Shout! Factory
Despite being originally released in 2002, Death to Smoochy is a black comedy time capsule of pre-9/11 American cynicism.
Casting children’s television as a hive of depravity, greed, and decadence is an idea fired straight from a post-Lewinsky American pop culture dominated by early South Park and Attitude era WWF programming.
Death to Smoochy follows “Rainbow” Randolph Smiley (Robin Williams, squarely in the middle of a self imposed “dark period”) the host of a popular children’s television show whose life is destroyed after he’s publicly revealed to be a criminal and alcoholic.
Execs from the network select the impossibly nice Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton, having a blast) and his character Smoochy the Rhino to be the new face of kid’s programming.
Randolph begins to psychotically fixate on Mopes; first, trying to just get him fired and then escalating to cartoonish violence in his quest to revenge himself upon the impossibly nice children’s performer, whom he assumes to be as depraved as everyone else in the business.
On paper, Death to Smoochy is a home run: a dark comedy starring one of the most gifted comedic actors ever and DeVito, a director who specializes in offbeat, macabre, comedies. It is well shot, well cast, and professionally made. There’s really only one issue with the whole piece.
It thinks it’s a lot funnier and more subversive than it actually is.
Death to Smoochy is the satirical equivalent of a Michael Bay Transformers film: it is a monument to excess, with no voice trying to rein the film in. Everyone is a cartoon character and not just that, but precisely the cartoon character you would expect the laziest hack characterization to make them. Hitmen woefully intone “I never saw Venice” as they fall to their deaths; Catharine Keener and Jon Stewart play the most weasley television executives you can imagine; Danny DeVito is playing Mopes’ agent and he’s as greedy as you’d expect. There’s no basis of reality here, and no one to ground the picture.
The stars Robin Williams and Edward Norton almost overcome this problem by sheer force of willpower: Williams is about a .8 on the Fisher King-scale of how over the top he’s willing to go and Edward Norton just dives into the sublime stupidity of his impossibly naive protagonist with lines like “We’re going to donate the proceeds to drug education for children because, let’s face it, little addicts turn to big addicts. We’ve gotta nip this in the bud.”
Unfortunately, there’s no way for the characters to ever surprise you once you understand how fully they’ve bought into their cultural cliche. Without surprise, and without emotional investment you’d better have Monty Python level wit in your joke construction to make this thing work– they don’t, everything is obvious.
Extras include commentary, interviews, a featurette, galleries, bloopers and outtakes, and extended/deleted scenes.
Comedies are always difficult to review because you either find them funny or you don’t. That said, I think I can distill the issue with this film into a single comparison: in Dumb and Dumber early on, the protagonists have a moment where Jim Carrey’s character begins to break down and declares “I’m sick of having no one. And I’m sick of being alone.” From that point forward, no matter how bizarre the idiocy or sight gags, you have the underlying reality of the emotion you got in that moment. These people have real dimensions.
No one in Death to Smoochy is a person, and the central thesis: that children’s entertainment is a shallow, corrupt, enterprise is a premise that is better suited to a Saturday Night Live sketch than a full feature.
Not recommended.
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