A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Directed by Charles Crichton
Written by John Cleese
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, John Cleese
Release Date July 15th, 1988
Published July 15th, 2018
It’s so strange, sometimes movies get a reputation for genius and you hear about it and hear about it and then you see it for yourself and you wind up wondering what all of the fuss was about. That’s the case for me with A Fish Called Wanda. Yes, I had seen the movie before, back when it was on HBO in the 90’s and I think that I tried very hard to like it as much as the critics of the time seemed to like it. I liked it so I could seem smart.
A Fish Called Wanda turns 30 years old this weekend and once again I watched with the aim of wanting to like it so I could seem smart. Only this time, I am mature and confident enough to say I simply didn’t care for it. A Fish Called Wanda just doesn’t work on me. I disliked the characters, I was barely amused by the gags and Kevin Kline’s Academy Award winning supporting performance, for me, came off as forced and shrill.
A Fish Called Wanda is a comic heist movie which stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Wanda, a woman who is dating a thief named Georges Thomas, played by Tom Georgeson, a gag funnier than most in the movie. Wanda is only setting Georges up so that she and her lover, Otto (Kevin Kline) can double cross him and their other partner, Ken (Michael Palin). Georges isn’t stupid however and to insure his cut, he hides the loot until he knows he’s clear, an idea that pays off when Otto secretly turns him, unaware of where the loot actually went.
To figure out where the loot is hidden, Wanda and Otto begin a convoluted plan surrounding Georges’ barrister, Archie Leach (John Cleese). The hope is that Otto will give Archie the location of the loot as a way to reduce his sentence after he is caught. The plan is for Wanda to seduce Archie to get him to reveal the location of the loot so that they can steal it back and leave the country. Things take a turn when Wanda develops a soft spot for Archie.
A Fish Called Wanda was directed by Charles Crichton, sort of. Though John Cleese claimed to have put his name on the co-director credit in order to allay studio fears about the fact that Crichton hadn’t worked in 23 years and was in his mid-80’s, it appears from on-set stories from Curtis and Kline that Cleese was the creative force. It was Cleese who came up with the memorable running gags about Wanda’s fetish for foreign languages and Otto’s insecurity about being called stupid.
There are other Cleese-ian touches as well such as Archie having a wife and the two of them having separate beds ala his character on the famed British television series Fawlty Towers. Regardless of who is responsible however, not much of anything in A Fish Called Wanda got a laugh out of me. Whether it’s the door slamming, Noises-Off style gags of people running in and out of rooms and weaving elaborate lies when caught in the wrong place at the wrong time or the almost nihilistic approach to right and wrong, I found nothing appealing about A Fish Called Wanda.
The characters in A Fish Called Wanda are all terrible people, and that includes Palin’s Ken who, though he may feel guilty about a few of his evil deeds, is nevertheless as terrible as anyone else and has arguably the most notable body count in the movie, if you count dogs. The gags involving the elaborate ways in which Ken accidentally murders an old ladies three dogs is some of the ugliest humor I can recall in a supposed comedy.
We are supposed to like Ken because Palin plays him as a simpleton, a dupe who thinks he's helping his friend but is blundering his way into crime. We are supposed to either sympathize with or find funny his stuttering but it only engenders a sad sort of pity that is far from funny. A scene where Palin and Cleese finally share the screen comes late in the film, as we've anticipated seeing the Python guys together, and the scene is a wretchedly excessive scene of Palin struggling with his stutter and Cleese becoming more and more explosively irritated while trying to stay calm. There is no gag here other than Palin's stutter and it's never funny, merely insensitive.
A Fish Called Wanda presumes its own sophistication. The filmmakers and stars appear as if they should be erudite, sophisticated players in a farce but somehow the film never earns a laugh. I shouldn’t say never, I was amused a few times, such as when Cleese dances about spouting Russian phrases while Jamie Lee Curtis writhes in ecstasy but the amusement was tempered and rare.
In his 1988 review of A Fish Called Wanda, Roger Ebert says “One of its strengths is its mean-spiritedness” and I could not disagree more. I don’t find the mean-spiritedness of A Fish Called Wanda to be a strength. It’s my least favorite thing about the movie. I don’t enjoy these odious characters and their greed and I especially don’t care for the ending that rewards each of them in some strange way.
I revere Roger Ebert which explains why, nearly 30 years ago, I watched A Fish Called Wanda and desperately attempted to like it. I wanted to seem cool to a man I would never meet. I wanted to impress this idol who didn’t know I existed via some transference of psychic energy; as if the universe might inform my hero that I was no ordinary teenage movie fan, I was a teenage movie fan who liked A Fish Called Wanda.
I still revere Roger Ebert, his writing will influence me for my lifetime but as an older man I find myself able to politely disagree. While Roger enjoyed this movie, I loathed it. I didn’t enjoy the mean-spiritedness because the characters weren’t pleasant or entertaining enough to earn it. I don’t mind a mean character winning in the end if they are charming or interesting enough and they are perhaps thumbing their nose at some societal ill. But when characters are just terrible because being terrible gets them what they want, I lose interest.
The characters of A Fish Called Wanda aren’t charming, their ugly. I don’t mind that they are criminals, I mind that they aren’t interesting or funny criminals. I don’t mind that they are killers or thieves, I mind that they aren’t charming or silly or funny killers and thieves. The characters appear as if they and what they are doing should be funny and yet I don’t laugh. I dislike these characters and thus they never become funny.
