MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Mr. Wilt’: A Real Misadventure

Few novels seem more suited for the screen than Britisher Tom Sharpe’s. Few have been more botched in translation than the new movie made from Sharpe’s 1976 “Wilt.”

Like water into wine or, more properly, stale beer, Sharpe’s classic of paranoid comedy has been switched hesto-presto, into a thick-headed, frenetic farce called “The Misadventures of Mr. Wilt” (at the Westside Pavilion).

Stories as achingly funny as Sharpe’s are rare enough. Why filch them and throw them away? Why “improve” them to the point of expiration: “revising” the hilarious dialogue, fracturing the ingenious structure, throwing out wonderful subsidiary characters and otherwise mucking about like a crazed civics renovator?

There are enough shards of Sharpe left here--plot twists, digs at academia, the police and the sexual revolution--to make “Mr. Wilt,” comparatively, seem special. But like its hapless hero, Henry Wilt (Griff Rhys Jones)--a beleaguered tech college teacher suspected of the murder of his wife after a misadventure with an inflatable sex-doll--the film seems trapped in a ludicrous fate. Steadily, moment by moment, it sinks into a quagmire of mediocrity.

As nothing seems to save Wilt, nothing can rescue this movie. Banality nips at its heels, just as Police Inspector Flint (Mel Smith) dogs Wilt. And--just as Wilt’s wife and presumed murder victim, Eva (Alison Steadman), is all the while off on a boat, carousing with a bisexual nymphomaniac and her impotent husband (Diana Quick and Jeremy Clyde)--much of the story’s shrewd sense and sublime unreason has been seduced and abandoned.

Instead of letting us sink, with Wilt, inexorably into fate, a pointless flashback structure makes us wonder if he’s guilty. Instead of the inspired foolery of the book’s climax--naked Eva tumbling into the hands of a drunken, horribly bewildered old churchman--the writers turn the vicar (David Ryall) into the Swofford Strangler, a deranged sex murderer. Instead of introducing Wilt and his nemesis Flint logically, during the investigation, a Flint drug bust is interrupted by having Wilt drop a shopping cart on his head.

And instead of keeping the novel’s intense scenes of sexual menace, its erotic scrabble game and sadomasochistic gags--the scenes you’d think they would have kept intact--lame, expository sitcom equivalents have been substituted. All these new scenes get from director Michael Tuchner, no master of comedy, the staging they deserve: frenzied and inane.

Sharpe’s books, unbuttoned, bawdy satires on modern politics and academic life, have that delightfully skewed sense of rigid hierarchies going madly out of control that typifies the best British comedy: P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Cook & Moore, Monty Python. The movie, which stars British TV comedians Jones and Smith (of “Alias Smith and Jones” and, more ominously, of 1985’s “Morons from Outer Space”) plays like a road-show “Benny Hill”: a gray, coarse screaming sex farce. As Wilt, Jones has the nasty cool of a TV talk-show host; he never wilts under Flint’s flinty inquisition. As Flint, Smith has one great moment--when he breaks down and arrests himself--in a slumgullion of slow burns and hysteria.

Brian Eastman, the producer of “The Misadventures of Mr. Wilt” (Times-rated Mature for sex and language), may have adapted Sharpe successfully before, for British TV, but here he and his team act as if the book’s humor were an impediment, its ingenuity a curse. They’ve dulled Sharpe, made of this movie exactly what the usual gang of Sharpe characters make out of life: a mess, spinning steadily out of control.