We sometimes struggle to find family films to please everyone in our house. My children really dislike violence on screen, and it’s only when watching older films through their eyes that I realise how very violent many of the films I watched as a boy were. Roger Rabbit? They dissolve the cartoon characters in acid like a scene from Breaking Bad. Star Wars? Luke returns home to find the charred, smoking corpses of his family littered across the ground. Raiders of the Lost Ark? The face melting, the guy chopped up into pieces by the aeroplane propeller, it’s endless. Oof, there’s so much terrible violence that it’s astonishing now to recall that it was all considered perfectly acceptable family entertainment at the time.
So last Saturday night we gravitated, as we have a few times before, to one of mainstream cinema’s true safe houses: a Steve Martin film. Has he not been the poster boy for wholesomeness for most of his career? Here is actor who seems to have been far more careful about his choices than most, and as a result his name on a poster feels like a code word for … well, I’m going to say cosy. I could say safe and unchallenging, but I think that would be unkind, and rather missing the point.
Father of Bride was our pick. It’s a sweet 1991 remake of a Spencer Tracy picture from 1950, and it retains a lot of that 1950s white-bread fantasy-land feel. (There’s a new HBO re-remake this year that apparently gives the story a bit more of a 21st century update, but I haven’t seen it.) The script was written by Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers, previously responsible for Private Benjamin (I wonder how that movie looks these days?).
For all the middle-class-wealthy-white-people-problems that haven’t aged spectacularly well (very rich family goes to visit even richer very rich family, oh how we feel their pain…) there is some tremendous, laugh out loud physical comedy in this film, with one scene that stands out above all others. Steve Martin is snooping through his prospective son-in-law’s parents’ house when he gets caught by the parents’ dogs, climbs out through a window and ends up in the pool. It’s perfectly paced, with some wonderful, understated clowning. But what makes it stand out in 2022 is that at no point does Martin do what far too many movie protagonists do currently: talk to himself. It seems like no-one could write a script now that wouldn’t have the character nosing through the prescription drugs in the bathroom cabinet and mumbling to himself, ‘Hmm, what drugs are they taking?’ before then moving on to the desk and saying, ‘Ah ha! A cheque book! I wonder what his bank balance is?’ and then turning to the door and telling himself, ‘Oh, no, the dogs!’
I’ve said this before, but many people I talk to think that screenwriting is dialogue writing. Really it’s almost the opposite. You know you’ve written the scene well when there’s no need for dialogue at all.