I suspect I'm among the only people who has seen See No Evil, Hear No Evil. A shame.
Back in the glorious 1980's, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor teamed up to make one buddy comedy after another. Most of them, including this one, were terribly written. The studios saw no need to put a lot of resources into writing and direction: they knew from Silver Streak that they had a winning combination of chemistry, timing, and racial harmony between the two comic geniuses. So, it seems as though they threw them into any wacky situation they could find, and slapped a title on it.
In this case, Wilder and Pryor took the emphasis off race and put it on disability: namely, deafness and blindness. You can imagine all the wacky antics that go with this. The plot of the movie fails to pull the antics together, nor to fill a single gaping hole in the story (of which there are many). But it does give us a young Kevin Spacey with a bad British accent, and the required beautiful female villain.
The two characters spend a lot of time shouting, "I'm deaf!" and "I'm blind!" Sometimes they interject a curse or two. And, while Pryor blind man is startlingly incompetent at mobility of any kind, Wilder's deaf man can read lips better than I can hear them. These are flaws, to be sure, but at the heart of each character there is... well, a heart. Each man has a passion, a sense of shame (or lack thereof), and a weakness. They are, in fact, fully developed characters, who happen to be missing one of the five senses.
In fact, while the story is about as thin as Kate Moss during Lent, the characters are three-dimensional. How nice. I'm not going to make one of those "better in the old days" arguments, mainly because there were plenty of one-dimensional characters in early film, but the 80's did present us with a lot of earnest, open characters. The current trend goes against that: irony does not lend itself to genuine feeling.
I still wouldn't give this movie more than a few stars, but it does hold a special place in my heart. It's one of those movies I saw over and over again when I was a kid, all within the first few years that my condition had popped up and was getting worse. I knew how unrealistic it was, even then, but it didn't matter. Watching it now -- I just saw it for the first time in more than ten years -- it still makes me laugh.
So I guess what I really need is a not-not-deaf buddy who can help me solve crimes.
2 comments:
I'm afraid I have to admit that I also saw it, and think it was kind of cute. Besides the theme of "I'm not going to admit my disability" (more on the Wilder character side than the Pryor character), there was also the fact that these doofy guys managed to accomplish something.
Don't be afraid! State it with pride: you liked the badly written movie too. It's no sign of shame.
Yes, totally agree: they do get something done. They make plans, and while those plans don't work out exactly as they intended, they accomplish their goals. I feel like that's a universal experience, especially if you have some kind of a handicap: you keep making adjustments until you get where you need to go.
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