MOVIE REVIEW : Brooks Takes Risks in an Uneven ‘Life Stinks’

“Life stinks,” moans Mel Brooks in his new movie of the same title (citywide). And, when he wails it, drugged out on Thorazine, strapped down in an overcrowded hospital corridor, it almost becomes a crackbrained cry from the heart.

A decade ago, in “History of the World, Part I,” Brooks strutted around as mustachioed sybarite Louis XVI, cooing “It’s good to be the king!”--a phrase that might almost sum up the ‘80s. “Life Stinks” is about the king’s comeuppance and, in it, Brooks’ Goddard Bolt--who has Louis’ prissy little mustache--is plunged into his special hell: Skid Row squalor.

It’s a slapstick fable about a billionaire developer who bets he can survive without money or resources for a month among the L.A. homeless: a movie about the myth of the superior virtues of wealth, the thin edge between euphoria and despair, haves and have-nots. And, though Brooks candy-wraps the theme in his usual frenzied, yuck-it-up style--turning it into a comic romantic fantasy about the exiled king who rouses the peasantry and strikes back against the usurpers--it’s obviously a movie that, successful or not, means something to him.

It’s a risky movie, and an uneven one. But the impulses behind it are darker and stronger than in most of his previous comedies. Good or bad--and “Life Stinks” definitely has a weak, undeveloped side--I liked it.

Ever since 1973’s “Blazing Saddles,” Brooks, as writer-director, has immersed himself in movie parodies. Those parodies began to make him seem like a wasted comic resource, deliberately avoiding the self-questioning or social critiques Woody Allen slowly developed. “Life Stinks” is Brooks’ first non-parody since 1970’s “The Twelve Chairs” and, in mood and spirit, it’s closer to “The Producers” than anything he’s done since.

“Life Stinks” is about people who will never make their way back--or forward--and about the people who keep them down: notably a self-made developer with a toady’s falsely fawning manner named Vance Crasswell (Jeffrey Tambor), three corrupt attorneys who keep answering criticisms of their swinish behavior with an indignant “We’re lawyers !” and Goddard Bolt himself, who initially shrugs off all moral qualms about decimating rain forests or displacing the elderly with a callous “So?”

It’s a conceit of the film that Bolt’s collision with the actual poor--feisty bag lady Molly (an improbably beautiful Lesley Ann Warren), scrofulous Sailor (old Brooks crony Howie Morris), alcoholic Fumes (Teddy Wilson) and legless Willy (Billy Barty)--will humanize him. That’s probably the weakest part of the story’s construction.

Brooks the director gets a vision that almost suggests Abbott and Costello wandering into Lionel Rogosin’s “On the Bowery.” But Brooks the writer and his collaborators (Rudy DeLuca and Steve Haberman) don’t structure Bolt’s fall or “education” very carefully. Unlike similar comedy-fables (“Trading Places”), they don’t really get a sense of progressive degradation and demoralization--perhaps because they’re more interested in the gags and comic highs: like Bolt’s wild rows with DeLuca’s “J. Paul Getty” over who lost the most money.

Brooks doesn’t condescend to the poor here, though he may be accused of it, just as may be accused of mean-spiritedness toward the rich. But if you can’t be mean-spirited about corrupt lawyers, brutal speculators and greed-crazed, rotten-hearted entrepreneurs, who can you be mean-spirited about?

The essence of Brooks’ comedy, ever since his short “The Critic,” has been his maniacal mimicry and the way he collides various kinds of pomp, show or pretense with an earthy, deflating, absurdly pragmatic Jewish tilt or spritz .

In “Life Stinks” (rated PG-13 for language), he digs part of the way down, then pulls back, burying the Angst he uncovers. A pity--though it’s hard to blame him for playing safe. Life may, indeed, stink. But it’s good to be the king.

‘Life Stinks’

Mel Brooks: Goddard Bolt

Lesley Ann Warren: Molly

Jeffrey Tambor: Vance Crasswell

Howard Morris: Sailor

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presentation of a Brooksfilms production. Director-producer Mel Brooks. Executive producer Ezra Swerdlow. Screenplay Brooks, Rudy DeLuca, Steve Haberman. Cinematographer Steven Poster. Editor David Rawlins. Costumes Mary Malin. Music John Morris. Production design Peter Larkin. Art director Josan Russo. Set designer Carroll Johnston. Set decorator Marvin March. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (language).