The Addams Family

The Addams Family

In “The Addams Family” there are many little smiles, many chuckles and grins, but nothing does not pile up. The picture is like one of the Charles Addams cartoons that inspired it, in which each line or image is self-contained. I was mildly entertained, but I wanted big laughs and got them only once.

This movie alone creates characters based on Addams’ immortal New Yorker cartoons and early 1960s TV series that look eerily like the original Addams drawings; somebody must have done a rip-and-paste job with the art direction. The ghoulish family lives in a many turreted gothic mansion next to its own graveyard on a blasted heath where nothing grows except for dead things. Inside the house all the ordinary rules of human nature are reversed, as when the mother finds her daughter going after a little brother with a kitchen knife and sternly takes it away from her in order to hand over an ax.

Mother’s name is Morticia (Anjelica Huston), who looks uncannily like the original character once she has put on her makeup. Father’s name is Gomez (Raul Julia), and despite how outlandish these people are I did feel some chemistry between them. They’re having fun. Many of the best moments involve their two children Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), who before being sent off to school each morning are handed their lunches in brown bags with something alive inside.

Wednesday and Pugsley eventually cause one big laugh in this movie, during a school pageant that ends with half of the audience being drenched by stage blood. At least I hope it’s stage blood. Otherwise, per usual, this movie involves a scheme by the calculating family attorney (Dan Hedaya) who convinces his client’s son to impersonate Fester Gomez’ long lost older brother. The brother (Christopher Lloyd, from the “Back to the Future” movies) stares out at the world through large black eye sockets and is a miserable wretch until he begins to feel he actually belongs in the Addams household.

The movie has a lot of beginnings, but somehow they don’t get pushed through to true comic invention.

Take Thing, for example an intelligent, disembodied hand that is a family pet. When they are evicted from their home and forced to take real jobs, Thing gets a job delivering Federal Express parcels-but this movie throws away all the funny possibilities here by simply showing Thing in fast motion racing on its rounds. Wasn’t there anything actually funny they could dream up about what would happen if you had a disembodied hand doing a job?

I was not one of the great admirers of “Beetlejuice,” the 1988 comedy by Tim Burton but seeing this movie made me realize how much more creatively Burton used his special effects; both movies are about strange evil creatures inhabiting tricky haunted houses yet in “The Addams Family” the effects seem put in for their own sake, to be looked at and are not really exploited in the story.

That only leaves the single moments of it. Yes, many are humorous. In the time before this movie came out there were many short trailers in theaters for it. You’ve probably seen some of them like one where a kid asks if Girl Scout cookies are made from real Girl Scouts. These lines are funny on their own, as were the cartoon captions that inspired some of them; but they don’t build. They earn a laugh, and then the movie has to work its way back up to the next one. This is not so much a fun film to see as it is a fun film to talk about.

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