Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #80 The Linguini Incident (1991)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, a lot of which, truth be told, has a lot of really fucked up shit in it, and I’ve just begun a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie. 

I’ve been going in chronological order on the Peckinpah series. I’m up to Cross of Iron now but I’ve been hopping around the timeline with Bowie because it seems to suit the fascinatingly, frustratingly random nature of Bowie’s career as an actor, which did not follow a straight line so much as it jumped around erratically.

Bowie of course was as electric presence in important movies like Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hunger, Labyrinth, Last Temptation of Christ and The Prestige but his choices didn’t always seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Why didn’t Bowie make more movies? He certainly must have had ample opportunities to make film acting a full-time career instead of a moonlighting gig. What on earth was he doing in the dire, low-budget previous Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry B.U.S.T.E.D beyond wasting his limited time left on earth on some dodgy, adolescent nonsense? Or Dream On, HBO’s night-time tribute to stock footage and the beauty of the unclothed female form? Why did Bowie decide to favor the silly but sweet teen rock movie Bandslam with a cameo?

More germane to today’s column, what about Richard Shepard and Tamar Brott’s screenplay for The Linguini Incident convinced one of the greatest and most influential artists of the twentieth century that this was worth making one of the few films Bowie legitimately starred in, rather than turning in a cameo or supporting turn? 

As written, there is nothing, really to Monte, the character Bowie plays here, a scheming pathological liar and degenerate gambling addict who works as a waiter in a giant restaurant owned and ruled by Dante (Andre Gregory, THE Andre of My Diner With Andre) and Cecil (Buck Henry) that looks more like an enormous, expensive art instillation than a place where people eat food. 

But because Monte is played by one of the most charismatic performers in the history of entertainment he radiates rakish charm and breezy movie star magnetism from every pore. It’s a goddamn pleasure spending 108 minutes in Bowie’s company even under less than ideal circumstances.

Bowie hadn’t gotten his teeth fixed when he made The Linguini Incident, so he has a mouth full of jagged, broken sideways Chiclets but he’s so swooningly handsome in his middle-aged prime that he somehow makes it work. 

In The Linguini Incident, Bowie is the calm in the storm, forever keeping his cool while the script forces Rosanna Arquette, his romantic lead, to flail about wildly in one bit of muddled physical comedy after another. 

Arquette is WACKY here in a way that utterly defeats her quirky charms by making her nothing more than an aggregation of writerly affectations, a would-be escape artist and Houdini/Houdini’s widow super-fan who can’t quit figure out the biggest escape of all—fleeing her crummy job and life—or, for that matter, any other escapes either.  

Lucy radiates Manic Pixie Dream Girl energy except that that hokey archetype is defined in part by MPDGs lacking agency and hopes and dreams of their own. Lucy, however, has the very human, very relatable goal of wanting five thousand dollars so she can buy the wedding ring of Houdini’s widow. That’s about as real and emotionally authentic as The Linguini Incident gets. 

It’s a film untouched by anything resembling life experience where characters toast marshmallows over a stove for breakfast because gosh darn it, it’s just more kooky than a bowl of Cheerio’s. From its title onward The Linguini Incident is ferociously committed to zaniness for its own sake, to wackiness as an operating principle. 

Lucy has two primary looks here. There’s the inept flapper ensemble she wears while practicing the lost art of escape artistry, oftentimes in explicitly Houdini-themed routines. Then there’s the big hair, blindingly silver get-up she wears at work, a look that screams off-brand Jetsons costume purchased at a day after Halloween sale. 

Our heroine hates her job and her employers, oily, smarmy capitalist monsters played with great relish and elan by two consummate old pros. Gregory hasn’t had a doubles act partner this inspired since Wallace Shawn. 

Gregory and Henry have such great chemistry that they blend together almost immediately to form one being with two heads and two bodies but one mind and one will. They’re malevolent old hams who are always on, always doing shtick to amuse themselves and each other and absolutely no one else. 

As expertly performed by Gregory and Henry, these two odious gentlemen of leisure have seemingly been an enjoying a private joke at the universe’s, but more specifically their customers and employees’, expense for the last half century or so. 

Cecil and Dante alternate between luxuriating in their moneyed evil, blatantly ogling and groping their gorgeous female waitstaff when they’re not preposterously masquerading as smarmy nice guys whose biggest drawback is that they care too much.

The duo’s oily burlesque of generosity and kindness ends up feeling way creepier and more disturbing than out and out villainy.  

Everyone hates Dante and Cecil so when Monte and Lucy both desperately need money to pay off a green card bride-for-pay played by Marlee Matlin and buy Houdini’s wife’s wedding ring respectively they hatch a plan to rob the restaurant with Lucy’s even more punishingly quirky roommate, a crackpot homemade inventor focussing on a sort of militarized brassiere that would protect women’s breasts from groping or assault with extreme prejudice. 

If the idea of a bra that fights back seems positively zany to you, it is! In fact everything that happens in this movie is wacky, zany, quirky, unusual and just plain precious, including a heist the filmmakers treat like an afterthought. 

Bowie isn’t given much to do other than smile and be handsome and dashing. When Shepard’s screenplay does give him an inspired bit of comic business, like a scene where Lucy is auditioning very badly for a lesbian theater (because in 1991 the mere existence of homosexuality was apparently considered hilarious) with her escape artist act and he’s forced to spend anxious minutes verbally tap-dancing as a distraction while she wriggles around hopelessly in a sack, he absolutely kills.

When the film allows Arquette to settle down she has potent sexual chemistry with Bowie but The Linguini Incident is so intent on cranking the quirkiness up to 11 in every scene that they’re never afforded the time or space to develop any kind of a real relationship. 

The problem with David Bowie was that he had such explosive magnetism that it was impossible to imagine him as an ordinary guy, as an average Joe who might work at an insurance company rather than a sex god worshipped the world over. 

In other words, it’s hard to believe that a man with the looks and presence of Bowie would be making people drinks instead of starring in movies or working as a male model.

Waiters/bartenders also tend to be actors, and actors tend to actually be waiters/bartenders but in The Linguini Incident it is revealed that Monte is only bartending because he’s made a bet with Cecil and Dante that he can marry one of their waitress within a week, one of a series of bets Monte and his family have made with the restaurant owners through the decades. 

Everything climaxes with a double or nothing bet on whether the almost impressively hapless Lucy will be able to pull off a genuinely impressive escape in front of Cecil, Dante and all of their friends, or at least the people in their social circle who tolerate their presence. 

It does not speak well of The Linguini Incident as an emotional experience that I would not have minded at all if Lucy had perished dramatically and publicly in what would have been her moment of triumph. In true Manic Pixie Dream Girl form, Lucy could never exist in our world. She’s a male writer’s kooky fantasy, not someone with an inner life beyond her obsession with Houdini. 

The Linguini Incident fundamentally does not work on a comic, narrative or emotional level but thanks to the scene-stealing work of Henry and Gregory, Bowie’s quietly majestic central presence and sharp, vivid cinematography from Robert Yeoman, who would go on to become a frequent Wes Anderson collaborator, this clattering, clamorous parade of quirks and eccentricities went down relatively easily. 

I would not describe Bowie’s taste in film or television roles as “good” but rather weird and interesting. That description certainly applies to The Linguini Incident, particularly the “not good” part.  

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