| Koki Mitani's comedies are hit
or miss with me. Each film I have seen (I have
only seen three now) has had ample amusement,
but if I can judge from them, his messages for
his films tend to become unwieldy and the resultant
experience feels unbalanced. Welcome Back,
Mr. McDonald, while dealing with wildly different
subject matter from All
About Our House (2001) and Suite
Dreams (2006), nevertheless comes across
as surprisingly familiar—and not in a good
way.
A radio station has recently offered
a competition—whoever can write the best
radio drama will have his or her script produced
by professional actors for broadcast on the air.
Housewife Miyako (Kyoka Suzuki, who was the love
interest in 2004's Zebraman and had a bit
part in Godzilla
vs. Biollante from 1989) was the only
entrant, and so her weepy melodrama about a bored
woman who has an affair with a fisherman wins
by default. She is very excited about her windfall,
but when drama queen star Nokko (the versatile
Keiko Toda, who has had parts in everything from
Vampire Hunter D from 1985 to Kiki's
Delivery Service in 1989) demands that her
character be a lawyer named Mary Jane, and her
caustic co-star Jo Hamamura (seasoned actor Toshiyuki
Hosokawa, hilarious here) then changes his character
to a pilot on-air, her dreams of seeing anything
even mildly resembling her work come to life disappears
in a sea of wild, breakneck compromise and live
improvisation.
The story of Welcome Back, Mr.
McDonald has a lot of potential for hilarity,
and sometimes it's capitalized perfectly—the
scene that justifies the title, which I won't
spoil here, is knee-slapping hilarious, and there
were a few times I actually busted up in front
of the screen. Unfortunately, that hilarity is
occasionally subdued and weakened by Mitani's
insistence on waving his "creative integrity
vs. practical necessity/asinine authority"
flag. In all three movies I have seen of his,
films that span almost a decade, this has been
his one major theme. I understand that he probably
has to struggle with creative compromise all the
time. I also understand that, as he becomes more
popular, his creative visions have probably become
more purely his own—so he's likely celebrating
that and trying to encourage others who have similar
problems. However, the way he presents those issues
here, I feel, weakens the plot, although not cripplingly.
The characters don't help much
either. Miyako, as written in the script, isn't
a very deep character. As portrayed by Suzuki,
she has some fun quirks, but mostly she is just
a two-dimensional, obsequious housewife. Worse,
she's probably the deepest character in the film.
Spoiled actress Nokko and her easily-chafed co-star
Hamamura are really fun, but their characterization
only reaches as far as their tempers. Toshiaki
Karasawa, who also played "the maestro"
in Mitani's All
About Our House (2001), plays the emotionally
subdued director of the radio drama, Kudo. He
becomes quite important late in the story, and
is basically the voice of reason and truth—which
means he gets to make snarky comments occasionally
while really not doing much of anything. A number
of minor characters, like the former sound-effects-expert
security man and the kook who rewrites Miyako's
script on the fly, are quite fun but don't make
a huge impression either. Watch for Ken
Watanabe, though, in a bit part as an emotional
truck driver.
The music is bewildering. Over
and over again I felt like I had heard the tunes
before—out of a Godzilla movie. The themes
often sound like militaristic or heroic cues from
other films, and when I learned that the music
was done by Takayuki
Hattori, whose Godzilla
2000: Millennium (1999) movie soundtrack
I own, I felt as if he was trying to work up to
that film a few years early. I felt it matched
so poorly with the action so often that I started
to wonder if it was my own problem (perhaps some
lingering case of addled brain due to my bout
with influenza), but my impression is what it
is--apply salt and serve with an open mind.
To round out the disappointment,
the subtitles were some of the weakest I have
seen in a modern movie, and were often a challenge
to read because they matched the on-screen colors
of the background too closely. I also felt that
they were more shoddily done than usual, skipping
over several entire lines or simply neglecting
to translate minor utterances between characters.
Note, however, that I viewed the Japanese release,
which probably had less care given to the English
subtitles than the American release did.
Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald
is not a bad movie. In fact, it is probably Mitani's
most popular work and was even released in America.
There is good reason for that. The concept behind
the film is quite delightful. Indeed, when it
works, it works wonderfully—the moments
of shining comic genius in this film, when they
come, reach higher on the laugh-o-meter than anything
I saw in All
About Our House or Suite
Dreams. However, those moments are not
frequent, and the weaknesses are more so, in my
opinion. Feel free to welcome this comedy into
your home; just don't go out and break the bank
on it.
|
(3/5)