Matinee

#1 in my ranking of Joe Dante’s filmography.

Not so much the movie that is the most prototypically Joe Dante film (that would probably be Gremlins 2) but the one that most fully defines who he is and what he wanted to do as a filmmaker, Matinee is Joe Dante’s best film, the most fully complete and satisfying film that demonstrates the extent of his ability to collaborate well when the right people are around him. It’s a portrait of innocence in the face of a dangerous world, of the value of trashy B-movies, and a celebration of showmanship. It’s a wonderful portrait of another time and a salute to the kinds of showmen that inspired Dante.

Gene (Simon Fenton) is a boy new to the area of Key West Florida in 1962. A product of a military family that moves around all the time, he has no friends outside of his family and the movies that he loves to go to all the time. Some of his favorites are the work of Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), a scifi B-movie filmmaker who specializes in new tricks to get audiences into the theater like buzzing their seats or having actors run through the theater. His newest film is Mant, about a man who combines with an ant through radiation, and he’s coming to that very theater that week to preview it.

There are a bevy of little subplots about the lives of the people in Key West. There’s Stan (Omri Katz) who falls for his classmate Sherry (Kellie Martin) who has just broken up with the older man and greaser Harvey (James Villemaire) who writes terribly poetry and has a propensity for violence. There’s also Gene falling for the little rebel rouser Sandra (Lisa Jakub) who objects to the nuclear explosion drills of hiding in the halls with hands over necks as pointless in the shadow of nuclear warfare (outside of immediate blast areas, it would have accomplished some safety). All of this happens, of course, to the background of the Cuban Missile Crisis taking place within ninety miles, an operation that Gene’s father, as a member of the Navy, is taking part.

A little more than the first half of the film is setting up all of this while Woolsey rolls into town, penniless and with his leading lady Ruth (Cathy Moriarty) along for the ride, though she’s certain that this will be the last considering their desperate state and her disillusionment with the bottom rung of movie industry stardom. He sets up the theater owned by Howard (Robert Picardo), tries to get interest raised by using a pair of low-level actors (Dick Miller and John Sayles) to gin up controversy (which doesn’t work because of the whole Cuban Missile Crisis thing), and Gene introducing himself to Woolsey, eager to learn what he can of the movie business from one of his idols. This first half works remarkably well considering the variety of stories, the number of them, and that they all end up rather interesting in their own small ways in their own limited times.

What really makes them worthwhile is that they all come together in the final half both in terms of physical space and in terms of the film’s themes. It’s been obvious that Dante has been an entertainer first and foremost, eschewing any real sense of larger theme in his films in pursuit of just good times at the movies (the chaos of Gremlins 2 is kind of the perfect encapsulation of his work), but this is the first time where that desire to entertain has actually become the thematic point of a film. In the face of even potential Armageddon, the little people can find solace in some crummy B-movie full of bad acting, silly concepts, and dodgy effects (the costume of the Mant is really high quality, though). It’s not just the threat of nuclear war, though, people connect through the movies, settling fights by becoming engrossed in the projection of light and sound before them.

Joe Dante was and continues to be a big child, and it’s a childish view of the world. However, he packages it with the script by Charles S. Haas with such energy and love of the subject that it becomes infectious. By the time Woolsey plays his biggest trick at the end, the blend of reality and fantasy from the screen has completed only for a moment, long enough to thrill the people in the theater into feeling completely alive before escaping out into the real world to appreciate it just a little bit more. It was a little thrill, a way to distract and feel alive even with the world potentially about to end, and it was all because of Woolsey and his bag of tricks.

I find this movie completely infectious. It has this combination of character-based storytelling that it takes its time to establish in the first half, and then it has Dante’s trademarked chaos by the end. Why this one works better than the chaos of something like Gremlins or Gremlins 2 is that the actual storytelling is so much more solid. Subplots don’t disappear. The embrace of the ensemble approach makes the need for a goal for the main character less important, allowing the small subplots to work as support to the theme without needing the larger drive to support the whole film on their own. It’s something of a combination with more arthouse sensibilities regarding character-based storytelling and Dante’s manic technique.

I’m completely sold. This is my favorite Joe Dante film.

Rating: 4/4