“The Addams Family” (1991)

Being a great enthusiast for the “spooky comedies” subgenre (The Haunted Mansion, and the great art to be found there, whether concept- or fan-, are what got me into it; Vincent Price is largely what made me stay), I easily let myself be persuaded by my sister to watch the 1991 big-screen The Addams Family feature last weekend. At the very least I would then finally discover the context of the large amounts of gifs that Tumblr has wrung out of that poor sod of a movie. Like a distressing number of 1990's movies, you'd be forgiven, judging from Tumblr, for thinking that half this films's dialogue consists of lines designed specifically to be quoted later at comically-appropriate times.

After watching it in earnest, I can testify that, unlike with most of the 1990's movies which get this treatment on the Internet, this sentiment would be entirely accurate. 

But let it be said that those are some damn fine quips, too! Let not the above jaded opening give you the impression that I disliked the movie; forsooth, I liked it quite a bit.

I scarcely think that there is much cause to explain a fairly self-explanatory premise: the titular Family are a jolly ol'bunch of grotesques enjoying the “end-of-the-rope Bela Lugosi who dressed and lived like Dracula” lifestyle to the fullest, and not caring one bit that everyone else finds them utterly creepy. Less straightforward is the plot of the attempt to bring it to the big screen, a rather confused affair of mistaken identity centering on the figure of the Nosferatu-like Uncle Fester. But of course, it is no more confusing, nor farther-fetched, than a lot of Shakespeare plots; if you can sort-of-buy Twelfth Night, you can sort-of-buy this too. The place of the Bard in the realm of literary posterity suggests most people can indeed sort-of-buy Twelfth Night. So, let's move on. 

This Fester character is here played with marvelous, inventive twitchiness by the great Christopher Lloyd. (I have not seen many films with the man; I have not even seen any of those Back to the Future films everyone kept banging on about three years ago. But I have seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Don Bluth's animated Anastasia, and that would be sufficient data to declare Lloyd a great actor, in the over-the-top category, whether or not the Internet was already screaming at me that he is one of the greats. Which it is, very loudly too.) Fester spends most of the movie as an amnesiac impersonating himself at the behest of a mother who adopted him in his 50's — don't worry, it makes just as much sense in context — so as to serve as our introductory “viewpoint character”. And — it's not that it doesn't work — but I'm not entirely certain we needed a viewpoint character. Designed for nigh-worldess newspaper cartoons first, and a 1960's sitcom later, the Addams Family are an extremely self-explanatory bunch; in truth, by the time Fester comes in, we already have a pretty solid idea who the Addamses are and what the tone of the film is going to be.

Though Lloyd is the “big name carrying the movie with a daringly different reinterpretation of one of the franchise's originals” (this is a trick that would be tried again with other fun-gothic films of this movie's generation: it sort-of-worked with Jim Carrey as Count Olaf in the 2003 Lemony Snicket flick, and failed horribly in the Haunted Mansion feature the same year), the rest of the cast is pretty uniformly stellar, from child actress Christina Ricci as the memed-to-death, but truly very entertaining, Wedsneday Addams, to Elizabeth Wilson as our villain, the Mme-de-Tremaine-esque Mrs Abigail Craven. (Craven not a very interesting villain, more as a result of with who and wirth what she's sharing the movie; Joan Cussack in the movie's sequel was dealt a much better deal with not a doubt. But Wilson plays her quite well still.) Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá as Morticia and Gomez Addams, in particular — I cannot judge them in comparsion to the televised originals, for I have not watched the TV series; but on their own terms, it is glaringly obvious that they are the most perfect realizations imaginable of what they are trying to be. 

The plot may be a little meandering, but that's never been a problem in a comedy so long as the meat is peppered with enough jokes at a good enough pace; The Addams Family does that. It has the good sense to borrow a fair few of its jokes from Charles Addams's original cartoons, and the rest are very successfully funny too; it also sometimes leaves the funny actors to do their funny things, and they do that very well too. There are a couple of jokes that don't land, or at least not with me (sadly, the last joke in the film is one of them), but aren't there always? 

The direction was handily recognizable as Barry Sonnenfeld to me, from his work on the 2017 Series of Unfortunate Events television series, and Sonnenfeld definitely knows what he's doing, creating a nice tone in almost every scene. The set design in which he's playing around is frequently gorgeous, though some bits of the Addams Mansion are a bit too much of a “boilerplate haunted house”. (There is one other exception I'll save for the post-scriptum.)

The Addams Family is also, of course, an effects picture; so I suppose I am expected to make a statement about those special effects. Well, the most obvious show of said SFX is ‘Thing’ the disembodied hand (it wasn't actually a disembodied hand in the source material, but rather a creature who was so hideous that we could only ever see its hand, the rest being too horrible; this is a vastly more creative concept than "disembodied hand"; but I shan't blame the movie overmuch for that, as that ship had long sailed by the time the movie rolled round, with numerous jokes back in the television series revolving around Thing's hand-ness). It works in most of its scenes, though it feels oddly weightless whenever it's crawling about; there is one exception of terrible greenscreenery, and that is that brief sequence in the climax where it's searching the swamps. But it lasts barely five seconds, so I'll excuse it. Similarly, of all the non-Thing effect, there is one laughably bad one, a computer-generated fire effect supposed to burn down a wooden statue in a few seconds. But it's a brief cutaway gag. 

All in all, it's not perfect, but I solidly recommend it. I look forward to watching the sequel, the amusingly-titled Addams Family Values, next weekend; I don't know if I'll have enough material for another review (we'll see), but for now I'd tacitly recommend it based on the quality of its predecessor and the presence of the great Joan Cussack in it (I know and love her from that other Sonnenfeld project, the Lemony Snicket televisions series). 

Post-Scriptum: 

• So what is up with the Addams Family Graveyard, anyway? Not only are the statues in a weird, 20th-century-ish style that would scream “Anachronism!” if it had working lungs, but most of the tombs inexplicably bear the sole name of Addams. Guys, sorry to break it to you, but again… this is the Addams family plot. You're not actually telling passersby a whole lot by labeling the tombstones with their occupant's last name. This is one respect in which the Gracey Family Plot in The Haunted Mansion (ride, not film, of course) is indubitably superior, as it instead features first names to the exclusion of last names. 

          (Oh, well. It's a nice enough setpiece to look at, at least; reminded me a bit of Phibes's lair.)