Dr. Forbush Thinks

I checked this movie out from the library several weeks ago. As sometimes happens I didn’t get a chance to watch the entire movie with the family. In fact, I began to watch the movie the night before I needed to turn it in. After watching about 30 minutes of it my wife and daughter came home and chaos ensued. Of course I needed to return the movie the next day, because the library wouldn’t allow it to be renewed.

So, I was left with the first 30 minutes of the movie for a few weeks while I waited for the movie to become available at the library again. My thoughts at this point were that the movie was funny in a strange way. It wasn’t quite 3 Stooges humor, and it wasn’t Monty Python either. Instead it was a surreal comedy based loosely on the adventures of Odysseus. The closest description would be Moulon Rouge meets the Odyssey.

The main character Everett Ulysses has a large vocabulary and a command of the English language. But, when it comes to human nature he only has an inkling of understanding. However, his two partners make him look like a genius. The three men manage to break out of a prison camp, shackled together with chains. Everett Ulysses has a plan, and the gift of persuasion, which take the men on an adventure through 1930s Mississippi. First they meet a blind man on a railroad pushcart who tells them that they will not find the treasure they seek and they will see a cow on a roof. Everett Ulysses is the skeptic while the others believe the man’s supernatural ability. In fact, Everett Ulysses, is the typical skeptic is almost every instance while his cohorts are deceived in almost every case.

Last week I was able to check out the movie once again. Aside from one very violent episode where a crazy Baby Face Nelson machine guns a cow and another car runs into several cows the movie seemed fairly tame. There was a bit of colorful language, but my kids have mostly heard this in school so it didn’t seem any worse than any other PG-13 movie. At least the first 30 minutes that I had seen wasn’t so bad. So, I thought that I could share the PG-13 movie with the family.

I thought that they would enjoy some of the slapstick comedy, being teenagers and all. One scene where the three guys are sitting around the campfire eating gopher on a stick was sure to be a hit, I thought. After all, we have about a thousand gophers living in our back yard and we joke about running a gopher farm all the time. It turns out that the movie was a bit too surreal for them, because they kept complaining that it wasn’t realistic. I kept saying that it was supposed to be unrealistic, which was the point. When we reached the scene with the gopher on a stick there wasn’t much reaction, so I knew that we weren’t going to finish the movie. The final straw was a scene where John Goodman, a Bible salesman, beats up Everett Ulysses and one of his sidekicks. Pete, his other sidekick was believed to be turned into a frog that was being kept in a shoebox. John Goodman believes that these guys have money in the shoebox, and when he discovers the frog he gets so mad that he squishes the frog in his hand and throws the body against a tree. This gruesome scene caused the kids to say that it was enough and we didn’t finish watching the rest of the film.

Unfortunately we hadn’t seen the rest of the movie, so we didn’t know that this was the most gruesome and final gruesome scene of the movie. Last night I found this out when I finally finished watching the movie.

The climax of the surrealism would be a wedding rehearsal dinner the night before Everett Ulysses’ wife is about to marry a more successful man. We find out that Everett Ulysses did not really steal 1.2 million dollars and bury it by his cabin. Instead, Everett Ulysses broke out of prison in order to get back to his wife so he can prevent the wedding from taking place. This pre-wedding party is being held in a huge hall, where the Governor and his opponent in the upcoming election have both been invited. The music from the wedding is live and being broadcast over the radio. If this doesn’t sound surreal enough, imagine that the threesome have picked up a black guitar player who sold his soul to the Devil. This foursome, in an effort to come up with some money recorded a song at a radio station in the middle of nowhere for ten bucks apiece. By the time of the pre-wedding party the song they recorded has become a hit record and the group known as the Soggy Bottom Boys becomes a huge excitement as they play their hit in front of all the guests. Even more surrealism is added to the mix when the Gubernatorial Candidate, a KKK member, and leading in the polls, becomes outraged that the Soggy Bottom Boys is seen to be integrated. In his rant he professes to be a Klan member over the radio and current Governor takes charge by exposing his challanger as a racist.

The funny thing here is that the two candidates are both undesirable, but the current Governor uses his cronyism to his advantage and also to the ex-cons advantage who are pardoned and given jobs in his government.

If you like what I have written, then you’ll like the movie. If you’d rather watch something more believable then I would say you’d be happier passing on this film.



Movies, O Brother, Surrealism