AUDIENCES SEEKING gut-busting laughter went to the wrong film this weekend. American Wedding, the joyless, otiose “threequel” to American Pie, opened at No 1 at the US box office, with an estimated $35 million, while Gigli, the hilariously misconceived teaming of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, went down in flames with $4 million and the worst reviews for a tabloid-hot celebrity couple since Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away.
Leaving aside the feeble box office — which is hard to do given the couple’s $25 million payday for the film — Gigli is a wrong turn of such magnitude that it is already being guided to an exalted place in moviedom’s hall of shame, right next to Ishtar, Shanghai Surprise, The Postman, Battlefield Earth and the complete works of Pia Zadora.
The confusing title is the name of Affleck’s character. To those who call him “jiggly”, he explains that it is pronounced jee-ly, “as in really”. Critics and viewers seem content to pronounce it “jiggly”, even though jee-ly dovetails nicely with the air of pretension that accompanies the best megaflops. On that score Gigli doesn’t disappoint. It is a broad Mafia kidnap romp that drifts into character-driven romantic comedy, ie, the plot dries up, and then more strangely tries to be a candid exploration of contemporary sexuality.
The mix of cartoonish mobster comedy and sensuality tone poem is a pioneering hybrid. Emulators are unlikely. The set-up involves two low-level Mob enforcers ordered to kidnap and babysit the brain-damaged teenage son of a federal prosecutor. The enforcers bicker and bond and finally return the lovable simpleton unharmed and flee their bosses.
It is more situation than plot. There is no urgency. No one comes looking for the son, or recognises him. He does not try to escape. When the head mobster arrives for the final showdown (Al Pacino in shouting mode), he is dealt with in one scene. In between is an aeon of time spent marooned in Gigli’s flat with the two Mob enforcers. For connoisseurs of bad cinema, this is where the riches are.
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Affleck plays one of the Mob enforcers, a goofy, dumb piece of muscle with an Italiano-Jersey tough guy accent. Lopez plays the other enforcer, a gorgeous lethal semi-Budd- hist, yoga-loving, martial arts expert and designer lesbian. (Yes, rigli.) It is a far-fetched pairing that might have worked if it had been handled like any broad comedy of opposites that attract. But the writer-director, Martin Brest, seems determined to make the slowest studio movie since Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris.
It is a heartbreaker. This is the man who directed Beverly Hills Cop and, more pertinently, Midnight Run, a gem among modern road movies. But something happened that I can’t explain. The deadpan snap and drollery of Midnight Run vanished under the dead dust of Brest’s subsequent dramas: the glutinous Scent of a Woman and soporific Meet Joe Black. Gigli at least promised a way back to Brest’s early liveliness. But when the theme of sexual maturation intrudes Brest treats it with all the didactic reverence of an intimacy workshop.
Gigli is one of his early comedies directed like one of his later dramas. It is languid and meandering as if probing some knotty area of human complexity. This might be digestible if the film knew how to observe Lopez’s sexual frankness with wit and distance. But it is abjectly in thrall to her official wonderfulness.
She is sensual, smart, good-hearted, enlightened, well-read and able to blind a man with just one finger — and we are not allowed to laugh. Lopez, who was so alluring and even half-convincing as an FBI agent in Out of Sight, has collapsed into the smiling saintly perfection that made Julia Roberts so unbearable in the mid-Nineties. Roberts became almost virginal in her untouchable loveliness. Lopez has swung the other way, becoming a midriff-bearing sexual angel healing all sexes.
The arrival of her unstable lesbian lover actually gives the film its best scene, a caustic three-way stand-off that kicks the simpering central courtship into gear. But the scene also shows both how wrongheaded and wet this film is. First, the irate lesbian cuts her wrists, which is far too real for this cuddly mobster universe. (If she’d tried using a plastic knife unwittingly it might have worked better.) Secondly, in the hospital scene that follows, Lopez appears in a skimpy little number with jewellery, which means that before the mercy dash to the hospital she found the time to change.
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For sheer stupidity nothing tops the dialogue. Lopez has two set-piece speeches that will become standard audition monologues for drag performers fed up with doing Faye Dunaway’s tirades from Mommie Dearest. In the first, J-Lo silences a gang of thugs by detailing her prowess in the fighting disciplines of the Far East. In the second, she performs yoga in minuscule shorts while delivering a treatise on the superiority of the female sexual organ — “What I am proud to call my pussy” — over its male counterpart. We humans all kiss on the mouth, one learns, because it is “the twin sister of the vagina” while the penis “is a bizarre sea slug, or a really long toe”.
Affleck is not spared. After the couple finally make love, he sighs: “God bless you, penis.” This could be great camp. Instead, it is bewilderingly, creakily wrong. The most toe-curling zinger has already swept into national pop culture infamy: the moment when Lopez, legs splayed on the bed, tells Affleck: “It’s turkey time.” He looks back baffled and she explains: “Gobble, gobble.” The last two words are spectacularly redundant.