There are more respectful ways to honor the great Phil Hartman on the anniversary of his death than by rerunning this piece on Houseguest but it's the one we're going with
Sinbad is the real Head of the Family
There comes a time in every man’s life when he must look at himself completely naked in the mirror and ask the only question that matters in our sick and sad and decaying world: am I a fan of goateed, baggy clothes-wearing 1990s comedian and actor Sinbad? Sometimes, we’re not ready to confront a question of this magnitude until late in life. Sometimes, we’re NEVER brave enough to ask or answer this most essential and probing of questions, and sometimes, we never ask ourselves this question because we know that answering it will drive us insane.
I confronted this question myself just a few days ago, listening to the First Kid and Jingle All the Way star’s appearance on a quarantine episode of the cult podcast Hollywood Handbook. Sinbad had guested on the podcast before, and every time he mixes it up with Sean and Hayes, he is an absolute delight: funny, charming, self-deprecating, and wonderfully self-aware. I found myself thinking, “Damn, am I a fan of goateed, baggy clothes-wearing 1990s comedian and actor Sinbad? I think I might be!”
Fate once again forced me to confront the truth about my feelings about Sinbad when I decided to make the 1995 interracial buddy romp Houseguest the first film of Phil Hartman Month. I knew the movie well from my years as a video store clerk, when way more people than you would imagine would cheerfully stride to the counter of Four Star Video Heaven holding a video box adorned with the smiling, disembodied head of a black man played by Sinbad poking cheerfully out of a suburban mailbox while a white family led by a grinning Phil Hartman (and their dog of course, because nothing sells a movie quite like a random-ass dog on the cover) looks on with a combination of confusion (why is a disembodied head sticking out of our mailbox? What has happened to this poor man’ s body?) and joy.
This video box invited questions of its own, like “Who on earth would want to see this stupid movie?” Sinbad fans, of course, but when Houseguest was released in 1995 to bad reviews, healthy box-office and even healthier home video returns I was a Sinbad agonistic. I didn’t like Sinbad. I didn’t dislike Sinbad. I had no strong opinions about Sinbad one way or another but now that I can finally cross off, “see and write about the 1995 light comedy Houseguest” as the final and most important item on my Bucket list. I am finally ready to stand before the lord and all my countrymen and proudly declare, “I like Sinbad, within reason.”
As nice as it is to see a character actor/consummate role player like Phil Hartman in a lead role, Houseguest is unmistakably a Sinbad vehicle. It’s Sinbad’s show. In this half-assed Not Quite Trading Places, he’s the Eddie Murphy motormouth beating the snooty white snobs at their own game. If Houseguest is a Disney sitcom version of 6 Degrees of Separation, then he’s the Will Smith con man who exploits the prejudices and preconceptions of moneyed white folks for his own benefit.
Houseguest is a particularly bizarre and surreal movie to watch during this fraught and uncertain time, with our nation ripped apart by racial tensions and an unashamed, unapologetic racist in the White House whose entire appeal is rooted in fear-mongering and xenophobia.
Houseguest is such a preposterous assimilationist fantasy and so utterly divorced from anything even vaguely resembling reality that I wouldn’t be surprised if Armond White declared it the most honest and important film about race in America ever made.
The goofball light comedy inexplicably begins with a prologue that provides an origin story for protagonist Kevin Franklin’s (played as an adult by Sinbad) desire to make money and be successful by showing him as a 12-year-old schemer who is laughed at by his class when he says he’ll have a lot of money and drive a fancy car as an adult.
Do we really need to explain why a man in 1995 United States might want to have money? Isn’t that the point of capitalism? Wouldn’t it be more noteworthy if he decided as a young man that he wasn’t going to have money or be successful?
We then jump ahead twenty-five years. Instead of achieving his dream of having a lot of money, he’s living the nightmare of owing the mob 50,000 dollars for various unsuccessful schemes, the most recent being a pathetic belief in the financial value of baseball cards. Instead of driving a sweet-ass ride the failed film flam man and schemer is driving a jalopy Oscar the Grouch would reject as way too sloppy.
On the run from mobsters, Kevin ends up pretending to be Dr. Derek Bond (Ron Glass), a childhood friend of status-obsessed attorney Gary Young (Phil Hartman), whom the wealthy suburbanite conveniently has not seen since they were childhood camp friends. Even more conveniently, Gary has no idea what his friend looks like as an adult, even though he seemingly knows everything else about him, particularly that he’s not just a successful dentist, he’s apparently the Tiger Woods of dentistry, a superstar of the field folks can’t wait to show off on account of him being so famous and wildly successful. For dentistry.
#NameaMoreIconicDuo!
There is not an iota of truth or realism in Michael J. Di Gaetano and Lawrence Gay’s screenplay, which is notable primarily for its unabashed love of racial stereotypes and the burgers, fries and frosty chocolate milkshakes of fast food giant McDonald’s, whose wares are pimped nearly as extensively and as shamelessly as previous nadirs/apexes of clown burger-based product placement Mac & Me and Bye, Bye Love.
Everything that feels funny or real or spontaneous or inspired here feels like the improvisation of Hartman and Sinbad, who are each so much better than the material they’re stuck with. That Gary comes off as a human being at all is a tribute to Hartman’s overachieving work. Hartman takes a broad sitcom cartoon of an oblivious cornball suburban dad and invests him with warmth, humor, wit, and vulnerability. For the umpteenth time in his glorious and too-short career, Hartman made something out of nothing, creating comedy and humanity in an oppressively wacky void.
The lawyer with the big house and seemingly idyllic existence seemingly knows everything about his long-lost camp chum, except, of course, what he looks and acts like, but he does know that his Conservative dentist associate is a committed vegetarian. This exists solely for the sake of the fake dentist and real-life confidence man needing to race to McDonald’s whenever possible to get his fix of sub-quality meat products.
The lawyer asks his ostensible long-lost buddy lots of questions about himself, none of which he seems to know the answers to, but that somehow does not affect his conviction that the affable black man at his house is exactly who he says he is, even if he’s nothing like he imagined or expected.
In exchange for a bed to sleep in over Memorial Day weekend and a party where the funky new soul brother in town teaches a bunch of snobs what it truly means to get tore up from the floor up Kevin Franklin solves all the white people’s problems in true Magical Negro form. He inspires Dad to stand up to his boss, the goth teenage girl, to demand better than her lame poser of an African-American boyfriend and helps the little boy get revenge on some bullies by dominating them in a game of pick-up basketball.
Houseguest is the kind of movie where, late in the third act, Dad asks the titular houseguest to have a heart-to-heart with his death-obsessed daughter about her romantic travails since he’s formed a stronger bond with her over the course of two days than her parents have in fifteen years and he happily acquiesces. He’s so committed to solving a strange teenage girl’s romantic problems that he even threatens her asshole boyfriend with violent death to encourage him to treat her better and/or go away forever.
Sinbad is only less of a Magical Negro here than he was in his Oscar-winning breakout role as the genie in the 1993 genie comedy Shazaam.
Upon arriving in the small town, Kevin is immediately whisked off to Career Day, where he stammers and stutters and tries to get away with not doing an elaborate presentation for the apparently dentistry-obsessed children of the school Gary’s children attend, but a faculty member nevertheless plays a series of slides of diseased teeth and gums (always a crowd-pleaser) and the towering stranger does insult comedy at the dental abominations before a teacher angrily confronts Kevin about something he wrote in a book about his life as a superstar dentist.
In what must have been the slowest news day of all time, the comic triumph of what is referred to as a “Hip Hop dentist” makes front page news even though nothing about his accidental presentation had anything to do with Hip Hop. The “Hip Hop” element of this fake dentist consists entirely of the color of his skin. It’s not established explicitly, but it sure feels like Kevin is the first black person to visit the town in decades.
Then Hartman’s lawyer decides to honor another aspect of his houseguest’s ostensible personality by throwing him a wine party in celebration of his guest being a famous wine connoisseur. The Hip Hop dentist with the “urban” style straight from the “streets" “freestyles” some “dope”, “fresh” wine knowledge when he’s challenged to a wine-off by a professional wine critic.
Sinbad’s lovable grifter then proceeds to show these uptight crackers how to really “party down.” Before he came to liberate the white folk, everyone saw alcohol exclusively as a vehicle to show off one’s taste and refinement by delivering Sideways-style monologues about every aspect of the wine’s taste, flavor, and quality. But Kevin teaches these squares that if you drink enough alcohol, it has the unexpected but most delightful quality of getting you inebriated so that when The Commodores’ lascivious ode to the female form, “Brick House,” comes on, the Caucasians assembled forget to be uptight and well, white, and get what can only be described as “funky.”
In a short space of time, Kevin shows these white people how to loosen up, get drunk, party, AND have fun. Is it any surprise they all love him? When the real dentist eventually shows up, he’s roundly rejected for not being as much fun as the amiable fake impersonating him.
Houseguest’s goofball charms wear thin over the course of its 113-minute runtime. Not even Hartman can make the film’s dramatic elements, like Gary constantly telling his guest that what he likes best about him is his incredible honesty, the way he’s living his unvarnished truth every second of every day rather than, say, being an inner city hustler pretending to be someone else in an attempt to elude mobsters, anything other than ridiculous. By the time Kevin is driving a car onto train tracks in an attempt to intimidate the daughter’s boyfriend, the movie has long since flown all the rails.
I would enjoy Houseguest a lot more if it were a half-hour shorter, but I found myself laughing at Houseguest extensively, if never quite with it. It goes so far over the top in its convoluted idiocy that it veers unmistakably and enjoyably into self-parody, as in this scene where a dentist played by Jeffrey Jones tries to bond with Sinbad’s fake dentist by very aggressively insisting that they wash their balls together—golf balls, that is! But “balls” also can refer to testicles, which is where the “humor” comes from.
Houseguest is empty-headed escapism at its most breezily ridiculous, which is just what I need at this uncertain time.
I can now say conclusively that I am, in fact, a Sinbad fan. I find him likable and amusing, an enormously ingratiating performer who, along with the always great Hartman, makes Houseguest stupidly entertaining instead of just stupid.
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