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Omigod, it's, like, Mr. Bean >>Bean loses it in L.A. by MIREILLE SILCOTT
And aficionados can tell you about every Mr. Bean sketch in detail: Bean tries to set up his telly; Bean at the doctor's; Bean eats steak tartare; Bean with a Christmas turkey on his head. Bean--aka Rowan Atkinson--somehow making humour only a mere flush above the toilet, violently witty. A real clever-trousers. So it's positively jarring to see Atkinson in Bean, "the Ultimate Disaster Movie," in his teeny knit tie and Marks & Sparks tweed jacket in L.A., surrounded by flash Americans who keep bowls of M&Ms in their faux-deco living rooms. The film's set-up serves a dual purpose: American audiences will find lots to laugh at in Bean, where Atkinson is sent on a mission from London's National Gallery--where he "sits in a corner and looks at pictures"--to L.A.'s Grierson Gallery to deliver the 19th-century American painting "Whistler's Mother" for a hypey "homecoming." The rest of the planet will laugh at the Americans and their fuchsia cappuccino machines, coping with a very troublesome visitor. But the cultural ravine between Atkinson and his hosts, the neurotic David Langley (Peter MacNichol, a sitcom dad if ever there was one) and family (which includes son Kevin, played by the vomit-enducing TV child Andrew Lawrence), is hardly enough to sustain the gag. The clichés (the Beverly Hills driving scene; the drown-your-sorrows-at-a-Budweiser-bar scene) are just too simple. Add this to the fact that you know Atkinson will become an accidental Whistler iconoclast from the moment he mistakenly sprays puke onto a first-class passenger on the L.A.-bound plane, and the film's big joke dissolves quite rapidly. But Atkinson--and Atkinson alone--salvages the movie, (directed by Mel Smith--The Tall Guy, Radioland Murders). I hate to use the Chaplin example, but Atkinson does possess a similar physical genius. The almost-mute Bean character, created by Black Adder writer Richard Curtis and Atkinson in the 1980s, has a temper strung somewhere between bad kid, weak-kneed ninny and MacGyver. And his extravagant trickery in body and facial expressions makes the mix truly hysterical. But Bean confirms that Atkinson's ingenuity shines on TV's simpler format. And why bother knitting a tiresome third dimension into it by giving the usual walk-from-disaster-whistling Mr. Bean a conscience and the film a flossy, happy ending? True, the character's small television universe of tea-pot troubles and things stuck up his nose wouldn't have been enough to stretch into a feature on its own. But filling the gap with stuff that smell like Home Improvement is perhaps not the best solution for making fabulous television into not-so-great cinema Opens Friday, Oct. 17. See film listings for showtimes
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There are some slim comforts that an anglophile living in Montreal can readily find: the odd egg-and-watercress sandwich, a festive bagpiper at Ogilvy's, the knowledge that some whiteys still lawn bowl in Westmount and the terribly British Mr. Bean on PBS television every Saturday night.