MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Checking Out’ Crumbles Amid Missed Gags

Jeff Daniels is such a resolutely healthy-looking actor that the idea of a comedy in which he becomes convinced he is going to die seems to have a built-in humorous kick. But “Checking Out” (citywide), with Daniels as an airline executive on a death trip, isn’t funny at all.

It’s a strange movie, an attempt to do a gentle fairy-tale satire on the corruption of American values, and it has a cleverly stylized candy-floss look. Every once in a while, there is something surprising or nice: the Las Vegas heaven scene or the end-credit song by the Traveling Wilburys. (George Harrison is the movie’s co-executive producer.) Ninety-three-year-old Ian Wolfe--whom I’ll always remember fondly for the wedding scene in “They Live By Night”--does a wonderful bit as a mortuary owner who keeps telling frantic Daniels how great business is.

Otherwise, this movie tends to crumble like a day-old coffee shop doughnut.

In the film, Ray Macklin (Daniels) becomes terrified of impending death when his boss, Pat (Allan Havey), expires from a heart attack at an outdoor tiki barbecue. Macklin goes haywire; he besieges his doctor, demands checkups, refuses to believe the results, and then runs out and buys home heart monitors, pulse-taking wrist clips and hydraulic therapeutic shower extensions. He interprets everything that happens as a dark omen and, at one point, he dives out of his bedroom window in his boxer shorts and, in daylight, stands on his car roof and screams incoherently to the entire neighborhood.

There isn’t a clue as to why Macklin has become such a fruitcake. Insanity didn’t sneak up on him; it possessed him all of a sudden, like Freddy Kreuger. Instead, there is a symbolic reason for the crackup. This overly complacent guy has become gorged on a the yuppie life style of frantic acquisition and inner terror until he’s choking.

The major running gag of the film is a bad ethnic joke--”Why don’t Italians like barbecues?”--which the boss was blaring out crassly as he suffered the attack. He died before getting to the punch line. This joke obsesses Macklin. It’s like the movie’s lost chord, but its absence is symbolic. The script is full of lost gags and missing punch lines, and, ironically, it’s been directed in the dry, understated, style of a British comedy or a Robert Altman film, as if the literary material were something special.

“Checking Out’s” director, David Leland, is capable of something special. He co-wrote “Mona Lisa” with Neil Jordan and wrote and directed “Wish You Were Here.” In those films, Leland showed an affinity for outsiders and a bracing mixture of wit, satire and romanticism. But here he is working with a script by Joe Eszterhas of “F.I.S.T.,” “Flashdance” and “Betrayed,” the man who turns class drama into MTV, sexual politics into gothic soap opera and iconoclastic ideas into slam-bang movie trailers.

Eszterhas is onto something potentially rich--he always is--but as usual, he has cranked out, or collaborated on, a script without a single character you can believe, full of attitudes and archetypes and banging, clanging plot twists. Particularly undeveloped here is Macklin’s wife, Jenny (Melanie Mayron), a suburban porcelain scold who starts kvetching and demanding sex while Macklin struggles with the hydraulic pump. Later on, Macklin gets raped by his secretary in his car. Is hypochondria supposed to be a wild turn-on?

The satiric vision of America that bubbles under “Checking Out” (MPAA rated R for sex, nudity and language) surfaces in only one extended scene: a nightmare of a horrible Las Vegas-TV heaven with sterile bungalows and people with Diane Arbus faces, where, instead of God, the boss is Howard Hughes. This is such a great idea it almost redeems the movie. But it’s gone before we can savor it: one more missing punch line, one more lost joke.