Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

As promised, a now-not-under-the-weather Josh Downer finally brought us the 1995 SNL-Alum comedy Tommy Boy, directed by Peter Segal. It’s not a terribly complicated movie, but it does bring the laughs, and sometimes that’s enough.

I think Tommy Boy and I went to the same high school

Tommy Boy, played by the late great Chris Farley, is technically Thomas Callahan III (usually referred to as “junior”, which seems wrong to me, even if grandpa is dead).

Clearly Tommy is not in charge of keeping the poster board neat

As the movie opens, this deadbeat son of an automotive parts manufacturing tycoon (Brian Dennehy’s “Big Tom”) has finally finished college (after 7 years) and is taking a plum position in management of the family company, to the dismay of Big Tom’s assistant Richard (David Spade), who finds him unqualified, unmotivated, unkempt…all the uns.

Can I do all my scenes in this film by blue screen?  Thanks.

At the same time, the widower Big Tom is planning a marriage to Beverly (Bo Derek) which means that Tommy is about to get a new stepbrother in Rob Lowe.  I’m kind of convinced that their initial interactions played an inspiration in the later SNL-Alum (OK, Will Ferrell, anyway) comedy Step Brothers.  But let’s just say that Rob Lowe doesn’t seem to like Tommy very much.

Also inspired: Sonic the Hedgehog

Still, for some reason Lowe reluctantly spends time with Tommy, including a muddy cow-tipping scene that results in a gas station hose-off that was totally the inspiration for a scene in the kinda SNL-Alum (OK, Will Ferrell, anyway) comedy Zoolander.  I mean, what I’m saying is that Will Ferrell obviously watched this movie.

Let’s see…I could date you…or Geordi LaForge. (Runs back to TNG screenwriters)

Still, there has to be a crisis in a film, and despite reading the synopsis for the film which explicitly states as such, I was a bit surprised when out of the blue Tommy’s father dies of a heart attack at his own wedding reception.  Oh yeah, it did say “…after the death of his father…” in the synopsis.  Duh.  Big Tom’s death spurs a crisis in the company, as the bank, unconfident in Tommy’s new leadership of the company, declines to issue them a loan to float their new brake pads division and demands repayment of the currently outstanding loans.  Taking his first steps toward responsibility (and trying to save the jobs of many of the people in the small town where the manufacturing plant is located, including Tommy’s new romantic interest Michelle, the shipping computer lady) Tommy cashes in his inherited half of the shares and embarks on a cross-country sales pitch trip with a super-reluctant Richard to keep the company afloat.

Angels and Mail Rats

Meanwhile, Beverly, who has inherited the other half of Big Tom’s shares has other plans.  We learn quickly that she and her HUSBAND Rob Lowe (oh no!) were scamming Big Tom all along, and they are taking the necessary steps to undermine the company so that it can be sold to another auto parts king (Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Zalinsky) who really just wants to buy the Callahan name so he can put it on his products.

I think Tommy Boy and I went to the same elementary school, too

Of course, at first these scammers don’t need to do much, as Tommy’s sales pitch is…pretty not good.

I told you Antetokounmpo wouldn’t fit in the hard top!

Richard hates Tommy, they’re making no sales at all (as none of Big Tom’s old clients have any faith in Tommy’s ability to continue to deliver good auto parts), and Richard’s car is being progressively more and more destroyed by incidents (of Tommy’s doing), including the old “Whoops, That Deer We Threw In The Back Seat Isn’t Dead” gag.  It’s looking like time to call the whole thing off.

If the kitchen is closed, why are you here?  I’ve got you there!

That is, until a hungry Tommy manages to convince a grumpy waitress to re-open a closed kitchen so that he can get some hot food.  Richard realizes that Tommy has a skill in reading people and telling them what they want to hear, and they reimagine their sales pitch – to the tune of massive orders that will totally keep the company alive.

I mean, until Rob Lowe sabotages the shipping computer and all the shipments fail.  Tommy blames Michelle (and though she swears she had all the orders right, you can’t really fault him on that one) and with Beverly and “son” set to sell to Zalinsky, he and Richard make a last-second trip to Chicago trying to convince the clean-imaged for-the-American-people auto parts king to reconsider the purchase.

It turns out Zalinsky is not really as concerned about the jobs of midwestern Americans as he makes himself out to be in his commercials.  Weird.  And, were this not a comedy, you’d figure it was really over for the Callahan company now.

We would have got here faster but we had to buy an extra roll of duck tape

But it turns out that Michelle has espied Beverly and “son” kissing – with tongue – and has used a sibling’s law enforcement contacts to learn of their true identities.  Freshly armed with this information, Tommy and Richard and a fake suicide belt made of road flares manage to get back to Zalinsky, and, having attracted the attention of a news crew, he manages to force Zalinsky, on television (by appealing to his image) to sign a deal for a very large Callahan shipment.  And Zalinsky secretly figures, what the hell, I’m about to buy the company anyway – until Tommy drops the news that mother/son are actually married, which means that Beverly’s marriage to Big Tom was a bigamous fraud, and she ain’t inheriting nothing.  And so the day (and company, and town) is saved.  The End.

You know, you don’t really watch a comedy like this for the plot.  It’s a silly plot, and the machinations necessary at the end (and the apparent lack of legal consequences for some of Tommy’s actions) requires a bit of suspension of disbelief to swallow.  But it’s at least clever enough, and it’s all set up from the beginning of the film, so it’s forgivable.  The film does a decent job of character development and has a solid comedy script, full of bizarre sequences and great one-liners.  But of course, the real selling power here is the physical comedy of Chris Farley.  Farley was the John Belushi of his time, the incredibly gifted comic actor doomed to fall victim to his own indulgences and addictions.  To borrow a line – how he lived! how he shone! but how soon the lights were gone!  It seems that many times it needs to be that way – greatness consumes so many of the talented.  It’s a shame, but I’m confident that Farley would, given an explicit chance, make the same Achilles’ decision.  Would he rather anonymously grow old in Maple Bluff, Wisconsin, or die at 33 bringing laughs to the hearts and smiles to the faces of millions?  Thanks, Chris, and requiescat in pace.