Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Anjelica Huston
Christina Ricci
Raul Julia
Christopher Lloyd
Directed By:
Barry Sonnenfeld
Viewing THE ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES after all these years in 2011 struck a chord with me. It reminded me how much I loved America's legendary weirdo family. I've been meaning to review the original effort of the nineties reboot for months now, but it's not until I caught it as a special Christmas screening on a local channel that I had the opportunity to do so. The Addams family weren't created in 1991, but the movie is where I discovered the Charles Addams creations. THE ADDAMS FAMILY has carved its place in time using many degrees of humor, from the obvious slapstick fun to the subtle and caustic satire of the concept of "normal". The movie tagline "Weird is relative" embodies the spirit of the Addams family better than anything I ever came up with. Yes, they are weird but if the only thing that comes up to you when you watch the movies is how weird they are well, you're probably a little weird too.
Gomez Addams (Julia) is the patriarch of the family and he does a very good job at it, except that he gets a little emotional sometimes, whenever well...family is involved. Because that's who the Addams are. A tightly bound unit. Him and his brother Fester (Lloyd) has a falling out twenty-five years ago and Fester completely disappeared from the face of the earth then. Tully (Dan Hedaya), the family lawyer owes money to a local loan shark (Elizabeth Wilson) and established a plan using her son Gordon (Lloyd) who eerily looks like Fester, so he can pose as him and find the secret vault where they keep all the family riches. But since Gomez is such a slob for family, he starts recalling all those good memories he had with Fester and Gordon obviously can't remember shit. Gomez' more rational wife Morticia (Anjelica Huston) then steps in to investigate the case, to make sure nobody crosses her family.
What I like the most about the Addams family is that once you remove the graveyard setting, they are the definition of the American dream. Gomez and Morticia are deeply in love with each other. They are tending to their kids Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) and Wednesday (Christina Ricci) who are having the most normal brother-sister competitive relationship there is, if you put aside the fact that they're constantly trying to kill each other. They are rich and people are envious of them. Really, take the plot from THE ADDAMS FAMILY and put your random rich American family instead of them and you have a classic movie plot. Think Francis Scott Fitzgerald, crossed with a daytime soap opera, of course in a graveyard setting. With humor. A lot of slapstick humor. Isn't it the best idea anybody ever had? To me at least, it is.
I'm not sure how faithful the Barry Sonnenfeld film was to the original Charles Addams comics, but I guess the point of the Addams is to say that you don't need to be normal to be happy. In fact, if you have something that defines you, you're more likely to be happy than if you just try to blend in the crowd. Because if that's what you're looking to do, you will just end up being jealous of those people who are defined by something. It's a very rational message for a slapstick humor movie and a parody family. Somehow, I'm not sure it could have been told better any other way. That's where the warm feeling comes from, when I root for the Addams family in the movie or the television series. They don't say they don't care about what people think of them, because they really don't. They live the way they like.
SCORE: 88%
SCORE: 88%