The Little Loved 1991 John Candy Vehicle Delirious is a Pleasant Surprise
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As a pop culture writer I try to remain open to surprises. I want to always allow myself the possibility that something will be different and better than I anticipated or remembered.
That open-mindedness and selective optimism pay off. It’s not uncommon for me to end up digging something far more than I expected to. Age has turned me into a softie. These days I find I like things for what they are, in all their messiness and imperfections, rather than being disappointed in what they are not.
It’s nevertheless unusual for a movie to really surprise me once I’ve actually started watching it. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover but you can generally tell whether or not a movie will be good within its first half hour.
That, strangely enough, is not true of the little loved 1991 John Candy vehicle Delirious. A half hour in I was convinced that Delirious would be an underwhelming dud like so many of Candy’s movies from this period.
Delirious gets off to a thoroughly unpromising start as it introduces the world of protagonist Jack Gable, a stressed-out producer and writer on the daytime soap opera Beyond Our Dreams, which explores the wildly histrionic lives and loves of the inhabitants of quaint yet salacious Ashford Falls.
Jack has a crush on Laura Claybourne (Emma Samms), the demanding diva at the center of the show but she is dallying with costar Dennis (David Rasche), who plays handsome Dr. Paul Kirkwood on Beyond Our Dreams.
The frustrated wordsmith butts heads with his fellow producers and a rival writer brought in over his wishes. Mariel Hemingway costars as Louise, a neophyte actress keen to audition in a role Jack very much believes does not belong on Beyond Our Dreams.
Hemingway is of course the breathtakingly gorgeous, intense movie star granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway. That might seem just a little intimidating so Delirious follows lazily in the footsteps of countless romantic comedies convinced that making an impossibly attractive, glamorous movie star slightly clumsy renders them relatable, even ordinary.
Who could possibly be intimidated by a woman who falls down sometimes? If anything, that makes Jack out of her league. After all, he’s surprisingly graceful while her poor sense of balance makes her vaguely sub-human.
Just about the only part of Delirious’ first act I liked was the use of the Prince song of the same name over the opening credits. Who doesn’t love Prince?
Jack thinks he has lucked out when Laura expresses an interest in accompanying him on a vacation to Vermont. His enthusiasm dissipates instantly when he sees her smooching her ostensible ex-boyfriend.
En route to Vermont Jack crashes his car and wakes up inside the fictional world of Ashford Falls. That makes it the second film I’ve seen in the last few days where the protagonist wakes up after a car crash to find himself in an entirely new reality.
In The Majestic, Jim Carrey’s terminally bland protagonist wakes up with Amnesia and comes to believe that he is someone he is not. In Delirious, Candy’s hero wakes up inside his own creation and initially thinks someone is playing a very elaborate prank on him.
Delirious’ world-building is bland and joke-light but it also sets up gags that will pay off later on. For example I was less than amused by an extended scene of Jack having to get his television fixed. It seemed pointless and weirdly devoid of humor.
But I was amused when Jack enters the surreal world of Ashford Falls and Carter Hedison (Raymond Burr, in his final performance), the towering, larger than life patriarch of a wealthy family, is dealing with the exact same TV problems.
Jack is clearly taking the old axiom to write what you know VERY literally. Besides, he KNOWS that what he’s writing is realistic because he has experienced it himself.
Our hero first struggles in this weird new/old world, at once familiar and strange, until Janet DuBois (Hemingway), who thinks he’s Jack Gates, a dashing billionaire our protagonist has created for the show, gives him some life-changing advice.
When Jack insists that he’s not a playboy mogul but rather a writer, she tells him that if he is, in fact, a writer, then he should write his way out of his predicament. In a variation on the premise of the classic 1983 Stephen King short story “Word Processor of the Gods”, Jack discovers that he can make things happen by writing about them.
He uses this God-like power to woo the character that Laura Claybourne plays on the show through flashy stunts like rolling into a charity auction in a sports car, putting the car up for auction and then bidding on his own car successfully, if pointlessly.
Things pick up considerably once the action moves to Ashford Falls and its reality becomes wonderfully elastic. It helps that director Tom Mankiewicz cast actors like David Rasche and Charles Rocket who look and act like they belong on a soap opera but are gifted comic performers. Rocket is a hoot as Ty Hedison, an eyepatch-sporting scion of the wealthy and powerful Hedison clan whose every wildly melodramatic utterance begs to be accompanied by a musical sting of the “Bum bum BUM!” variety.
There’s a wonderfully silly visual gag where Ty tries to dramatically shatter a valuable vase, only to have it bounce right back as if made by rubber.
The great Dylan Baker is hilarious as Blake, a Hedison who took an experimental drug whose side effects are dramatic, severe and ever worsening. In a clever running gag, Ty grows increasingly feral and sub-human over the course of the film, to the point where he seems more mutant than man.
Beyond Our Dreams is the kind of cornball fare SCTV delighted in mocking and while this isn’t anywhere near as sharp or satirical as Candy’s beloved sketch institution it has some of the same winning spirit.
Daytime soap operas are an irresistible but tricky target for parody and satire because they’re already so close to parody. Soap operas by definition do not take themselves seriously yet Delirious mines a steady stream of laughs out of this exhausted material all the same.
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Delirious is no masterpiece or hidden gem but it is a mildly inventive comedy that had me chuckling for a good hour or so. That’s more than I expected from its dire reputation and dull first act and it’s exactly enough for me.
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