A Fish Called Wanda
Charles Crichton (1988)
The streak of cruelty that runs through much of John Cleese’s work is too salient in A Fish Called Wanda for this comedy to be enjoyable. Its chief characters, with one exception, are derided and/or humiliated throughout the film, a crime caper co-produced, written by and starring Cleese, and directed by Charles Crichton, an elder statesman of the Ealing school. This collaboration turns out not to be a marriage of equals: Cleese’s familiar but strongly expressed misanthropy overpowers Crichton’s indecisive treatment of the material. What’s new in Cleese’s script and performance – and what’s hardest to take in Crichton’s direction – is aberrant sentimentality. Wanda is the name of both the eponymous angel fish and a blithely amoral young American con artist (Jamie Lee Curtis) who, along with a ‘weapons man’ and compatriot named Otto (Kevin Kline), becomes a partner in crime with two British jewel thieves – a Cockney martinet called George Thomason (Tom Georgeson, strenuously unfunny) and his cluelessly loyal sidekick, Ken (Michael Palin). (Otto and Wanda, who are lovers, pretend to George and Ken to be brother and sister.) After the gang has stolen and hidden some diamonds, George is shopped by Wanda and Otto, taken into custody and put on trial, to be defended by a successful barrister called Archie Leach (Cleese). (Archibald Leach was the real name of Cary Grant – an in-joke that suggests A Fish Called Wanda may be in part an exercise in wish fulfilment for John Cleese.) Wanda and Otto discover to their horror that George and Ken have moved the loot to a different hiding place. Wanda reckons their best bet is for her to seduce Archie so that George will plead guilty and reveal where the diamonds are hidden. Archie falls in love with Wanda.
Wanda turns Archie’s life upside down. His dizzying infatuation with her is a big improvement on the stultifying routine of his loveless marriage to the nagging Wendy (Maria Aitken). Stripped of his wig, gown and wing collar, Archie becomes a new man. Each time Jamie Lee Curtis goes into a clinch with Cleese, the cinematographer Alan Hume gives her beatific lighting and there’s sensitive Cavatina-ish guitar music on the soundtrack. John Cleese is trying to be sincere and to appear gratefully entranced but though you’re very aware of the effort, you’re not convinced by it. If the whole film were shaped as the development and attainment of the barrister’s fantasy, these romantic moments might play differently. As it is, Crichton and Cleese deploy (their idea of) ‘typical’ American freedom of linguistic and sexual expression – chiefly ‘fucking’, the word and the practice – as a stick with which to beat ‘typical’ English social correctness and emotional inhibition. They do this rather humourlessly but are not so committed to the approach as to lose sarcastic face: Archie’s and Wanda’s lovemaking is invariably interrupted by the obsessively jealous, Anglophobic (and audience-pleasing) Otto. Jamie Lee Curtis looks lovely and acts competently but she understandably fails to be as charming as Cleese’s conception of the woman she’s playing. Wanda’s insouciance is a little jarring because it’s the insouciance of a smart and knowing character (and actress). The potentially subversive leading lady is made cute.
The film’s unkind treatment of Ken, the owner of the aquarium that contains the other Wanda, sits uneasily with its wet love story. Ken is meant to represent the English love of animals. Charged by George with getting rid of the elderly Mrs Coady (Patrica Hayes), the chief witness to the jewel robbery, Ken succeeds only in accidentally killing her three Yorkshire terriers in increasingly elaborate ways: the last of these deaths is enough to give Mrs Coady a fatal heart attack. Patricia Hayes delivers her lines in a superior yap – an amusing illustration of the idea that people become like their pets. Ken’s feelings for animals aren’t, however, built up strongly enough to turn the demise of the dogs into comic irony – it comes across as merely heartless. So does a sequence in which Otto ties Ken up, sticks fruit and veg in his mouth and up his nostrils and then tortures him by eating his fish. Michael Palin is, as always, a likeable presence but he’s not a great comic actor – and he would need to be to make much of Ken, who bungles and stammers and that’s about it. Kevin Kline uses his physical and vocal agility to romanticise Otto’s paranoia. He realises the script’s best character with panache and makes his manic thickness charismatic. Yet I didn’t find Kline funny. As in Sophie’s Choice, you’re left in doubt how accomplished and versatile he is – but his exceptional zest for performance and an aggressive show-off quality are two sides of the same coin. Unlike some bravura actors who sink without trace when they try to be restrained, Kline has been effective when he tones things down (in the early romantic scenes in Sophie’s Choice, in The Big Chill, especially in his underrated Donald Woods in Cry Freedom). Winning an Oscar for A Fish Called Wanda is unlikely to be conducive to his developing the more delicate side of his talents.
It’s puzzling that this film has proved to be such a major critical and commercial success. It’s inferior to the Monty Python movies that I’ve seen and much inferior to Fawlty Towers. It lacks the extravagance and unpredictability of the former; it doesn’t get near the latter’s tight, elegant farce structure or the quality of its characters. (The people in Fawlty Towers may have started life as caricatures but they were so vividly portrayed that they turned into something richer.) Of course A Fish Called Wanda isn’t specifically trying to emulate these other comedies but what does it offer instead? Charles Crichton tells the story clearly but conventionally. The plotting is efficient but not inspired. Of the performances, only Kline’s is remarkable. The film was already a hit in America when it opened in Britain – a rare enough event, for a home-grown movie, to compel critical success over here. A Fish Called Wanda would have done well at the British box office in any case. But why did it tickle the fancy of American critics and audiences? Perhaps its lame adoration of the heroine not only explodes the British sense of superiority that infuriates Otto throughout the film but also tapped into an American sensitivity to this spurious phenomenon. One thing’s for sure: A Fish Called Wanda won’t damage Americans’ properly overwhelming sense of superiority about which country makes better cinema.
[1990s]