Reviews

...is so obviously hilariously NOT from the original 1983 footage. (For those that care, they're called The Dayz and have an Instagram page; kudos to them for being one of a BILLION bands to be randomly selected for a very hyped cult film release! Perhaps they know the producer??) It's obviously a modern day band (the sound is different, they didn't even ATTEMPT to make it sound like a live performance), the hair styles and clothes are different (a man bun? A dude in a backwards baseball cap and a shirt that says GREENPOINT?? In 1983 when no one outside Brooklyn had even heard of Greenpoint??) and the footage of them playing is clearly not at a concert! They're playing in a studio or perhaps warehouse. Furthermore they keep using the SAME shots (guy on saxophone! Female member headbang in slow motion), with quick cut aways to wide shots of the actual 1983 live audience in hopes you won't notice. Well, we did!

It is a widespread myth that Eddie Murphy's scenes were only added after the movie tested poorly with audiences. That theory makes sense, given that the Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy storylines are so different and set in two time periods, and that Murphy's appearance is so brief. But actually, the film was based on a Robert Grossbach book that already had cross-cutting in it (though it was about the Vietnam War), called "Easy and Hard Ways Out," and the film was all shot in late 1983. This is a quote from Murphy's agent in a July 1984 Wall Street Journal article, the same month the film came out: "No, no," was how Bob Wachs, Mr. Murphy's manager, responded to the theory. "From the beginning, the movie was structured the way it is. The movie was signed with Dudley Moore as a sure go, then we signed on last August." (Shooting didn't begin until October.) Mr. Wachs explained that even though Mr. Murphy had a five-picture deal with Paramount last summer (which doesn't include "Best Defense"), the studio "didn't have a starring vehicle we considered appropriate for Eddie. Rather than Eddie sitting around not being on the screen at all this summer, we wanted him to be in something. This isn't our movie. Dudley Moore is the star of this movie." However, Mr. Murphy is displayed more prominently than Mr. Moore in television ads for the movie, and local theaters have put both names in letters of equal size on their marquees. Isn't Mr. Wachs worried that Mr. Murphy's fans might be angry to find out their hero shows up only sporadically and in a confused movie to boot? "Paramount controls the distribution and advertisement," Mr. Wachs replied. "This was a cameo, for God's sake."

It was the most slandered movie of 2001 and, as its one mainstream supporter, NY Times' A.O. Scott, remarked, it was unfairly lumped in with six or seven Farrelly Brothers rip-offs in which dewy-eyed teen romance is lazily broken up by knowingly nauseating humor (most often centered on semen). Although the film contains no embarrassing teen sex jokes along the lines of "American Pie," it is still in the genre of "gross-out comedy," hence, its release was poorly timed, from a critical standpoint. Once critics have seen three films of this type within a short period of time, they become that toxic combination of embittered and immune. They hate all films that resort to that "disgust the audience" tactic but eventually, they're also not shocked by them in the slightest.

I think what really riled the critics on this one is that they couldn't dismiss "FGF" as just another lightweight scatological comedy. Its head is in an altogether more demented place. Aimless yet innocent creative gags (Tom Green wearing sausages on his head and playing the piano; Tom Green wearing a suit backwards and babbling "I'm the backwards man, the backwards man; I can walk backwards fast as you can") coexist with truly macabre, borderline Lynchian ones (Tom Green reviving an unconscious baby by swinging it around by its umbilical cord, blood splattering on not only its mother but two "Cumbaya"-humming Mexicans in the maternal ward). The biggest flaw of the movie is, strangely, what makes it a fascinating anomaly; since its content shifts so sporadically from playful man-child antics to a seriously scarred relationship between the protagonist and his father (Rip Torn), the film is less failed comedy than a tragic parable on the inevitable arrested development of eccentrics.

The Torn-Green theme provides the explanation for the more incongruous aspects of the movie, which is what a lot of critics hated the most. For instance, there's no real immediate purpose behind Green, en route from his Portland home to Hollywood to pitch an animation series, screeching to a halt at a horse farm and aiding the farmers in stimulating a stag. Nor is there much point behind him strapping a sausage to his crotch and yelling "Ding dong!" on a cheese factory's mobile strip.

Yet the movie offers some smart variations from Green's MTV show, in which the only comic set-up is Green annoying shop owners, ball players and other poor saps to the point where they physically assault him or escort him from the premises. Knowing that attempting that sort of humor with hired actors in a real movie wouldn't generate much shock, the film mostly stages grandiose, one-person stunts as metaphors for Green's self-loathing. Mostly, he abuses himself. And you eventually notice that all his perversion, his idiotic babbling, his jaw-dropping naivete, is a result of stifled creativity. Torn lovingly accepts Green when he's aspiring to be mainstream but slaps him, berates him, destroys his artwork, etc., whenever Green is eccentric. No wonder he's such a malcontent.

Now, sometimes the film goes too far, as Green's character occasionally behaves in such an aggressively awful way that it contradicts his sweeter elements. But that major flaw is also what takes the film into darker, more interesting territory than most comedies about overgrown children (ie "Cabin Boy"). And, after all the ugliness, the film ends on an upbeat, with son and father exuberantly making up and recognizing that they have both gone too far in their misanthropy. Most heartwarming of all, Torn has accepted that Green can indeed succeed with his artwork, which Daddy once labeled mere "doodles."

In short, it's a film in which the payoff of its ghastly, bodily function-spewed pranks is less a mood of detached hilarity than one of cringing melancholy. You want Green to grow up, to stop acting out constantly on his misguided ambitions, but, thanks to plenty of milder, gentler-toned scenes (which the critics of course completely overlooked) that paint him as deep down a morally sound person, you also want him to accept himself and live the tortured artist's dream.

"Freddy Got Fingered" is not great art. I only laughed about four times, so, in my opinion, it failed as a comedy. I also wouldn't praise it in quite the same way A.O. Scott did, equating Green (who in real life, as demonstrated on the DVD commentary, doesn't know the meaning of the word "irony"), with "70's conceptualist pioneers like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci." The show is funnier, because of the reality of the stunts, and there's something timid about outrage being attempted within the fourth-wall confines of a movie. I would not call the movie smart. I would also not, however, call it incoherent or pointless. It's a dark, gruesome fable about a neglected child pining for acceptance. See it that way, and scenes like the one in which Green cuts open (an ACTUAL) deer carcass and wears it, upon a TV exec's advice to "get inside" his characters, actually begin to make some sort of twisted sense.