 minutes. Rated R (for language and sexual references).
Edward Norton as Sheldon Mopes in
Death to Smoochy.
Robin Williams as Rainbow Rudolph with his entourage of dancing dwarves.
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