No 'Bones' About This Hit

Funny Bones

directed by Peter Chelsom

starring Oliver Platt, Jerry Lewis and Jack Evans

at Sony Harvard Square

Filmmakers today are desperately stalking an elusive, yet deliciously lucrative genre--the cult classic. Peter Chelsom's new "Funny Bones" is one of the few to capture the capricious beast. The film, starring Oliver Platt (the dramaturg-thug of "Bullets Over Broadway"), brilliantly walks a tightrope between absurdist comedy and tragedy without ever missing a step.

Though the film plunges into the world of stage comedy, its first scene is played not to the roar of the crowd, but to the roar of the sea at Black-pool, England. In a contraband exchange gone awry, we meet the disturbed Jack Parker, played by the sparkling young Brit, Lee Evans. In an apparent outtake from a David Lynch feature, Parker is left alone in the sea with a wax egg and two severed feet. Unlike a Lynch flick, "Funny Bones" will let you in on the joke, if you wait for the punchline.

Tommy Fawkes (Platt) is a comic who has been struggling through gigs in small venues for years. He is about to make his first run on the comedians' Big Time--Vegas. He follows in the over-sized footsteps of his father, played by comic icon Jerry Lewis, who is certainly not typecast as an aging gag man.

Things do not bode well as Tommy prepares to take the stage. He tells his writer (William Hootkins) that he is, "willing to take risks, push the edge...because I only have two weeks to live." Just after his melodramatic girlfriend, Jenny (Ruta Lee), breaks up with him backstage, his father takes the stage and steals two of his best jokes. No wonder Tommy needs a vacation.

Dying in the bright lights of Vegas, Tommy limps back to his native Blackpool as Vic Torascos, seeking his comic and family roots. The town's main attraction is an archaic amusement park where horror and laughter mingle in a wry microcosm of human existence. At this point, Dickens lends a hand in the characterization, bringing in some of the most weirdly wacky creatures since Oliver. Blackpool's population seems to be comprised entirely of elderly eccentrics left over from the "Harold and Maude" auditions.

Lords of the rosy-cheeked loonies are the Parker Brothers: Bruno (Freddie Davies) and Thomas (George Carl), father and uncle respectively to the deranged comic genius Jack, who seems to have recovered nicely from his surreal trip to the seashore. These three alone could carry the film with their physical comedy routines, evoking the genius of Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Evans' facial manipulations make Jim Carey look like a looselipped amateur.

In his quest for the ultimate stage act, Tommy encounters singing dogs, transvestite ballerinas and most disturbingly, his past. A series of eerie black and white flashback scenes sends him straight into the rubber arms of Jack and the Parker brothers. When past and present ultimately face off, Chelsom's film has the coherence of the Beatles' "Revolution 9," but is far more comprehensive and satisfying.

Despite its apparent fragmentation, Chelsom's directing soaks the film in an amibiance of insanity and tragicomedy, with the assistance of assorted morgues, haunted houses, circus tents and chorus girls. His unconventional and unsettling angles clutch the viewer in a graphic documentary style. A soundtrack of Bayou blues and French sailor songs as forgotten as the stage acts they accompany complements the screen action, and assures "Funny Bones" a place in the cult film firmament.

The film's multiple-location, multiple-plot, multiple-time evokes Katherine Hepburn in the classic "Two for the Road," but is all the rage with contemporary young directors. Chelsom's cinematography works through "Funny Bones" with far more subtlety than current darling Quentin Tarintino has ever mustered, and with far less pretension.

"Funny Bones" concentrates on solid, yet innovative, aesthetics, blending cinematic traditions of horror, black comedy, slapstick and absurdity provocatively and artlessly. It is this effortless, quirky creativity that the films currently touted as the next "cult classic" seek. Like a good comedy routine, it's born, not made; "Funny Bones" is a natural.