CAR WASHPlot In A Nutshell
Michael Schultz’s 1976 ensemble comedy about a day in the life of a Los Angeles car wash.
Thoughts
I spent most of my Sunday at a garage—I bought a car from my sister, who lives in the States, which means that the car had to pass a federal and an out-of-province inspection. The whole process took about eight hours, during which time I read two books (for the record, they were Joan Didion’s fairly insufferable novel Play It As It Lays and Jeffrey Stepakoff’s memoir about working as a TV writer, Billion Dollar Kiss) and watched a movie on my iPod.
The movie I chose was the thematically appropriate Car Wash, and what a wonderful discovery it was! Even on my tiny iPod screen, the film was bursting with life, good humour, and a vivid sense of time and place.
Of all the films whose approach to storytelling have been influenced by Robert Altman’s multicharacter comedy-dramas—everything from Crash to Me and You and Everyone We Know—Car Wash might actually be the truest to the Altman spirit. The use of a song score from a single source (in this case, a bunch of terrific bubblegum-funk tunes sung by Rose Royce and produced by Norman Whitfield) to comment on the action recalls the use of Leonard Cohen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller; the “undesigned” set and costume design creates the same deliberately messy visual style that you see in Nashville; and even the closing credits, which are read out by the radio DJ we’ve been listening to throughout the movie, seem like a conscious homage to the closing credits of M*A*S*H.
The film also struck me as a lighthearted prototype for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The two films share the same day-in-the-life structure, the action in both films centres around a white-owned business in a predominantly black neighbourhood, and both films end with a tense showdown at the white-owned business involving a hotheaded young black man with a Muslim name. (In Car Wash, the violence gets averted—largely, one suspects, because the white owner isn’t anywhere near the premises at the time.) There’s even a scene in both movies where a kid nearly gets run over by a car.
Car Wash is, of course, much less overtly political than Do the Right Thing—at heart, it’s just a good-time summer comedy. But there’s a nice message of tolerance running underneath its surface: it’s great to see a Native American character in the mix, for instance, and it’s even nicer that the movie doesn’t make a big deal of his ethnicity. I cringed a little at the introduction of Antonio Fargas’ character, the limp-wristed Lindy, who swishes into the ladies’ room accompanied by a radio news story full of gay double entendres (a politician named “Harry Twig” staging a filibuster at a recent caucus)—but I was pleasantly surprised to see the character more than holding his own amidst the taunts of his co-workers. “I’m more man than you’ll ever be and more woman than you’ll ever get!” Lindy tells Abdullah (Bill Duke, who’s barely aged a day in 30 years), a glowering Nation of Islam convert who disapproves of Lindy’s effeminate ways. In an era when gay characters were the butt of all sorts of demeaning jokes, it’s refreshing to see a proud, happy, unembarrassed gay man who never apologizes for his sexuality and who gains respect on his own terms. (The script is by Joel Schumacher, the openly gay future director.)
Schumacher would, of course, go on to direct one terrible, schlocky, campy movie after another, so it’s surprising that this script stays so grounded in reality and true to the rhythms of an actual workday. There’s a subplot about a “war of pranks” between two characters, and I was so grateful that the pranks were so humble—nothing more elaborate than surreptitiously pouring half a bottle of hot sauce into the other guy’s lunch. If this film were made today, I’m sure the pranks would be much more elaborate, and build to a much more graphic grossout “payoff.”
The only scene that puzzled me—and perhaps I’ll be betraying my cultural ignorance here—is Richard Pryor’s scene as a flashy evangelist named Daddy Rich. Why do all the characters (except for Abdullah) love this guy, who’s an unabashed con artist? What am I not getting here? Is the mere fact that he’s a black man who’s “made it” enough to qualify him as a role model, even though his success is based on picking his followers’ pockets?
Whatever. This movie put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. It reminded me in a weird way of George Pelecanos’ terrific crime novel King Suckerman, which has a wonderful running joke—all the characters, good and bad, black and white, are looking forward to seeing the same movie at the end of the day, a new blaxploitation flick about a pimp called King Suckerman. Car Wash felt like the kind of movie that when it came out in 1976, like King Suckerman, everyone in the city could have gone to see it and enjoyed it together.
Once I got my car back, I couldn’t resist: I took it to a car wash. It was nowhere near as much fun as the movie made it look.
RATING: 4.5/5
* * *
TELL NO ONEPlot In A Nutshell
French thriller, based on a novel by Harlan Coben, about a man (François Cluzet) who thought his wife was killed years ago—until he begins getting video clips of her e-mailed to him.
Thoughts
I don’t have much to say about this one, a well-made, adult thriller with an intriguing setup but a fairly ho-hum resolution—except to say that a couple of things about it are really fantastic, and which seem inextricable from the film’s Frenchness, but which American thrillers could learn something from.
One is the way director Guillaume Canet doesn’t amplify the sounds of punches. There’s a scene where a woman gets brutally beaten—we don’t see her face, but the dull, smacking sounds of the fists hitting her flesh are truly gruesome. Ugh.
The other is the centrepiece action scene, in which François Cluzet (perhaps best known in North America as the young French jazz fan who befriends Dexter Gordon in Round Midnight) flees the police who have come to arrest him for a murder he didn’t commit. Cluzet is in good shape and he’s a speedy runner—but he’s no action hero, and Canet does a terrific job of creating a thrilling chase in which everything the hero does is completely plausible. Cluzet finally shakes the police by crossing a busy highway, gingerly making his way from lane to lane as the cars whizz past him at terrifying speeds. My hat goes off to Cluzet, Canet, editor Hervé de Luze, and what must have been a small squadron of stunt drivers—it’s one of the most convincing stunt scenes I’ve seen in a long time.
RATING: 3/5 (but well worth seeing just for the chase scene!)
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