In 1969, Woody Allen gave himself the challenge of writing a genuinely improbable love story. His idea was to build a farce around a burgeoning romance between the world's most inept ambassador and a young lady trapped by circumstances in his embassy. Set behind the Iron Curtain and predicated on the Soviet propensity to mistake shutterbug tourists for spies, the original Don't Drink the Water was clumsily directed by Howard Morris and starred Jackie Gleason as a not-very-inspired-and-even-less-funny leading man.
In 1994, Allen had an opportunity to right the wrongs that Morris and Gleason had done to his script by directing a sort of twenty-fifth anniversary remake of Don't Drink the Water. The fact that the remake was to be a made-for-tv movie prompted some pretty serious dumbing down of the script and a reliance on witless irony that is almost certain to be a disappointment to fans who have come to expect a steady rat-a-tat-tat of brilliance from the repartee of Allen's characters.
The movie (I fear I can't quite bring myself to call anything made for television a 'film') begins with a voiceover introduction that is reminiscent of Cold War documentaries and many of the federally subsidized school films to which those of us who attended elementary school before the 80s were subjected. It's not so much a funny commentary on the deeply masculine voices of the narrators that we Americans went for in the age of conformism as it is a reminder that the target demographic today was never really exposed to such laughably phony and predictably stern masculinity.
Our action begins with the competent (if self-serving) Ambassador Magee (Josef Sommer) leaving his embassy to do some politicking back in the States for a cabinet position. He leaves his inept son Axel (Michael J. Fox) in charge despite his better judgment because Woody Allen didn't realize at this point in his composition that the comedic possibilities of an ineptly managed embassy are not quite as infinite as one would be inclined to imagine.
Exit Ambassador Magee. Enter the Hollanders. Walter and Marion Hollander (Woody Allen and Julie Kavner) are just simple touring Brooklynites who took a snapshot that they weren't supposed to and have now been categorized as spies by the Soviets. Their daughter Susan (Mayim Bialik) manages to join them in the safety of the embassy, but all three of them will be arrested the moment they leave the sanctuary of the building.
Now that the foundation for the inevitable romance between Axel Magee and Susan Hollander has been established, Woody Allen tries nobly to give the film a good strong shot of complications. We have an Arab dignitary (John Doumanian) with fourteen wives and a propensity for falling down and going boom. We have a priest (Dom DeLuise) who first sought asylum in the embassy six years earlier and has since been training as the world's most incompetent magician. We have a chef (Austin Pendleton) whose culinary creations invariably infuriate the finicky Walter Hollander.
All of this inanity is productive of such HI-larious dialogue as Walter's quip concerning mental instability: "Years of insanity have made this guy crazy." I urge you to send donations to Mr. Allen's New York apartment, as he has apparently been reduced to auditioning as a writer for network sitcoms. Later, Walter makes up for his tautological gibe by spewing such anti-logical gems of humor as this: "I can tolerate anybody's orphans except my own."
While I agree that glaring instances of the inability to think can be funny, they are not automatically funny. Woody Allen has demonstrated that he knows how to make them funny, but the success of that formula, in my opinion, is directly tied to the outrageously neurotic selfishness of the lovable nebbish that Allen perfected in the 70s. Walter Hollander is not a nebbish; he's just a putz.
As we might expect from a made-for-tv production, Don't Drink the Water is far less interested in entertaining us than it is in being inoffensive. Judged in terms of what it clearly wanted to be, it is a triumph. It oozes innocuousness. And maybe when it first aired on television, it was a vaguely clever indictment of the shallowness of television fare. But as a movie that one rents at the expense of renting another movie, it's very difficult to justify. Watch it if you're one of those folks who go looking for more reasons to hate Woody Allen. Otherwise, give it a wide berth.
An inept U.S. diplomat romances the daughter of a New Jersey caterer trapped in an embassy behind the Iron Curtain. Directed by Woody Allen.More at HotMovieSale.com
The Hollanders a family of Americans on vacation in Eastern Europe during the 1960s get into trouble after Walter director Allen takes a photo of a su...More at Family Video
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