Caddyshack (1980)

Caddyshack: 1980, dir. Harold Ramis. Seen on DVD April 18.
I really did think I would like this movie. I thought it would be like There’s Something About Mary, where I put off watching a film that seemed distasteful to me, but then it was so amusing and entertaining that I didn’t care so much about the gross jokes.
I was wrong.

I might have enjoyed watching Caddyshack more if I’d seen it in a full movie theater, or if I’d had a couple of beers beforehand. Or both. Comedies are often funnier in movie theaters because when you hear other people laughing, you laugh too so the threshhold for amusement is lower.
But it was just my boyfriend and I on the sofa watching the DVD on a Sunday afternoon, and even though we were prepared to be entertained, we just didn’t laugh very much.
Later on he said that the movie wasn’t as funny as he remembered it being, so obviously we can’t blame my failure to laugh on an inherent lack of sense of humor.
Besides, there are plenty of similar funny movies from that time period, many with the same writers and/or director, that I have enjoyed. I like The Blues Brothers and Animal House and I love Ghostbusters and in fact, I will shyly confess here that way back in 1984, I had a little crush on Harold Ramis. I think that gives me a permanent spot in the Geek Girl Gallery.
But let’s face it, Harold Ramis (and Ivan Reitman, while we’re on the subject) can only seem to make a good movie once every 10 years or so, and Caddyshack was not that film.
A lot of it probably depends on your tolerance for Rodney Dangerfield. I don’t like his style of humor very much. In fact, he annoyed the hell out of me. There was no way I could sympathize with his character. So that threw the movie off balance. I kept waiting for Chevy Chase to show up onscreen again because he was the least irritating funny person in the movie.
In fact, I think one of the problems with Caddyshack is that the entire movie is off balance. We were watching one of those lame video documentaries afterward, just because it was on the DVD, and Ramis admitted himself that the movie had changed from its original intent, although he didn’t admit that this ruined any coherent storyline.
I mean, think about the title: Caddyshack. This was conceived as a teen movie about a bunch of caddies, probably in the same vein as Meatballs, which was a hit a year earlier with Bill Murray, a bunch of teenagers, and also scripted by Ramis. The focus was on the teenagers and all the havoc they wreaked and so forth.
But what happened, Ramis tells us in the little documentary (see, those extra features on the DVD sometimes come in handy) is that they were able to get such big-name comedians and actors in the roles of the rich older golfers that those roles essentially took over the movie. So now we have a movie that is ostensibly about the humorous trials and tribs of teenage caddies, but most of the scenes feature Ted Knight, Rodney Dangerfield, Chevy Chase, and Bill Murray, because they’re a bigger box-office draw and they’re more experienced and funnier and blah blah blah.
This movie barely holds together, as a result. It leaps wildly from scene to scene. You wonder if the editors were thinking, “Wait! We haven’t seen the kid who’s supposed to be the main character in awhile. Okay, show something with him … yeah, that is kind of boring … let’s go to Bill Murray. And now Rodney. And Ted. And Rodney. And the gopher. And some tits. Oh yeah, those kids, I guess we’ll have to show them again sometime.”
As a result, there are all these loose ends with the teen characters that don’t quite pay off. Why does the main character’s girlfriend have such a dumb fake Irish accent? Was there a reason in an earlier draft of the script, or did I miss something? Who are all these teenage boys that look alike, and why are they in the movie at all, and why should we care about them?
So instead of a teen movie we now have a movie that appeals to my dad, because he probably loves the Baby Ruth-in-the-pool gag, loves golf jokes, likes Rodney Dangerfield, and doesn’t notice that the Attractive Chick character really isn’t all that attractive, either. (She would never be cast as the attractive chick in a movie in this decade because her legs are too muscular, for one thing. She’s not skinny enough.)
And this may be why so many people have liked the movie for so long. It’s not focusing on a particular demographic.
It didn’t work for me. Rodney Dangerfield was either too abrasive or his jokes were too lame. Bill Murray reminded me why I didn’t like watching him as a kid, because he is best in small doses … I think Tootsie was the first movie I liked watching him. Ted Knight has this mildly amusing cut-rate-Paul Newman thing going on but since he’s fighting Dangerfield, I almost sympathized with him at times.
And the ending is supposed to be this cool moment in which the teenage hero stops ass-kissing Knight and throws away his college scholarship in order to prove a point … or to get a better one from ass-kissing Dangerfield, which doesn’t seem that rebellious and special to me. It reminded me slightly of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and suffered terribly in comparison. Besides, if you’re thinking about a movie like that when you’re in the middle of watching a comedy, you know the comedy is in trouble.
The gopher is funny.
Next time, we get Groundhog Day. The groundhog may not be as funny as the gopher, but everything else is so much better.