Ishtar

In Tropic Thunder (2008), the action star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is chastised by his co-star, Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) for going "full retard" in his sentimental film Simple Jack.  Lazarus says that if  you want to win an Oscar, you should play the role of a mentally disabled person as "part retard" -- like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.  Going "full retard" is unsettling to the audience; it's better to make your mentally challenged character wry and charming.  A "full retard" performance that is too naturalistic, too true to life, will simply be perceived as unpleasant.  In Ishtar, Elaine May's much-derided comedy from 1987, the two leads played by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play their parts "full retard" -- this is catastrophic, at least with regard to Beatty, and has led to the film being almost uniformly vilified.  Viewed in a certain light, Beatty's acting in the film could be considered brave -- he certainly takes risks that no other A-list Hollywood performer has ever attempted.  (What he does in the picture would be tantamount to John Wayne playing a cowardly weakling or Cary Grant slumming as derelict, alcoholic bum.)  The singular success that Beatty and Hoffman achieve in playing moronic and painfully awkward (and untalented) singer-songwriters has long confused critics -- people who despise this movie can't get over the fact that the performances are "full retard"; Hoffman and Beatty have the temerity to play their parts realistically -- it's method acting applied in a way that makes audiences uncomfortable:  the two actors play clueless, unpleasant losers so effectively that they trash the movie. 

Rogers and Clark is a singing duo comprised of Lyle Rogers (Beatty) and Chuck Clark (Hoffman).  They write their own songs and perform them at wedding receptions and low-rent bars.  Although they are constantly improvising new tunes, and complete one another's rhymes, they have zero talent -- they can't sing (their voices are grating), their ability to play their instruments is rudimentary, and their stage-presence wholly lacking in charisma.  (This latter defect is a triumph of acting by Hoffman and Beatty, two highly charismatic movie-stars.)  They aren't so bad that they're good or, even, marginally passable -- they are simply downright bad performers who make those watching them uncomfortable.  And, of course, they don't have a clue that they're terrible.  Strangely enough, Rogers and Clark have an agent (this seems implausible) and he books them into the Chez Casablanca a dowdy, over-lit cabaret in Marrakech.  Flying budget from the States, the singers land in a miserable country that borders Morocco called Ishtar.  (Ishtar is like Saudi Arabia but without wealth.) A popular revolution is about to begin against the villainous Emir who rules Ishtar.  A beautiful female revolutionary enlists the help of Clark in smuggling a prophetic map into Morocco (for reasons that are unclear to me).  The ancient map, found in a ruined city, prophecies the arrival of two angels who will lead a revolution against the tyrant ruling Ishtar.  After Clark is enlisted as a smuggler, a sinister CIA man recruits him to subvert the revolution in Ishtar, asserting that the rebels (who are labeled "Shiites") are communists.  In Morocco, Rogers and Clark perform to a group of utterly deluded tourists and Arabs who applaud them wildly -- they aren't performing their own tunes in the cabaret, but covers of Dean Martin and musical comedy numbers.  In the morning, the female freedom fighter (played by Isabelle Adjani) persuades Lyle to go to the "camel market" and "buy a blind camel."  These instructions are meant to be code-words but Lyle takes her instructions literally and, in fact, buys a balky, ill-tempered blind camel.  After a shoot-out between KGB, CIA, and Turkish operatives all monitoring the activities of the Ishtar rebels in Morocco, the boys are sent out into the desert.  The plan is to simply get them out of town and into the wilderness where they will certainly perish.  But Rogers and Clark manage to survive overnight and, in fact, make contact with arms merchants who are selling machine guns and rocket launchers.  Somehow, they pretend to be Berbers and Clark even imitates an auctioneer.  The weapon vendors flee (for some reason that makes no sense) leaving Rogers and Clark in control of a large cache of guns  and other ordinance.  The CIA, who has been plotting to quash the rebellion, dispatches helicopters to kill the Americans who appear to be aiding the rebels.  The girl terrorist and a sidekick appear suddenly -- more or less out of nowhere and without any real motivation.  They help the two Americans fight off the CIA helicopter attack.  By this point, the CIA's complicity in the crushing the rebellion is about to become public.  Rogers and Clark's booking agent negotiates a deal with the governmentg that includes a recording contract for the hapless duo and a big concert at the Chez Casablanca that American servicemen and generals are pressganged into attending.  I guess all ends well, at least for the Americans -- presumably, the rebellion in Ishtar is savagely crushed or, maybe, not.  I think some "social reforms"are mandated but it's just not clear. 

None of this is particularly funny or well-staged.  The gunfight in the Marrakech market looks a little like Hitchcock's The Man who knew too much in the version with James Stewart and Doris Day.  Of course, the set-up seems to harken back to the popular Bob Hope and Bing Crosby musical comedies of the late forties, particularly The Road to Morocco.  But the Hope-Crosby "Road" movies had engaging songs, neatly performed by Bing Crosby, and a plausible love-interest in Dorothy Lamour.  The songs in Ishtar are cringeworthy, simply painful to the ears, and Isabelle Adjani's female freedom fighter is completely wasted -- she has no good lines, her motivations are baffling, and, for most of the movie, she's mistaken for a boy and has to flash her breasts to make the point that she's a woman.  Somehow Warren Beatty completely dampens his famous charm.  He plays a man who is terrified of women and regarded as wholly unattractive -- and, amazingly, he makes himself seem unattractive.  Beatty squints and mumbles and stutters -- he seems to be twice the size of the braggart and bully Chuck Clark and stumbles around clumsily like a version of Lenny in Of Mice and Men. (Both Clark and Rogers are shown as married or with steady girlfriends in the film's beginning scenes -- Tess Harper and Carol Kane play these women who figure out that the two men are completely useless and abandon them.)  An early scene involving Clark's attempt at suicide epitomizes what is wrong with the film.  Learning that his girlfriend has left him, Clark clambers out of his apartment window, perching on a ledge about a hundred feet above the street.  Elaine May, who directed this film, has no idea how to stage the sequence --  somehow, she manages to make it singularly uninvolving.  She doesn't exploit the danger, barely aims her camera down at the street to show the lethal height from which Clark is threatening to jump.  In fact, she stages the scene as if it were in someone's front yard with Clark teetering on the edge of a curb or something on that order.  The sequence isn't funny nor is it thrilling or fearsome -- it's just utterly bland, a plot point from the script perfunctorily filmed without any finesse or imagination whatsoever.  This is true of the more elaborate scenes in Morocco as well. The notion that the two singer-songwriters might be mistaken for the angels from the prophecy and hailed as the leaders of the revolution is suggested, but never actually developed.  The parchment map is just a MacGuffin that triggers some listless chase scenes -- it has no other significance even though we see people killed for it at the beginning of the film.  Everything is weirdly off-key.  Beatty, I suspect, has larded the film with references to Anwar Sadat, Ghaddafi, and the Shah of Iran, but none of this satire goes anywhere and, ultimately, seems too detailed for a movie that is really nothing but feather-brained fluff.  The tyranny in Ishtar is described in these terms:  "The dome of the Emir's palace in Ishtar is gold.  But the people have never seen a refrigerator."  Refrigerators are fine appliances and everyone should have one, but I don't know of any revolutions fought under the slogan:  "Give the masses refrigerators!"

Certain contrarian critics have made large claims for Ishtar.  Jonathan Rosenbaum, formerly of Chicago Reader and Richard Brody at The New Yorker have asserted that the movie is a great film that has been unfairly derided.  This is rubbish.  The movie is pretty bad -- it's not abysmally bad, just garden-variety bad and has a couple of mildly funny sequences -- blind camels, I guess, are just inherently funny.  I suppose one could praise Beatty in particular for playing so violently against type:  he actually says "Women don't like me."  But his performance, utterly devoid of even a hint of charm (we can see why women wouldn't like him) is one of the reasons that the film goes off the rails.  Elaine May was gifted as a comedian, but she's a listless, lackluster director -- the movie looks like it was made for TV.  (And she's sloppy as well; in The Goodbye Girl, she put mountains in Minnesota; the continuity in Ishtar is a mess.)  Elaine May and Paul Williams wrote the horrible songs -- they had fun; the audience does not.