Americathon

Americathon

“Americathon” is a vulgar exploitation of a very weak joke over 98 very long minutes. It comes with a short subject which is part of the NEA’s new program to get shorts in movie theaters. If they keep playing their shorts with features like “Americathon,” they will, alas, continue to be unseen.

The movie is about America in 1998, when the gas shortage has completely eliminated the auto — except as something you can park permanently and live in. Bicycling and jogging and roller-skating are the means of transportation, and the country is $400 billion in hock to an ancient Indian (Chief Dan George) who has cornered the roller-skate market.

What to do? Better yet, how to care about an idea that might stretch itself as thin as a four-minute sketch but hardly carries the weight of feature length? That was the challenge facing director Neil Israel, whose earlier credits include “Tunnelvision,” which had a Procter and Bergman sketch in it about a charity marathon to save New York City, so why not make a whole movie about a marathon to save America?

He did. And he populated his movie with hundreds of comic characters: berserk masters of ceremonies and lustful Presidents and usual would-be zany presidential advisers. Much of this movie feels directly but not cleverly ripped off from “Putney Swope” and the deservedly obscure “The Virgin President.” There are “jokes” involving government computers that cast dozens of ventriloquists in Amerithons, and Chinese fast-food stands and warring Arabs and sexy double agents from Vietnam.

But mostly what we get here is hysteria. Israel’s idea for a funny scene seems to be jamming his screen with people dressed funny who run around screaming at the top of their lungs. He has not yet learned one basic rule of comedy; namely, that people are not necessarily funny because they act funny; they’re funny when the way they act seems funny to us, or seems logical through the story’s vision. W. C. Fields never acted “funny.” He always behaved with the utmost self-concentration.

However, one of the ways in which “Americathon” attains a ghastly fascination is in its absolute consistency: There is hardly a single species of comic business that Neil Israel knows how to handle. He underlines puns. He picks the wrong angle for the shot where the vain hero loses his toupee. He shoots midget tap-dancers in extra-long shot, and puts uncoordinated marching bands on TV monitors so that they look like regular marching bands, and he lets his actors look as if they’re having a good time acting so crazily, when in fact they’d be infinitely funnier projecting a studied dim intensity.

Watch this movie closely and you will see bit performers trying bits of comic business that must have seemed funny to them at the time but which are lost or obscured by camera placement and editing. It is also very badly lit — astonishingly so at times, since cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld’s credits include even difficult but beautiful black-and-white work such as “Young Frankenstein.”

If you plan to skip this movie, better skip it quickly; I doubt if it’ll be around to skip for long.

Watch Americathon For Free On Gomovies.