Joel Schumacher Triumphed with Debut The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Stumbled with his Abysmal Final Film, 2011's Trespass
When prominent filmmakers die something wonderful usually happens. Public interest and appreciation in the late filmmaker’s work soars and critical and public judgment soften instantly and dramatically.
Film critics write sincere appreciations that inspire readers to want to dip back into the dead filmmaker’s oeuvre with fresh eyes and a new sense of perspective while cinephiles binge the auteur’s work with an eye towards understanding what makes it special, unique and important. Bad reviews and toxic buzz are forgotten and/or forgiven while successes and triumphs are savored and celebrated anew within an innately more flattering and sympathetic context.
It has been particularly satisfying watching Joel Schumacher become the recipient of this treatment upon his recent death at eighty because he was treated so unfairly by the public, particularly comic book fans, during his lifetime.
Over the course of a long, eclectic and wildly impressive career, Schumacher segued nimbly from serving as the costume designer on Sleeper and The Last of Sheila to writing Car Wash and Sparkle, two of the most beloved Black films of the 1970s, to directing the iconic likes of St. Elmo’s Fire, Flatliners, The Lost Boys and Falling Down in his 1980s-1990s heyday.
To a small but screamingly loud group of detractors, however, Schumacher’s extraordinary credits as a costume designer, screenwriter and high-gloss director mean nothing because all he is, was and ever will be is the crass vulgarian who committed the unforgivable crime of putting nipples on the Bat-suit and and giving the world an endless assortment of cold-themed puns from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wordplay-warped Mister Freeze.
Even Schumacher’s widely mocked work as a director of hyper-kitschy Batman sequels like Batman Forever and Batman & Robin is being re-appraised in the glowing light of his recent passing.
With death, the tenor of headlines went from “Isn’t Batman & Robin the worst!?!” to “Is Batman & Robin the worst?” Fans began petitioning for the release of a darker, more adult 170-minute Director’s Cut of Batman Forever that would ostensibly give a better sense of Schumacher’s vision for the character and the film.
As a person, Schumacher was more interesting, colorful and original than the movies he made. Then again, the movies Schumacher made were often more interesting, colorful and entertaining than he was generally given credit for.
This begins with Schumacher’s clever 1981 directorial debut The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a gleefully satirical riff on Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man that began production with John Landis at the helm before he was replaced by Schumacher.
The screenplay by star Lily Tomlin’s real-life partner Jane Wagner smartly Trojan-horses its creator’s long-standing feminist preoccupation with the ever-changing roles of women in society and the way consumerism and capitalism de-values the lives and needs of women into a high-concept, special effects-heavy broad comedy about an ordinary woman in an extraordinary predicament.
Tomlin, truly one of the greatest performers of her time, is absolutely wonderful in the lead role of Pat Kramer, an everyday housewife living the suburban dream as the wife of cheerful adman Vance Kramer (Charles Grodin), a true believer in the eternal benevolence of capitalism, and the mother of a pair of rambunctious tots.
Tomlin is equally unforgettable in the bigger, juicier role of Judith Beasley, Pat’s friend and neighbor, a honey-dripping Southerner who epitomizes Tomlin’s genius for giving caricatures and archetypes specificity and layers.
Pat derives her identity from her role as a mother, wife and suburbanite but also from the wonder products that fill her shelves and home and give her life meaning and purpose. She’s living a dizzy commercial of empty materialist bliss until something peculiar starts happening.
The same chemicals that help Pat feed her family and keep her house clean cause her body to begin to shrink. Pat eventually shrinks so dramatically that she’s able to live in a dollhouse and wear the same clothes as her daughter’s Barbie knock-offs.
Pat becomes a household name in the process. The public is riveted by her ordeal and her casual heroism in the face of seemingly certain doom. She goes on The Mike Douglas Show, where the host serenades her with a syrupy rendition of “Little Things Mean A Lot.”
The incredible shrinking woman’s transformation makes her the target of a shadowy cabal of scientists and business leaders and all-around bad guys for whom her blood is the key to a seriously confused plot to take over the world by shrinking humanity.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman anticipates the direction its director’s career would take. It begins on a funky, satirical and decidedly personal note and grows progressively more commercial with each scene.
By its third act, Schumacher and Wagner’s science fiction take on the vanishing role of the traditional housewife in pop culture and society as a whole has somehow morphed into a gorilla-based adventure story that finds a minuscule Pat teaming up with a hyper-intelligent gorilla in a quest for survival after being imprisoned in a laboratory overseen by space-cadet Rob (Mark Blanfield).
Needless to say, that’s not the most cerebral or highbrow direction for the material to take but at least The Incredible Shrinking Woman has an ape for the ages in the form of Sydney, a sassy yet sensitive simian the great Rick Baker imbues with surprising sensitivity and depth.
As played by Academy Award-winning special effects legend Baker in a stunning gorilla costume and voiced by famously prolific voice actor Frank Welker, Sydney is more human and complicated than almost all of the film’s human characters.
Schumacher directs the proceedings like a cross between a campy live-action cartoon and a soft-focus commercial but Tomlin lends her everywoman protagonist real pathos. Pat is a real woman in an unreal world, belonging to a caste that has always been invisible to everyone except the corporations that want to sell them things, who finds herself dwindling into nothingness physically as well as metaphorically.
The always terrific, perfectly cast Grodin is wonderful as a man asked to choose between the woman he loves and his true-blue faith in American-style consumerism while Ned Beatty makes his coolly pragmatic boss a close cousin of the similarly Machiavellian schemer he unforgettably played in Network.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman begins more strongly than it concludes and is hamstrung by a nonsensical cop-out of a happy ending. But it’s nevertheless a funny, briskly paced and exceedingly promising debut all the same, a mostly satisfying attempt to reconcile its star and writers’ strong personalities and values as artists and creators with the demands of the market from a director who would go on to be pilloried unfairly and sometimes fairly for the excessively commercial nature of his films and his aesthetic as a whole.
Schumacher ended an often checkered but sometimes remarkable career as a director three decades later with a movie overflowing with cynical commercial calculation but nothing in the way of the satirical ambition or good intentions of The Incredible Shrinking Woman in the sordid 2011 thriller Trespass.
As a filmmaker, Schumacher was an unabashed entertainer. He wasn’t out to win awards or make great art. He wanted to put butts in seats but Trespass was only released for one week in ten theaters before hitting video on demand.
Schumacher’s home invasion thriller casts a soft, puffy and balding Nicolas Cage as Kyle Miller, a wheeler dealer of a diamond merchant with a closet full of skeletons, a life full of secrets and a marriage in trouble.
Then one day a quartet of crooks, real wild-eyed sleazebags, gain access to the lavish, massive mansion the desperate businessman shares with his bored, gorgeous Sarah (Nicole Kidman) and rebellious teenage daughter Avery (Liana Liberato) by pretending to be law enforcement.
The family has the terrible misfortune to be terrorized by a crew that consists of nothing but dangerous, unpredictable wild cards, a whole team of Joe Pesci types.
There’s Elias (Ben Mendelsohn), the seeming leader of the robbers, a verbose, malevolent bully with an impossibly complicated, convoluted relationship with younger brother/accomplice Jonah (mellifluously monikered b-list beefcake Cam Gigandet).
Elias works up a sweat trying to assert total control over the situation but as we eventually discover in a film entirely too full of unnecessary reversals and revelations, he’s really more of a hapless pawn in someone else’s game.
Jonah, meanwhile, is a mentally ill stud who may have a sordid sexual history with the bored and tantalized woman of the house or their relationship may be a figment of his all too vivid imagination and inability to delineate between sexual fantasy and reality.
Dash Mihok comes on strong as the physically imposing Ty to suggests that he is actually the dangerous one while Jordana Spiro wanders through the film in a stoned daze as a sometimes sex worker and mother whose need to compulsively hit the pipe makes her the most unpredictable member of a quartet of unusually unpredictable lowlifes.
Trespass takes place almost entirely within the massive confines of a family home so cavernous that it would seem to take up a full city block. The only other real location is a teen party the daughter sneaks out to attend, only to return home to an exceedingly complicated and tense situation after rejecting the aggressive advances of a young man with access to much in the way of money and drugs.
The modernist mansion could seemingly house NFL football games. The sheer size of the home can’t help but make the sweaty machinations less urgent and claustrophobic than they should be.
Limiting the action to one house lends the film a distinctly theatrical quality. Alternately, it suggests bottle episodes of television shows that similarly pare things down to a single setting before cranking up the heat and the volume and watching characters sweat, squirm and panic.
Nobody goes anywhere in Trespass but allegiances are continually shifting as new information and conflicts are introduced that change our perception of what is happening.
Guns are forever being shoved in people’s faces menacingly as two very different families who might not actually be so different after all battle for control of a situation threatening to spin madly out of control. The robbers keep tugging persistently at the fabric of the family’s home life until it unravels completely, leaving behind a confusing mess. But the brothers’ relationship is, if anything, even more complicated, toxic and ultimately deadly.
Trespass is never anything less than watchable. It’s an impossibly lurid, melodramatic potboiler from seasoned professionals who knew how to make the most of the dodgy material they were saddled with.
Trespass perversely casts one of cinema’s preeminent madmen in the straight man role of a yuppie husband and father under siege but if the screenplay primarily calls for Oscar winners Cage and Kidman to convey a combination of wild-eyed animal terror/desperation and wily calculation, Cage gets a few moments of pure madness when the sexual jealousy bubbling just under the surface explodes into plain view and he seethes to his wife of her possible indiscretions with one of their captors, “Your filthy lust invited them in!
Schumacher knew what audiences wanted. He considered it his job to give it to them. In a melodramatic, voyeuristic late-period Nicolas Cage vehicle overflowing with intimations of sexual violence and class warfare that’s moments of pure, volcanic insanity where the camp icon can really let loose and be as big and theatrical and preposterously larger than life as humanly possible.
Trespass certainly does not reflect Schumacher at his best. It feels like the kind of project he could get made at this point in his career — a modestly budgeted thriller starring two big stars not averse to slumming in sleazy genre movies — rather than a project he felt passionately about.
But even when he was not operating at the apex of his abilities, Schumacher knew how to tell a story in a way that was diverting and entertaining even if it did not amount to high art.
Campiness is ultimately a feature rather than a flaw in Schumacher’s canon. That’s a big part of what made his movies so entertaining if critically unfashionable.