Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #248 Creator (1985)
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Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. 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. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
As a teenager I worked in a video store for four years: three at a Blockbuster Video on the north side of Chicago and then a year at Madison’s Four Star Video Heaven. So it’s hard to overstate the role video stores have played in my intellectual, creative and emotional development.
Yet even before I snagged what seemed to me was a plum job making four dollars and twenty five cents an hour at Blockbuster Video as a sixteen year old in 1992 video stores occupied an outsized place of importance in my young psyche.
I spent a LOT of time in video stores as a kid, both checking out movies that I would watch in a desperate attempt to escape the inexorable horrors of everyday life and dreaming about movies I would someday get to see.
Video store boxes were potent vessels for day-dreaming. I formed strong ideas about movies based solely on artwork. For example, I looked at test tube-clutching mad scientist Peter O’Toole smoking a comically large cigar with a characteristically impish expression while Mariel Hemingway gazes adoringly at him with a vaguely lobotomized look on the cover of the video box for the 1985 romantic comedy-drama Creator and assumed that the movie was an adult version of Weird Science.
Name a more iconic duo!
I imagined that in Creator O’Toole played a Dr. Frankenstein type who, through some manner of dark/mad science brings his beloved dead wife back to life, either as a clone, or through the vessel of the beautiful young woman played by Hemingway.
I was wrong! I was extremely wrong. Creator is somewhat perversely a movie about a man who fails to create, who is 100 percent unsuccessful in his attempts to resurrect his late wife.
Even more puzzlingly the film relegates the legendary O’Toole to the background for much of its duration so that it can focus on its real subject: a lovestruck Vincent Spano dealing with his girlfriend being in a coma.
Fun fact: Peter O’Toole left all his comically oversized cigars to Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
That’s a stone cold bummer of a premise and not terribly commercial either. So the video box instead advertises a movie that fundamentally does not exist, a kooky romantic comedy twist on The Bride of Frankenstein that bears only a vague resemblance to the actual film.
In Creator O’Toole plays Dr. Harry Wolper, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who has never gotten over his wife dying in childbirth decades earlier. The eccentric genius with the mischievous twinkle in his eyes has spent the ensuing years trying to cheat death and play God by cloning his long-dead soulmate.
To help him in his Quixotic quest the droll doctor hires ambitious young pre-med student Boris Lafkin (Vincent Spano) as an assistant, helper and sidekick infatuated with a mystery beauty who turns out to be lithesome co-ed Barbara Spencer (Virginia Madsen).
Dr. Wolper acquires a college-age love interest of his own in the form of brash, uninhibited, self-described “nymphomaniac” Meli (Mariel Hemingway). At nineteen years old, Meli is both barely legal and young enough to be Dr. Wolper’s daughter.
That does not matter to her, however. The wildly orgasmic, clothing-averse beauty angrily demands this older man’s cock all the same. She won’t take no for an answer and because the nineteen year old is the aggressor in the relationship, Creator does not find anything even remotely creepy or inappropriate about a sexual relationship between a Nobel Prize winner in his mid 50s and a nineteen year old waitress.
Meli is a bit of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a chatterbox kook without a filter or sense of shame. She’s also woefully miscast. Watching Hemingway flail in a role that’s all wrong for her I couldn’t help but think how much better Cyndi Lauper or Madonna would have been in the part.
Meli is a ridiculous figure of male fantasy: a scantily-clad, hyper-sexual tomboy who never stops broadcasting her intense carnal yearning for a much older man. She’s a hurricane of manic energy that overwhelms damn near every scene she’s in.
Despite playing a horny old goat who can’t stop admiring the pert posteriors of undergraduates, O’Toole nevertheless radiates impish charm. O’Toole’s innate likability is the only thing keeping Dr. Wolper from being a grade A creep.
Director Ivan Passer (Cutter’s Way) and screenwriter/neuropsychiatrist Jeremy Leven, who adapted his own novel and would go on to write and direct the simpatico Don Juan De Marco seem to lose interest in Dr. Wolper and Meli’s romance in the film’s second half.
In the third act the tone shifts dramatically from loony, goony romantic comedy to romantic tragedy when Barbara unexpectedly slips into a coma despite being a very young woman and the seeming picture of health.
Boris is understandably distraught at the prospect of the love of his life dying young and tragically. What begins as a goofy comedy devolves into a leaden and lumpy melodrama about how the lingering specter of death can help us appreciate the incredible gift that is life and youth and beauty.
Creator is ultimately only interested in Dr. Wolper’s combination of mad love and mad science as a means of articulating the undoubtedly true if clumsy and obvious message that love and life are for the living, and that it’s better to love someone who is imperfect yet alive than to pine hopelessly for someone who died long ago.
Madsen is a delight, as always. She’s radiant and otherworldly, a woman worth obsessing over but Creator just kind of meanders to an anti-climax, growing less and less urgent with each successive scene.
Creator is definitely is not what I expected or hoped for but it has a certain shaggy appeal all the same, thanks largely to appealing performances by O’Toole and Madsen and an intermittently clever script that, alas, never quite coheres into something satisfying or complete.
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