Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #114: Throw Momma From the Train (1987)

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 three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor or early aughts animated television program. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and I will be writing about the cult animated series Batman Beyond as long as one very generous patron deems necessary.  

Alternately, you can follow in the footsteps of one kind patron who was unsatisfied with the choices I made for Danny DeVito Month and paid for me to see movies DeVito made that are good and important and not just movies he happened to be in that I thought I would write about due to my deep, passionate, damn near pathological obsession with movies that terrible but also random and screamingly inessential. 

I’m talking movies like Ruthless People, The Heist, The Rainmaker and finally DeVito’s 1987 directorial debut Throw Momma From the Train, a darkly comic variation on the Alfred Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train that’s about as close as a hit mainstream studio comedy can get to a Todd Solondz deep dive into the depths of human misery.

In Throw Momma From the Train, DeVito masterfully plays a character who wouldn’t be out of place in movie like Happiness or Welcome to the Dollhouse. The double-dipping auteur plays Owen Lift, a portly, pathetic man-child who still lives with his battle-axe of a mother deep into adulthood and harbors a poignantly deluded dream of becoming a great writer despite a total lack of talent. 

In an Oscar-nominated breakthrough performance, Anne Ramsey plays Momma Lift as an Oedipal nightmare who alternates between dishing out verbal abuse at her son and everyone she encounters in a deafening bullhorn of a voice and writhing in self-pity.

When Owen implores rage-filled writing teacher Larry Donner (Billy Crystal) to murder Momma for him it’s mostly because he mistakenly believes that his instructor has implicitly agreed to do so in exchange for Owen killing Larry’s ex-wife. 

But part of Owen’s pitch to the horrified Larry is that Momma is such a cancerous boil on the face of humanity that killing her is actually the right thing to do, that this is the rare case where murdering an old woman is a moral decision. 

“Meet her! Maybe she’d be someone nice to kill!” Owen volunteers brightly to his mortified writing instructor. He’s not wrong! Momma is definitely in the upper one percentile of people whose deaths would make the world a better, and certainly quieter, place. 

Larry’s ex-wife is even more of a Men’s Rights paranoid fantasy than Owen’s testicle-crunching mother from the deepest bowels of the underworld. As Larry will tell anyone who will listen, his ex Margaret (Kate Mulgrew) stole a novel that he had written and used it as a springboard to become the kind of wildly successful best-selling author who sells her novels to Hollywood and goes on Oprah to bask in her historic, world-wide success. 

Like Ramsey, Mulgrew really leans into villainy, albeit of a much different variety. Margaret smugly and cynically depicts her ascent to literary super-fame as a feminist triumph over a boorish patriarchy embodied by her perpetually apoplectic ex. 

Talk show hosts generally play much meaner, much sharper versions of themselves in movies but seldom as shrewdly or hilariously as Winfrey does here. Margaret’s self-satisfied smirk of deeply unearned defiance and pride as she describes how she overcame a failed marriage to a wannabe writer to realize her destiny as a literary superstar enrages her bitter ex to a point of homicidal rage. Winfrey, meanwhile, treats Larry as so unimportant and insignificant that he’s barely worth mentioning as anything beyond a regrettable step in Margaret’s journey to self-realization and fame.

It would not be entirely inaccurate to describe Throw Momma From the Train as misogynistic but the truth is that DeVito’s gloriously mean-spirited romp hates everybody. It’s sexist, sure, but it has nearly as much withering contempt for male characters who are grasping and desperate, angry and half-mad with rage towards the terrible women in their lives. 

DeVito’s gleeful exercise in unapologetic misanthropy opens with Larry battling an epic case of writer’s block that has rattled his soul ever since his former partner stole his book and left him with nothing but bitterness and impotent rage. 

If I had to narrow it down to three, I would say my biggest problems with Crystal as a performer are shtick, sentimentality and his unfortunate enthusiasm for blackface. Seriously! It’s not just that Crystal darkened up his face to play Sammy Davis Jr. long after it should have been clear to everyone, even that numbskull Lorne Michaels, that blackface is not “cool” or “acceptable” even if doing so serves the additional useful purpose of taking a job away from an African-American. 

I positively shudder at the idea of a black person getting cast as Sammy Davis Jr. in a sketch or a movie when there are white men like Crystal willing to give it a shot.

Crystal loves blackface so much he put on the burnt cork to play Sammy Davis Jr. for the 2012 Academy Awards. 2012! That’s, like, eight years ago! That’s not right! 

I’m invariably annoyed and put off by Crystal’s desperate need to be loved, by the cloying sentimentality that defines so many of his projects. Thankfully, Throw Momma From the Train finds Crystal at his least cuddly, his least sympathetic and most entertaining. 

Larry is a real bastard, a bitter woman hater who can’t get past beyond the betrayal that he has allowed to define and destroy his life.

Then Owen, in a weirdly cuddly and considerate act of murder, manipulation and mayhem, removes the scourge of his would-be best buddy’s existence in hopes that he will reward him with a similarly fatal act of kindness. 

DeVito gives Owen a child-like sweetness and innocence seemingly at odds with his oft-stated desire to remove at least two human beings from the planet through murder. Yet DeVito allows us to not just empathize with this excessively ambitious late bloomer of a would-be criminal mastermind but to love him as well. 

As part of a long look into his personal life at once achingly sad and quietly hilarious, Owen shows Larry his “coin collection” only instead of being rare or valuable or unusual coins they’re little metal mementoes from trips Owen took with his father before he died, when life was less unbearable and hopeless. 

In a lesser film, with a lesser grasp on its characters, a scene like this could easily come off as mawkish and syrupy. It would clash violently with the film’s pitch-black comedy and slapstick violence. Instead it registers as genuinely poignant, a deeply ingratiating glimpse into Owen’s tragicomic but mostly just tragic past. 

The nicest character in Throw Momma From the Train is also the one proposing double murder to an acquaintance who is horrified but also strangely intrigued. Crystal and DeVito have a fascinatingly dark and co-dependent relationship that alternately calls to mind the central dynamics in Chuck & Buck and What About Bob?

I was surprised to see that Throw Momma From the Train only has a C+ CinemaScore despite being a sizable box-office hit, an Oscar nominee and a very funny movie with a sizable cult following. I suspect that’s because audiences tend to be put off by movies with unsympathetic characters. 

Our national cinematic cult of likability is so powerful and pervasive that people genuinely seem to think that enjoying a movie with nasty characters makes them bad people by extension. There are folks who think that if you like, for example, The Wolf of Wall Street, it’s because you think its characters are all great guys and you’d love to party with them, or have one marry your daughter.

Throw Momma From the Train is so unrelentingly dark and nasty and filled with sex, violence, bad language and deplorable behavior that I was astonished to see it’s PG-13. I suppose DeVito’s Hitchcock homage avoided an R rating by being a murder story whose final twist involves no murders actually getting admitted. It turns out that Larry’s hated ex-wife didn’t die from drowning after all and Momma dies of natural causes. 

That feels like a bit of cheat but Throw Momma From the Train is so funny and visually dynamic and tight at 85 minutes or so that I was more than willing to forgive a happy ending to a film whose message otherwise is that life is unrelenting pain and the sooner we accept our doom, the easier it becomes to accept our miserable fate. 

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