Barry Levinson's Flop Joe Pesci Vehicle Jimmy Hollywood Is No Damn Good
I have a soft spot for the lesser films of Barry Levinson. Levinson graduated from being the hotshot co-screenwriter of High Anxiety, Silent Movie, and …And Justice For All with 1982’s autobiographical Diner and later the brilliant 1987 comedy-drama Tin Men.
Levinson became a blockbuster filmmaker with 1987’s Good Morning Vietnam. His next film wasn’t just a hit; it was a bona fide pop culture phenomenon whose influence is still being felt strongly today.
I’m referring to Levinson’s most successful film, 1988’s Rain Man. In addition to being the top-grossing film of 1988, Rain Man won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Director.
Rain Man occupies a particular place of importance in my life and career because when I saw it as a twelve-year-old, I was autistic but did not know it. Like many people of my generation, Levinson's film was my primary reference point for autism for a very long time.
It’s been decades since I’ve seen Rain Man, and I plan to re-watch it soon for my Autism in Entertainment column. However, I half-remember Hoffman’s award-winning performance as largely a series of tics, twitches, and compulsions.
That was not my experience of autism. I couldn’t relate to it, so it will be interesting to see what I think of it from the perspective of a forty-seven-year-old film writer who was diagnosed as autistic late in life.
Levinson’s subsequent career has been full of highs (Bugsy, Wag the Dog, the underrated show-biz comedy What Just Happened) and lows (Toys, Sphere, Bandits, Envy, Rock the Casbah).
The 1994 comedy Jimmy Hollywood represents an unfortunate nadir in its writer-director’s checkered career. It somehow cost thirty million dollars despite consisting mostly of two schmucks wandering around Los Angeles.
Pesci is miscast against type as Jimmy Alto. He’s an aluminum siding salesman from New Jersey who moved to Hollywood to make it as an actor. He’s encountered nothing but failure but he holds onto delusional hope all the same.
Jimmy is a loser, but he’s Warren Beatty compared to his best/only friend and sidekick, William (Christian Slater). William is the only person in Hollywood that Jimmy can confidently talk down to because he is a mentally-challenged man-child who buys into all of Jimmy’s bullshit.
The perpetually unemployed thespian with the garish mop of bleached blonde hair’s life changes forever when his improbably hot girlfriend, Lorraine De La Peña (Victoria Abril), is robbed at gunpoint.
Jimmy decides to take it upon himself to wage war against the plague of criminality afflicting Los Angeles. Like a tacky bleached blonde Bat-Man with no money or crime-fighting experience, he becomes a vigilante dedicated to cleaning up the streets.
After heroically preventing the theft of a car stereo, Jimmy and William drop the thief off at the police station with a note explaining that if the cops aren’t up to the job of preventing every crime in the city, then they’ll have to do the police’s work for them.
In what must have been the slowest news day in Los Angeles history, someone preventing the theft of a car stereo makes it onto every newscast. I’m sure a deleted scene would have revealed it to be front-page news the world over, as well.
The news can’t get enough of the heroic tale of someone preventing the theft of a car stereo. It’s all over the news. Being a half-wit, William signs the letter to the police “S.O.S.”
This leads the police to assume that the car theft is the work of a guerrilla vigilante organization with untold members and an unknown agenda.
Jimmy has no experience fighting crime and no training yet, but that somehow does not keep him from being improbably successful in his efforts to lower Los Angeles’ crime rate single-handedly.
If Jimmy Hollywood were released today, it’d be filled with montages of people tweeting about S.O.S being amazing heroes on the side of the right and YouTube clips of random Los Angelenos praising the lead character.
Jimmy Hollywood takes place in a pre-internet, pre-digital era so he’s all over the news because apparently nothing else even remotely interesting or newsworthy is happening in Southern California.
The protagonist becomes an unlikely and unrealistic folk hero to the people of Los Angeles. He goes from zero to hero, from being a nobody headed nowhere to the people’s champion.
Levinson co-wrote Silent Movie and High Anxiety with Mel Brooks before he graduated to directing. That makes the film’s complete lack of jokes puzzling and unfortunate.
The big problem with Jimmy Hollywood is that it does not know what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a Taxi Driver/Big Fan dark comedy about an insignificant little nobody trying to find meaning and purpose in a world hostile to his very existence? Or is it a breezy comedy about a lovable underdog and his loyal pal pursuing their dreams no matter the cost?
Pesci’s performance epitomizes this identity crisis. As Goodfellas and Casino unforgettably illustrated, no one does combustible darkness and incoherent rage, as well as Pesci.
Jimmy Hollywood inexplicably has no need for that darkness or rage because its lawless, egotistic vigilante is depicted as a good guy without a dark side who just wants to be famous and help people, and, ideally, become famous for helping people.
The police, needless to say, are considerably less positive or enthusiastic about a leprechaun-sized actor with bleached blonde hair making them look bad with his incredible, quite literally unbelievable crime-fighting skills.
With a runtime of one hundred and seventeen minutes Jimmy Hollywood takes its sweet time going nowhere. It’s aimless and shapeless and devoid of laughs and pathos.
Yet it concludes with one of my least favorite cliches.
Jimmy Hollywood should never have been made. It should have lived and died as a script in Levinson’s office that he hid from the world out of richly merited shame.
Yet Levinson nevertheless decided that what we’ve just seen is so undeniably entertaining that it has to be made into a film within Jimmy Hollywood’s fictional universe.
Sure enough, Jimmy Hollywood ends with Harrison Ford playing Jimmy Alto in a biopic directed by Barry Levinson.
When Levinson is good, he is very, very good, but when he is bad, he is damn near unwatchable, and Jimmy Hollywood belongs squarely in the “loser” category of the veteran filmmaker’s filmography. It ranks alongside fathering the co-creator of The Idol as one of the worst things he's ever done.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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