This movie has always felt like a very lonely movie to me.
Stuart Smalley (the main character) is constantly surrounded by people, yet he seems to have no really deep and meaningful relationships. His family doesn't like or understand him, it seems nothing is really going to happen with his best (female) friend Julia (they share a lip peck at the end but it's extremely ambiguous and tame), and his most passionate relationships seems to be with his ex-boss, with whom he shares a mutual hatred.
Stuart is no less quirky and comical than any of your standard SNL characters. He's an effeminate devotee of the 12-step-programs and new-age feel good popular psychology. He runs a cable access show and he fails at everything. He has no deep relationships, he has no money, his TV show, which seems to be the center of his world a la Wayne's World (1992), seems to have very mixed reviews... Most importantly, the self-help programs he uses to structure his life clearly don't work well - he's even more dramatic than the average person, going into spirals of self-loathing and self-pity frequently and apparently requiring constant interventions to get him through his low points.
It seems like a subtle critique of the whole industry which probably doesn't work so much in and of itself, but rather on the mechanisms of placebo effect and improved affect through social interaction.
I personally like this movie, but it's no heavy hitter. The stakes are, as the movie poster suggests (he's ironically holding up a sphere like Atlas, suggesting he's going to try to save the world), pathetically low and narrow. The movie involves him trying to solve certain petty family squabbles and failing at it.
It's also clearly meant to be a comedy with absurd situations, but it's not funny. It rarely gets a laugh from raw humour and it's not at all absurd enough to be funny in that regard; the only humour you could expect from it is a very low-key ironic sort of humour. He's delusional, he's a drama queen obsessed with self-help, he's too rigid to do something good for his family if it means going against his impractical values.
The final message is strong and consistent throughout the film - you need to focus on yourself because you can't really change others. I appreciate the effort and the movie effectively (if lightly) holds your attention for its run, but that's not enough to save this film. It was a box office bomb and deserved to be. It's niche.
Honourable Mentions: A Night at the Roxbury (1998). Another movie involving SNL alumni. It's equally bleak in a sense. Even though the main characters get all of the (petty) things they want at the center of the plot, by the end you get this impression that nothing's going to be OK with them. They have some serious personality flaws that are going to keep making their lives an eternal series of unimpressive hills and very low valleys.
Stuart Smalley (the main character) is constantly surrounded by people, yet he seems to have no really deep and meaningful relationships. His family doesn't like or understand him, it seems nothing is really going to happen with his best (female) friend Julia (they share a lip peck at the end but it's extremely ambiguous and tame), and his most passionate relationships seems to be with his ex-boss, with whom he shares a mutual hatred.
Stuart is no less quirky and comical than any of your standard SNL characters. He's an effeminate devotee of the 12-step-programs and new-age feel good popular psychology. He runs a cable access show and he fails at everything. He has no deep relationships, he has no money, his TV show, which seems to be the center of his world a la Wayne's World (1992), seems to have very mixed reviews... Most importantly, the self-help programs he uses to structure his life clearly don't work well - he's even more dramatic than the average person, going into spirals of self-loathing and self-pity frequently and apparently requiring constant interventions to get him through his low points.
It seems like a subtle critique of the whole industry which probably doesn't work so much in and of itself, but rather on the mechanisms of placebo effect and improved affect through social interaction.
I personally like this movie, but it's no heavy hitter. The stakes are, as the movie poster suggests (he's ironically holding up a sphere like Atlas, suggesting he's going to try to save the world), pathetically low and narrow. The movie involves him trying to solve certain petty family squabbles and failing at it.
It's also clearly meant to be a comedy with absurd situations, but it's not funny. It rarely gets a laugh from raw humour and it's not at all absurd enough to be funny in that regard; the only humour you could expect from it is a very low-key ironic sort of humour. He's delusional, he's a drama queen obsessed with self-help, he's too rigid to do something good for his family if it means going against his impractical values.
The final message is strong and consistent throughout the film - you need to focus on yourself because you can't really change others. I appreciate the effort and the movie effectively (if lightly) holds your attention for its run, but that's not enough to save this film. It was a box office bomb and deserved to be. It's niche.
Honourable Mentions: A Night at the Roxbury (1998). Another movie involving SNL alumni. It's equally bleak in a sense. Even though the main characters get all of the (petty) things they want at the center of the plot, by the end you get this impression that nothing's going to be OK with them. They have some serious personality flaws that are going to keep making their lives an eternal series of unimpressive hills and very low valleys.