1993
was the year I decided to become a cinephile. I’d always loved watching movies
with my family like any kid, but now I was a teenager and a regular reader of Roger
Ebert’s column in the Thursday newspaper. I made up my mind that I was going to
start seeking out movies that challenged me and gave me insights into truly
appreciating film. That wasn’t the easiest thing to do in Sparta, Wisconsin in
the mid-‘90s. We had three decent video shops and the usual array of gas
station and supermarket video sections, but classics and under-the-radar titles
were hard to come by. In lieu of critic-approved, capital-A “Art Films,” I made
do with whatever offbeat or indie flicks (Miramax productions, mainly) made it
to my local shelves. Early in high school I claimed Spike Lee’s Crooklyn as my favorite film. I’d go to
bat for Mixed Nuts as the most
underrated film in the Steve Martin canon. I was almost certainly the only 15-year-old
boy in Wisconsin who went to sleep beneath a poster of the Ted Danson
coming-of-age dramedy Pontiac Moon
every night.
But
before any of that, there was Toys. Toys wasn’t an indie movie by any means.
It was intended to be a holiday blockbuster for the whole family. In that
regard it was every bit the failure it was always doomed to be. It’s just too damn
weird an endeavor to have been embraced by the public at large. It’s borderline
unthinkable that a day-glo story of a manic man-child and his cognitively
disabled sister fighting to save a toy factory from a military takeover would even
make it past a table read, let alone be granted the budget to realize a litany
of massive, surrealist sets and a cast of top-tier stars, but such was the
power of Barry Levinson in the early ‘90s. The result was a ludicrous mélange of
lunatic designs and ideas with the unhinged energy of Terry Gilliam, the unlimited budget
of Steven Spielberg and the unfortunate sentimentality of Chris Columbus.
It
also had LL Cool J disguised as a sofa.
I
first saw Toys at my pal Nathan’s
house, viewed on his parents' dying VCR. The tracking was shot and the color
faded in and out, no way at all to watch a movie that depends so heavily on a
striking color palette. Nonetheless, I was mesmerized. It felt like something
that shouldn’t exist, and I was delighted that it did. I watched it again with
my own family at my first opportunity and was again enthralled with the
churning, multicolored gears; the indoor roller coaster hallways; the
life-sized dollhouses and mechanical duck crossings and endless, billowing
fields of grass. It wasn’t like anything else, and where I came from anything
that wasn’t like anything else was something worth loving.
And
the cast. The cast of Toys is
something else. Michael Gambon. Joan Cusack. (Never better – I had such a
pubescent crush on her in this movie.) LL Cool J. Donald O’Connor. Jack Warden.
Robin Wright. Yeardley Smith. Debi Mazar. (Remember Debi Mazar?) Shelley Desai.
Jamie Foxx. Wendy from Wendy and Lisa. And of course, at the core of it, Robin
Williams. How could the motor-mouthed man-child heir to the world’s most
whimsical toy company have been played by anyone but Robin Williams?
Late
1992 was pretty close to peak Robin Williams. He’d redefined Disney movies
earlier that year with Aladdin and
had already cemented himself as a dramatic actor with Dead Poets Society and The
Fisher King. He’d anchored a high-profile flop with Hook, sure, but he was only a year away from the zeitgeist-smasher
of Mrs. Doubtfire. America was on the
back end of a solid 10-year stretch wherein Robin Williams was comedy. I was a little too young to have memories of his
coke-fueled standup heyday but I’d grown up loving him as a movie star. It was
the early ‘90s. Who hadn’t? For as out-there as the movie is conceptually, Toys finds him giving a quintessentially
Robin Williams performance, all funny voices and rapid-fire babble sprinkled
with earnest monologues. Somehow Williams never overpowers the movie
the way he could at his most unfettered (although he does cross over into irritation at times - when he manages to wedge in both his Michael Jackson and his Gandhi impressions, for instance). Maybe it’s because Levinson is
throwing just as much brain candy at the walls as Williams is and the two
creative forces balance each other out. Any which way, I count Toys as one of the best uses of Robin
Williams ever.
For
whatever reason I’d always glommed onto Williams’ least-loved roles. If you’d
asked me in 1993 to name my three favorite Robin Williams movies, I’d have told
you Toys, Popeye and The Survivors.
It’s probably been 20 years since I’ve seen The
Survivors so I can’t tell you if that one holds up – although it’s hard for
me to imagine that Robin Williams and Walter Matthau as hapless survivalists
circa 1983 would be anything but funny – but the other two are still at the top
of my list. Robert Altman’s Popeye
has undergone a critical redemption in recent years and finally gets some of
the praise it so richly deserves – seriously, Williams as Popeye is some of the
finest casting in Hollywood history. Poor Toys,
on the other hand, is remembered primarily as Barry Levinson’s greatest folly,
to the extent that it’s remembered at all.
Watching
it again two decades later, on the day that Robin Williams died, I can understand some of
the animosity. It’s sometimes mawkish, sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes
outright annoying. The blending of childlike wonder and adult themes is uneasy
and occasionally a little creepy. But by god, it’s just as weird a beast as it
was in 1993. There’s nothing safe about it. It’s visually creative and stimulating
to an insane degree, especially for a pre-CGI movie. The story goes
surprisingly dark but never sacrifices a genuine spirit of whimsy. The sets are
astonishing. Joan Cusack is still a revelation. And Robin Williams is a force
of nature, bouncing off the walls both figuratively and literally in a
performance that seriously could not have been given by any other human. It’s a
movie that failed at so many of the things it set out to do but succeeded in
teaching me the power of a beautiful failure. For all its flaws, Toys was essential in making me a lover
of cinema.
Plus
the soundtrack features a pretty cool Thomas Dolby song.
