THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1996)
The Writers
David Sheffield, Barry W. Blaustein, Tom Shadyac and Steve Oedekerk; based on the motion picture written by Jerry Lewis and Bill Richmond
Why It's Here
I have never been one of those moviegoers who believes that remakes of classic films are an inherently bad thing. If it's okay for the BBC to favor audiences with a new presentation of a well-worn Austen or Dickens text every few years, what's so fundamentally awful about refashioning a great cinematic work with contemporary actors and updated special-effects technology? And let's be frank here. It's not like some of these films that are being remade couldn't stand a little improvement (I'm looking at you, Friday the 13th...). I do believe, however, that most people's knee-jerk objection to the present-day glut of "re-imaginings" is not a fundamental belief in the invalidity of such a concept, but rather that said re-imaginings are seldom re-imagined at all. Many contemporary remakes, rather than taking their source material's fundamental concepts and reworking them to suit the vision of a particular director, screenwriter or even actor, seem content simply to re-create memorable moments, lines or shots from the original film without adding anything new to the equation. Thus, we get stuck with contrivances like the final scene of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes re-do, which recycles the monkeyfied-national-monument finale of the original Apes picture with no regard to its lack of logic within the framework of the remake's plot. Some people say this notion reached its dubious apotheosis with Gus Van Sant's 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, but one has to at least give Van Sant credit for attempting a bold, if perhaps ill-advised, cinematic examination of the true nature of filmmaking genius (and kudos as well to Universal Studios for having the guts to let him spend $25 million of their money on such an experiment). Still, I feel that the best cinematic remakes are those which have truly re-imagined their source material, channeling the original film's narrative through a strong and distinctive filmmaking sensibility. David Cronenberg re-invented the hokey '50s science-fiction chestnut The Fly as both a gruesome essay on the wages of disease and a surprisingly potent love story, while John Carpenter's The Thing used modern special-effects technology to transform the original film's plant-man hybrid into a shape-shifting beast of terrifying versatility.
Even with all these possibilities, however, the notion of remaking a comedy seems dubious at best. After all, a comic story setup can only earn laughs of surprise once, and recycling jokes seems to be as clear a case of the law of diminishing returns as one could find. But it's not impossible to cleverly re-imagine a comedy, as David Sheffield, Barry W. Blaustein, Tom Shadyac and Steve Oedekerk prove with their 1996 re-invention of Jerry Lewis's most revered film, the 1963 Jekyll-and-Hyde riff The Nutty Professor. The 1996 version, which co-writer Shadyac also directed with supreme energy and a lightning-fast pace, takes the original film's source concept, in which a nerdy, lovesick college professor uses a chemical potion to transform himself into a "cool" but obnoxious alter ego, and takes it in directions intriguingly different from the Lewis film (which the comic also directed and co-wrote with Bill Richmond). The result is a film, I think, both narratively stronger and funnier than the original. The Nutty Professor, in fact, ranks high on my list of the laugh-out-loud funniest comedies produced in Hollywood in the last twenty years.
One of the major changes the Nutty Professor writers enacted can be gathered simply from looking at the film's poster. Realizing that it would be awfully been-there-done-that to simply have their lead actor, Eddie Murphy (in a career-best performance that won him a National Society of Film Critics best actor award), play yet another bespectacled nebbish, the writers decided to play up both the difference between the two personalities and the film's comic potential by making their nutty professor, Sherman Klump, a 400-pound behemoth of a man. Sherman is not nearly as garden-variety nerdy in his personality particulars as the original's Julius Kelp; he lacks Kelp's ridiculous bowl haircut, buck teeth and slightly crossed eyes, and his voice, unlike Kelp's nasal whine, has a pleasantly dignified, slightly Southern-inflected tone. But you whip 250 extra pounds on this professor, and the comic catastrophes virtually take care of themselves. The film opens with a chaotic carnival of destruction as hundreds of research hamsters escape from their lab cages and cavort through the campus of the college where Sherman teaches. We later discover, of course, that Sherman caused the rodent exodus when his prodigious rear end accidentally tripped the lever holding their cages closed. And so it goes throughout the film's first act, as we are invited to laugh as Sherman struggles to wedge himself into a chair in the dean's office, knocks over a jar of candy on his desk with his belly (he claims that he did this on purpose, as it "makes the table more festive, and the children, of course, they enjoy it"), and sings a Teddy Pendergrass bedroom anthem to a TV dinner revolving in his microwave.
In these early scenes, the film admittedly seems to be scoring some easy chuckles off of a fat man's troubles with a normal-sized world, but Sherman soon wins our sympathies through several smartly conceived moments and characters. First of all, the writers show how disrespectfully people treat Sherman just because of his weight; his students can't help but laugh when his trailing gut wipes away a long equation he's writing on the blackboard, and his own boss, the odious Dean Richmond (Larry Miller), calls him a "fat tub of goo" to his face. We also see the mixed dietary messages Sherman has gotten on the home front during a side-splitting scene in which Sherman joins his equally plus-sized parents, grandmother, brother Ernie and nephew Ernie Jr. for dinner. The entire family, with the exception of little Ernie Jr. (played by Jamal Mixon in a wordless but very funny performance), is played by Murphy in various Oscar-winning makeup disguises, and he joins forces with the writers to create a hilarious gallery of wholly distinctive comic characters. Papa Klump is a fat-and-proud sort who assures Sherman that "you could sew up your stomach and your asshole, and you're always gonna be fat", while Ernie Sr. tells Sherman he just needs to work out like him, that his own considerable bulk is "all muscle". Grandma, meanwhile, is slightly dotty but still with-it enough to recount her family with tales of talk show host Mike Douglas making her "moist" and about giving her dates "hot lovely relations" as a youngster. And this is all before the farting starts (and it's a testament to this film's comic command that the farts, which rarely work for me as a comic device, set me laughing every time I see this film). The one island of what passes for sanity in Sherman's family is Mama Klump, who dotes on her sons as a good mother should, gives as good as she gets against the vulgar Papa Klump and his constant "breaking gas", and assures Sherman that if he believes in himself, he can do anything. Sherman's ass may take after his dad's, but he gets all his sweet-souled spirit from Mama, and their post-dinner conversation is surprisingly touching.
So, too, is the following scene, where Sherman goes to the apartment of Carla Purdy (Jada Pinkett), a pretty young chemistry instructor with whom he has become smitten. He has been afraid to ask her out for fear of being laughed at, and when she confronts him about his wishes to request a date from her, his downcast eyes and almost ashamed mumblings have us pulling hard for him. This scene is not played for laughs. We share in his exhilaration when Carla accepts his proposition...and the scene is set for one of the most effective scenes in the film, one in which Sherman is treated with a cruelty to which the original film's Professor Kelp, for all the indignities he suffers, is never subjected. Sherman takes Carla to a popular nightclub called the Scream, where she is starting to be won over by Sherman's expertise and sweet simplicity, when onto the stage bounds Reggie Warrington (a memorably grating Dave Chappelle), a pitch-perfect send-up of hack stand-up comedians who alternates stupefyingly unimaginative scripted material ("Women be shoppin', baby!") with easy insults about his audience's appearance. Naturally, he has a field day with Sherman's girth, riddling him with yo-mama jokes, and we get an uneasy chuckle out of a few of those...but then Reggie spots Carla, and the laughs quickly dry up as Reggie lays into her for being on a date with Sherman ("Who is suckin' whose titties over here?"). The writers have set up our sympathies enough for Sherman that the scene, without spilling over into sappiness, has a surprising emotional charge (when we first saw this film in its original theatrical release, this moment actually moved my then-girlfriend to tears).
Therefore, we completely understand Sherman's motives when he downs a heretofore-experimental serum that shrinks his waistline, pumps up his testosterone levels, and transforms him into Buddy Love (the only role Murphy plays looking more or less like himself), who is every nightmarish alpha-male cliche brought to preening, egotistical life. At first, we share in Buddy's ecstasy as he purchases an all-spandex wardrobe and downs piles of hamburgers, all the while gushing about how great it is to "feel thin". Even when he meets Carla for the first time, he tempers his somewhat too-aggressive come-ons and sly jabs at his alter ego (telling her about Sherman's reaction to the Scream fiasco, he says it "tore his chunky ass up"), there's something appealing about him. The writers may not have intended this, but Buddy Love is a sly commentary on the ways in which society is ever predisposed to judge people on their appearance; we want so much to like Buddy because...well, look at how handsome he is, and what good shape he's in! A guy that looks that great has to be great! Right?
Wrong. It's upon the return visit to the Scream, at which Buddy exacts revenge on Reggie Warrington with a long string of insults, mostly about the comic's horselike teeth and ridiculous "shit-locks" hairdo, that Buddy's macho posturing crosses the line from amusing into obnoxious. It's there in his embarrassingly forced begging for Carla's clemency when he shows up late for their date, in his caustic cautionary note to a valet ("Every scratch in my car is a scratch in your ass"), and in his forced laughter at Reggie's really-not-that-funny act. When the confrontation finally comes to blows, it seems an inevitable outgrowth of Buddy's testosterone-drenched personality. Here the film reaches its major narrative hiccup (one which the writers admittedly inherited from Lewis and Richmond's original script). Why doesn't Carla simply run in the other direction when faced with the full gale-force awfulness of Buddy Love? The film pays some lip service to the notion that Carla can sense the true, decent Sherman buried inside the hideous Buddy, but it mostly serves to diminish our opinion of Carla, who seems willing to overlook an awful lot for the sake of being with a handsome, athletic guy. Of course, one could say that about a lot of men and women in the actual world, too, so in the process of harming the audience's opinion of their female lead, The Nutty Professor's writers nevertheless manage to strengthen their film's satirical underpinnings.
Of course, to Carla's credit, the bloom soon wears off the Buddy Love rose for her, too, as the writers unveil their film's other major deviation from the plot of the original Professor film. In Lewis's version, neither Kelp nor Buddy professed much awareness of the other's activities, and even when they did, they never attempted to actively interfere with the plans of the other. Not so with Sherman Klump, who finds in Buddy Love something the original film was sorely missing: an honest-to-God antagonist. Buddy, whose testosterone levels keep dangerously increasing the longer he stays in control of Sherman's body, soon grows weary of sharing a being with a chubby, sweet-souled sad sack, and he begins scheming (with the scientific expertise his other personality has bequeathed to him) of a way to eliminate Sherman for good. He attempts to destroy him professionally by taking complete credit for Sherman's "miracle" formula at a meeting with Dean Richmond and Harlan Hartley (James Coburn), a wealthy alumnus who plans to donate heftily to the college's science program; the meeting goes so well that the dean fires Sherman on the spot and gives his job to...Buddy Love. Buddy also sabotages Sherman's romantic ambitions by forsaking Carla for three bimbos he picks up at a hotel and then throwing a raucous party (at Sherman's apartment, natch) so that, when Carla comes by the next morning to apologize to Sherman about Buddy's undercutting him with Hartley, she finds the three bimbos in his bed and assumes that Sherman and Buddy are "sharing girls now". Finally, Buddy recalculates the formula into a super-formula that will allow him, if he drinks enough, to take over Sherman's body for good. He plans to dose himself with the formula at the school's alumni dinner, proving his mettle to the deep-pocketed Hartley and killing off his nutty professor-ness forever. I have commented in other reviews on this site about the way in which the lack of a strong antagonist frequently hurts the narrative drive of comedies. The Nutty Professor has no such problems. It's a rarity, a big-budget Hollywood comedy with genuine stakes for the characters, and with, in Buddy Love, a comic antagonist to rank with the greatest in cinema history. It all culminates in a brawling, effects-laden showdown at the alumni dinner, with Sherman's body morphing back and forth between his own self and Buddy's as they battle it out for control. Usually, heavy special-effects sequences kill the laughs in a comedy, but by the time The Nutty Professor reaches this boisterous climax, we've invested so much in Sherman Klump's welfare that the laughs stay big and the tension remains high.
The Nutty Professor admittedly wraps up its proceedings with the expected speech about believing in yourself and staying true to what you are, but somehow the message doesn't seem as hackneyed here as it does in other comedies...perhaps because the writers, through Buddy Love, have so memorably laid bare the horrors of the alternative. Indeed, in less skilled hands, the remake of The Nutty Professor could have ended up just like Buddy Love: a slicker and better-looking version of the original model, but crasser, louder and not nearly as lovable. Crass and loud it is, for sure, but thanks to the skilled screenwriting work of Sheffield, Blaustein, Shadyac and Oedekerk (not to mention Eddie Murphy's memorable panoply of comic characters), the film is funnier, faster and more emotionally engaging than its predecessor. It's a Professor that could teach a lot to any filmmaker attempting to tackle a remake of a well-loved original. Its lesson: Do it different and do it better, or don't do it at all.
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