DEATH TO SMOOCHY
by Gareth Von Kallenbach

In Danny De Vito's Death to Smoochy, Robin Williams plays Rainbow Randolph, a top rated children's show host who is knocked from his lofty perch when he accepts a bribe from an undercover cop posing as a parent trying to get a child on his show. Reeling from the scandal, the network places the task of finding a replacement that is squeaky clean in the hands of M Frank Stokes (Jon Stewart), and Nora Wells (Catherine Keener). This is no easy task, as most of the available candidates have issues ranging from drugs and alcohol to assault charges.

Desperate to save their jobs, they reluctantly settle on Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton), a tree hugging milquetoast who makes vanilla seem wild and daring. His character Smoochy, a pink rhinoceros, becomes a gigantic hit, and this drives the desolate Rainbow Randolph to the brink of madness, as he sets out to take down his replacement and regain his crown as the king of kid shows.

While this might have been a recipe for a good comedy, Death To Smoochy soon gets lost in a bewildering crime subplot involving De Vito and Harvey Fierstein, and there is much too much repetition. Williams is missing from large portions of the film, which suffers from his absence. Norton is good, but his character is very bland. Despite good supporting work from Keener, the film flounders with muddled pacing and a confusing point of view. What could have been a frantic and inventive comedy loses momentum when large gaps occur between Williams's antics. There is a sensational moment, for instance, when Williams frames Smoochy, but it is followed by several scenes of Norton moping about his bad fortune.

Dark comedies can be very difficult to do and even harder to sell to the public. (Jim Carrey's brilliant work in Ben Stiller's The Cable Guy went largely unnoticed, for example.) Here, screenwriter Alan Resnick fails to flesh out the characters. We have no idea why Mopes holds his "politically correct" views, nor do we have an inkling as to why Randolph would be broke and seeking to take bribes despite hosting a top rated show. A lot of talent and ideas are wasted here, with purposeless scenes of the characters in bars, restaurants, meeting, and wandering New York, that did little to enhance the plot but a lot to kill the potential of Death to Smoochy.

The World War Two drama Hart's War tells the story of Lieutenant Tommy Hart (Colin Farrell), an officer at the rear headquarters in Europe who is safely behind the lines, thanks to his Senator father. Hart was in his second year of law school at Yale when he entered the war, and is content serving his country at HQ. While driving to a field office, he is taken prisoner and finds himself in a Stalag run by the brutal Major Visser (Marcel Iures), where he is ordered to live apart from the officers in the enlisted men's barracks, ostensibly due to a lack of space. Hart later learns that the ranking prisoner, Colonel William McNamara (Bruce Willis), a fourth generation West Point graduate, doesn't trust him because his interrogation by the Nazis only lasted three days, never moving past an entry level interrogator.

Undaunted, Hart goes about adjusting to life in the camp, which is soon disrupted by the arrival of two black airmen who have been shot down. McNamara instructs him to take care of these men, and this causes Hart to run afoul of his mates in the barracks, who are opposed to living with black officers. When one of the black pilots is framed and executed, tensions run high in the camp. The discovery of a dead white prisoner leads to the remaining black pilot being forced to stand trial for the crime, and Hart is assigned to defend him.

It is at this point that the movie's pacing and focus becomes very uneven. It seems as if director Gregory Hoblit (Frequency) is unsure about whether he's making a prisoner escape film, a racial drama in the vein of A Soldier's Story, or a courtroom drama like A Few Good Men. The screenplay ends up all over the place, and fails to make an emotional impact.

Willis is good in a subdued role - one of the film's strengths is that we're never sure of McNamara's intentions until the very end. Farrell plays Hart as a wide-eyed soldier who needs to develop traits of honor and leadership. He does fine within the limits of the role's conception. The film is well shot and well crafted, building methodically to its climax, and generally plausible, despite some Hollywood-style trickery involving characters dragging things out for the sake of future drama, even though there are no valid reasons for their delays. I was mildly entertained at times by Hart's War, but in the end it left me with an empty feeling. I did not gain hope, inspiration, or satisfaction from the characters and their stories, only resignation to their fates, much like the prisoners of war themselves.

©2002 Gareth Von Kallenbach
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