The Travolta/Cage Project #24 The Experts (1989)

The Dave Thomas-directed Russian-American culture clash comedy The Experts was supremely fucked by timing. It had the misfortune of being a Cold War comedy that spent two long, cold, excruciating years on the shelf while the Soviet-style Communism at its core died a slow, painful and very public death. 

But it didn’t take Glasnost or two years on a shelf to render the premise of The Experts anachronistic and irrelevant. The Experts was never relevant or timely at any point in its misbegotten existence. How perplexingly perfect that a movie whose one stale joke is that the Russians have such a backwards conception of American culture that they imagine that Leave It To Beaver is a documentary about life in contemporary United States own conception of life in the Soviet Union and the KGB would be so cartoonishly, preposterously dated. 

In order for the premise of The Experts to make any sense comedically, let alone be funny, the Soviet Union would have to be nearly as cut off from modern life as the villagers in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. I lived and worried through the end of the Cold War and I can vouch that the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union were considered a little un-hip and a little behind the times, but they weren’t seen as so primitive that a Russian child would stare at a walkman with the kind of open-mouthed awe and wonder we might reserve for encountering a space alien for the first time. 

Charles Martin Smith stars in The Experts as Mr. Smith, an American-culture loving KBG agent with a suspiciously flawless American accent he conveniently never breaks who helps run a KGB-operated village designed to train Russian spies to flawlessly impersonate real Americans by perfectly replicating a typical Midwestern town, specifically Indian Springs, Nebraska.

The problem is that “Indian Springs” resembles an idyllic American town from the mid-1950s rather than a village that might have anything to teach spies about life in the United States in 1987. “Indian Springs” is Pleasantville. It’s Mayberry. It’s Ed Debevic’s the town, minus the sass. 

Though it’s never explicitly established in dialogue, The Experts apparently inhabits a world where media and entertainment do not exist because if Mr. Smith were to return to the KGB village after his trip to New York with a newspaper, a Time magazine or a videocassette containing a week’s worth of nightly network news broadcasts, it would provide just as much, if not substantially more, practical information on the particulars of life in contemporary America as drugging and kidnapping two morons and then tricking them into setting up a New York-style nightclub. 

Ah, but in the analog world of The Experts in order for Russians to learn anything about modern American life they have to do everything the old fashioned way, through flesh and blood interactions rather than, I dunno, looking at a Rolling Stone magazine.

The Experts opens with a fake-out. Mr. Jones, a glowering  Russian heavy played by the always wonderful Brian Doyle-Murray interviewing Bonnie, a standout spy played by Kelly Preston. Alas, even the KGB’s most advanced agent labors under the delusion that “heavy metal” is not a form of music but rather a “catalyst for the plutonium bomb.” 

Needless to say, if an American were to ask Preston if she enjoyed heavy metal, and she were to reply that she thinks it’s a wonderful catalyst for plutonium bombs her cover would be blown. 

Mr. Smith is horrified that the backwards denizens of the fake KGB American town know nothing of such fixtures of mid 1980s American life as ghetto blasters, punk rock, New Wave, sushi bars and “Gimme Five!” He mentions punk rock so often, in fact, that it starts to feel like he’s recently gotten into the music himself and is honestly just looking for someone to talk about the Clash with.

Mr. Smith could always return from America with a slang glossary or some recent non-fiction books. Instead he returns with two singularly oblivious, useless human beings, John Travolta’s Trevor and Arye Gross’ Wendell under the dubious logic that the KGB and its undercover operatives have much to learn from wisdom and knowledge of two half-wits.

The Experts wastes little time challenging my theory that there is no line of dialogue so clunky or convoluted that Brian Doyle-Murray’s gravelly Midwestern authenticity can’t make it ring true when he snipes at his Westernized rival/colleague Mr. Smith, “Take that Glasnost back to Moscow, where it’s so popular!” 

I could say that Doyle-Murray makes even dialogue that terrible vibrate with gritty authenticity but that would be a goddamn lie. Doyle-Murray does as much as he possibly can as a reactionary, joyless functionary intent on keeping the town in the 1950s and free from contemporary American corruption but there’s only so much he can do. 

That goes for Travolta as well. The Pulp Fiction icon, still a few years removed from his comeback role as handsome boyfriend in Look Who’s Talking, looks uncharacteristically terrible here. A singularly hideous mullet goes a long way towards hiding his usually dazzling movie star charisma. Even Travolta can’t pull off playing a character this impossibly stupid.

Mr. Smith brings the Americans to Russia so they can bring a blast of contemporary authenticity to the town but they do their job too well. The town is cosplaying badly as a typical American enclave but once Travis and Wendell introduce these relics from the Eisenhower era to rock and roll music and consumer goods they want to experience the real United States for themselves. 

In the third act Travis and Wendell discover that they’re actually in Russia, not out of any special insight but rather because the KGB makes no attempt to monitor the Americans in their midst. The Americans are forced to denounce their home country and themselves as capitalist pigs but they just can’t do it. They just love their country too much to betray it. 

If I was ever in a position where I had to denounce my country, I would just let her rip. An hour in, they’d be begging “Jesus, enough about this Trump guy! I get it. You hate him!” 

The nicest thing that can be said about The Experts is that it ends eventually and at least Travolta seems to be enjoying himself. The nightclub setting/theme is little more than an excuse to have Travolta boogying onscreen as much as possible, most notably in a “setting up the nightclub” montage set to a cover of “Back in the USSR” and a later  set-piece where Travolta and Preston wow the rubes with a sexually charged dance. 

It’s always great to see Travolta dance onscreen but on the great continuum of movies where he boogies Pulp Fiction and Saturday Night Fever occupy one extreme and The Experts another.

The Experts’ central comic conceit is that during the Soviet Union’s death throes it was so backwards, and so cut off from American popular culture and technology that its conception of life in the States lagged three decades behind the times, that they were so bad at being Americans that they seemingly took all of their cues about American life from The Andy Griffith Show. 

In actuality, Russians know how to be Americans better than Americans do these days, at least where cyber-sabotage and electoral chicanery are concerned. Over the past few years they have used that technological knowledge to subvert and corrupt the American political system through the election of their puppet, Donald Trump.

Russians are still pretending to be Americans for the sake of spy craft, manipulation and subversion but they’re a whole lot more sophisticated these days and we’re somehow even stupider than the maroons at the center of this idiocy. The joke, this time, is most assuredly on us, and as with The Experts, nobody, but nobody, is laughing. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

and/or get in on the red-hot Weird Accordion to Al campaign over at https://make-the-weird-accordion-to-al-book-a-ridiculous-r.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders