Review: The Producers

"Do you know who I used to be?" the smoking jacket-clad Max Bialystock asks his new accountant, Leo Bloom. Indeed, Leo does know all about the Max Bialystock of yore – producer of the kind of sub-Ziegfeld revues that kept a million chorus girls in their stay-ups and off the Depression streets – and so should you, really, because this story has already been told several times. But by the time Nathan Lane gets to broadcast this primal roar for attention, Max's glory is long gone, and Leo has, in fact, only nebbished his way over in button-down blue to paint Max's red books black. It takes the boys three production numbers to get there, but eventually, Max and Leo cook up a scheme to raise $2 million to produce a terrible musical called Springtime for Hitler. Safe in the knowlege that they can't be forced to pay back investors if they can't prove a profit, they then plan to take the seed money and run off to Rio when the thing flops. Need I say it doesn't all go according to plan?

This incarnation of The Producers (I know needn't tell you that this is a film, based on a milquetoast/successful Broadway musical, based in turn on Mel Brooks' best film) is less a satire of show business than an indictment of creative accounting with songs and jokes thrown in. In any other year, director Susan Stroman's effort might have been the most noteworthy picture about accounting to see wide release; but, working in the shadow of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Producers is left to scramble for a distant second place. It might have been a fairer fight, but frankly, the documentary had better tunes.


I've thus far managed to escape The Producers' Broadway run, but considering most in the know report that the musical has made it to the screen virtually unchanged, I can't say I feel as though I've missed out. Put very simply – and I say this as a fan of musicals, as a general believer in contemporary Broadway, as someone who not very long ago spent an entire Saturday night illegally downloading Side by Side by Sondheim – it seems as though this musical sucks. The score is full of unmemorable melodies and truly awful rhymes (by the time "Broadway producer" meets its coupling with "dreams come true, Sir", even the most highbrow of patrons will find themselves longing for a bit of the ol' Andrew Lloyd Webber cerebral rape). The choreography, as rendered here, would be quite impressive for a grade school production, and the book almost seems to resent having to stop short for every deadweight excuse for a number. In short, this is lowest common denominator stuff.

Beyond the blatant profit motive, I can't think of a good reason for The Producers: The Movie Musical to exist. Even if it does have loftier aspirations, the various hands at work here don't appear to be trying very hard. The film plays as though someone hauled the sets and players straight from Broadway to a soundstage, set up a camera and asked the actors to procede with a straight runthrough. Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, reprising the roles that made them very rich, fail to adjust their performances from back-row-bound blast, and new cast additions Will Ferrell and Uma Thurman appear to have been coached to simply keep up. On the whole, the people on screen just don't even attempt to communicate with one another; instead, they play to a live audience that isn't there. The result is that The Producers feels a lot like one of those live-action cartoons that Disney has made sporadically for 50 years or more, but with none of the wit or even pathos of, say, That Darn Cat. There are at least one or two additional dick jokes, but even when the script goes straight for the groin, the "dirty" punchlines are so full of family-friendly helium that they seem to fall far short of the threat posed by either a bedknob, or a broomstick.

The biggest disappointment here is Broderick. Having spent most of the last decade blue-screening away the hours not spent on the stage, he seems to have forgotten entirely how to command a cameras attention. What the hell happened to Ferris Bueller? I'd argue that even his work in the mostly superlative Election was underwhelming, which would mean that this guy hasn't churned out a truly fascinating piece of screen work since Ben Stiller's brutally underappreciated The Cable Guy. When some future race discovers his filmography, I imagine they'll pinpoint 1997 as the year in which Matthew Broderick was castrated.

It's no accident that the only time the actor seems alive in this film is in the one scene in which he's allowed to address (and thereby acknowledge) the camera. With endlessly irksome screenhog Lane taking a breather on the sidelines, he gets to give a great little prologue to the film's one cinema-aware dance number, a widescreen partner splash in which Thurman shows us what might have happened had Fred ever let Ginger lead. For three or four minutes, The Producers is suddenly witty, classy, cheeky and delightful. And then the couple disappears to apparently fuck behind a couch, and you remember that the film you're watching really isn't very good.

Speaking of bad decisions made in the name of sex positivity: the energy that GLAAD has expended on ensuring positive reviews for Brokeback Mountain would have been better spent protesting this script. Seemingly hellbent on teaching your children how to tell the difference between Tom of Finland and Carson Kressley, the film is bursting with tired queen jokes wrapped in garish lavender velour. Did you know that Broadway is very, very gay?  Do you care?

I'll admit that collected flashes of The Producers make for a good trailer. But watch what the false advertising makes you wish for: after I saw the film, I'd often accidentally catch a television commerical for it, and, again and again, actually get sucked into thinking that this might be a movie worth seeing. It's rare that I'll so bluntly trash anything, but The Producers truly warrants a warning away from the cineplex. If it needs further summing up, the problem is this: there's nothing more embarrasing than comedy that consistently falls flat. I suppose your results may vary, but throughout the two-plus hours that The Producers held me captive, I laughed out loud only once. That sole guffaw came at a point within the show-within-the-show, wherein Gary Beach plays a version of Adolf Hitler clearly influenced by Judy Garland. I don't know about you, but as far as atrocities go, I think that woulda been a sight to see!