After a week off due to the Thanksgiving holiday, FSF has returned, and this week I've selected another comedy, though one markedly different than my previous absurdist/slapstick offerings. It's smart, clever, tightly written and very f-f-f-f-funny.
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
To be quite honest, when I first saw Wanda many moons ago, I was rather disappointed. Why? Well, I was young and foolish and was expecting something more along the lines of the great Monty Python films I had come to adore. After all, Python members John Cleese and Michael Palin were heavily involved in Wanda's production, right? Upon further viewings (and my maturing as a cinematic consumer), however, I've come to believe that Wanda is the finest example of what many modern, "smart" comedies aspire to be.
To be sure, the film has its slapstick moments, but they're judiciously used for maximum effect while the rest of the film's humor is sprinkled evenly through the movie's story of diamond theft, judicial wrangling and sexual temptation. Importantly, most of the humor seems to spring organically from the story itself, as opposed to giving the sense that the story was constructed merely as a vehicle to deliver a string of jokes.
All of the performances in the film are wonderful, but Kevin Kline's turn as Otto, the weapons expert with an unjustifiably inflated opinion of his own intellect is simply outstanding. He's given fantastic material to work with and uses it to turn Otto into an iconic character whose various expressions I've come to use on a regular basis. I even considered using his invented name of "Harvey Manfredgensen" as my blogging name here at YR.
It's actually difficult to come up with more to say about the film because Wanda is really a fairly simple and straightforward film that doesn't necessarily aspire to be all that original or "edgy." That being said, though, what it sets out to accomplish, it does extremely well, and it's almost impossible to come up with any aspect of the film that falls short. In the end, Wanda is a fun, smart bit of mature comedy that works as well today as it did over twenty years ago (though the score does show its age at times), and it has become one of my favorite movies.
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