Audient Audit: Roxanne

This is the first in my 2019 monthly series Audient Audit, in which I’m checking my own records to see if I’ve actually seen certain films I say I’ve seen.

Not ten minutes into my new monthly viewing series, I wondered what the hell I’m doing here.

Not only here here, but in this series in general. 

“Why the hell am I watching Roxanne?” I wondered. “Why does someone need to watch Roxanne in 2019? If I didn’t see it, who cares?”

To be fair, these thoughts were inspired by a particularly brutal first ten minutes of the movie. I don’t know what happened during production, but Roxanne’s first ten minutes involve a lot of really awful ADR – dialogue recorded later on, and in this case, not matching the action on screen – and a prolonged scene in which Steve Martin beats up Kevin Nealon and one other guy with a tennis racquet. I love that there was a phase of Kevin Nealon’s career when he was cast as a bully, but this scene is terrible. It doesn’t even sound like Nealon provided his own voice, though he was already on Saturday Night Live in 1987 when Roxanne was made.

However, at about the ten-minute mark, Roxanne becomes a normal movie. Charming, even. And I was back on track, for the most part.

No, this series will not be as consequential as watching a year’s worth of silent movies or pairs of films by great directors. But the anal retentive in me loves that at the end of it, 12 films that have made it onto my various viewing lists under dubious circumstances will be legitimate members of those lists.

I suppose I should tell you a little bit of my history with Roxanne, to let you know why I originally added it to my lists and why it might not have been deserving.

I was absolutely certain of having watched a bit of this movie at my friend’s house on cable within a year or two of its theatrical release, just before I would have started comprising my viewing lists. I remember particularly well the Romeo & Juliet scene (in a movie inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac), where Steve Martin, obscured by bushes, pretends he’s Rick Rossovich while pledging his love to Daryl Hannah on the balcony above. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible that I actually saw that part of the movie more than once.

I was pretty sure, though, that I had not seen the rest of the movie. Adding it to my lists was, I think, a recognition of the fact that I had “seen Roxanne” – in other words, it was kind of a wave of the hand saying “I get what Roxanne is and it’s fair to say that I’ve seen it.”

In trying to confirm how much of the movie I’ve seen, I’ve recognized a challenge that will run through this series. Given that we tend to forget the details of even movies we really like, it’ll be difficult to watch these movies and say for certain that yes, I saw them, or no, I didn’t. The details of a mediocre movie I saw only a week ago might already be gone, so what about a mediocre movie I saw 30 years ago?

That said, I didn’t even remember that Steve Martin plays a fire chief in this movie, which ends up being a fairly significant part of the action. There’s a lot of time devoted to his training of the bumbling volunteer firefighters in the ski town in which the movie takes place (one of whom is a young Damon Wayans!), and I feel like I should have retained at least some memory of that. In fact, I felt like I really only remember that scene on the balcony.

In the end, the thing that I thought would be a gimmick played just for laughs – Martin’s enormous schnozz – became a really useful prop. For all its gargantuan size, the prosthetic nose ends up looking pretty realistic, and it’s easy to imagine it only being a slight exaggeration on people who might exist in the real world with that kind of Pinocchio-like protuberance. The movie actually does a reasonably sensitive job imagining what it might be like for such a person, what defense mechanisms they might develop to make their way through the world. In short, the movie was far more intelligent than the opening scene prepared me for. That said, it still keeps certain whimsical elements, like the fact that Martin’s character has an unusual fitness for gymnastics that allows him to scale the sides of houses in a flash.

Speaking of whimsical bits, there was one random bit I loved that seems to bear no relationship to anything else in the movie. At one point Martin’s character is exiting a restaurant and stops to pay for a newspaper from one of those coin-operated dispensers where you open the door and (on the honor system) take only one newspaper. Martin does this, reads the front page, screams at the state of the world today, then pays another coin so he can open the door and put the paper back in again. Funny! It felt like something Charlie Chaplin might do.

Verdict: Definitely had not seen the whole movie before now, and am glad enough that I made the time to do so.

I’ve already borrowed The Witches of Eastwick from the library, so it looks like that will be my February movie.