MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Coupe de Ville’ Comedy Takes a Wrong Turn

“Coupe de Ville” (selected theaters), a mediocre road comedy with a few sparkling scenes, tackles that pivotal cultural question of the ‘60s: Exactly what were the lyrics of the Kingsmen’s mush-mouthed big-beat hit “Louie Louie”? Were they, as many suspect, a barrage of unrelieved scatology and filth? Were they a tender, if incoherent, love song? Or were they, as one “Coupe” character stoutly maintains, a sea chantey about a voyage to Jamaica?

Director Joe Roth, who obviously knows the importance of the “Louie Louie” lyric controversy for males of the War Baby generation, uses four different renditions here, including one by its composer, Richard Perry, and one by the Rice University Marching Band. And his central trio, the bickering Libner Brothers of 1963, all have different slants on the song.

These incorrigibly mismatched siblings, madly arguing all the way from Detroit to Miami in their dad’s 1954 powder-blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville, are divided emotionally and politically too, shading from conservatism to liberalism to anarchy. Tight-rumped Marvin, the Air Force sergeant (Daniel Stern); ambitious collegiate Buddy (Arye Gross), and stick-it-in-your-ear black-jacket rebel Bobby (Patrick Dempsey): three battlers on the road, yoked together.

The movie is a big yoke too. Based on an actual incident in writer Mike Binder’s family history involving his father and two uncles, it edges toward the pleasant trunk road of real life and then veers off onto the expressway of super-Hollywood cliches. Binder, like many post-’80s scriptwriters, filters his real-life episode through several generations of movies and sitcoms. This is a Jewish family whose only real ethnic specificity comes in show-biz terms: stylized dialogue reminiscent of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty “ or the Borscht Belt badinage of dad Alan Arkin, a failed inventor specializing in polyurethane stop signs.

The movie keeps crashing from one plot point to another, like a jeep at a destruction derby. Has Dad Libner warned his warring children not to mess up the Coupe? Naturally they’ll yell at each other, fall asleep, crash into a road sign, a tree, another car. Are they tight on cash? Naturally, they’ll lose it all.

The plot mechanisms here resemble Three Stooges shorts. Everything goes wrong--and, in between, everybody socks and screams at each other. But “Coupe de Ville” isn’t as astringent as the Stooges. It’s obviously headed toward a heart-warming climax, with lots of bear-hugs. By then, it’s trying to play out emotions it hasn’t really earned.

Director Joe Roth, who made a fine debut feature, “Streets of Gold” and is now chairman of 20th Century Fox, gets some spontaneity and energy into the movie. And he’s had one masterstroke of casting: Daniel Stern as the macho Marvin. Stern plays Marvin with some of the gooniness he often uses in his comic space-case roles, but it’s held back under rigid body armor: shaven head, sheet-metal eyes, hunched shoulders, the coiled, bunched back muscles of someone always ready to explode.

Marvin, who has a beautiful, menacing bat-swing, is Daddy’s enforcer. He’s there to whip troublemaker Bobby and nice liberal schmo Buddy into line. But he’s also there to be softened by them, humanized by them. Unfortunately, Gross and Dempsey aren’t convincing humanizers. Stern rises above his part; they get slogged down in the milkiness and punkiness of theirs. Dempsey gets to show off his athletic ability by making neat leaps into the Coupe de Ville, but his Bobby isn’t convincingly nasty. And Gross seems to be suffering from Richard Dreyfuss fixation, something that also occasionally affects other young actors, like Casey Siemaszko.

A movie like “Coupe de Ville” (rated PG-13 for brief sex and language) thrives on bits of cultural jetsam, but Binder and Roth blow nearly their whole wad with “Louie, Louie.” They’ve turned what was probably a fascinating real-life episode into one more mismatched buddies-on-the-road movie--with only two real innovations. Three buddies replace the usual two and they wind up at the dog track instead of the Las Vegas casinos.