Matinee

Joe Dante – 1993 – USA

Written by Charlie Haas, Joe Dante’s Matinee is a thoroughly charming comedy about childhood and the magic of the movies.  It’s like the unpretentious, American response to the art-house crowd-pleaser Cinema Paradiso (1988).  The quaintness and sentimentality of that film is replaced in Matinee by a modest forthrightness in its treatment of character, time and place.  Without qualification or undue appeals to nostalgia, Dante plants us squarely in Key West, Florida in 1962 on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought us the closest we ever came to war with the Soviet Union.  Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton) is a good-natured fourteen-ish boy who loves monster movies and is thrilled to learn that  B-movie producer Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman) is coming to town to host an advance screening of a new movie called Mant!  (That’s right; man + ant + atomic radiation = Mant.)  Being character-driven, the film is brilliantly subtle in its approach of some pretty sober issues; quite unlike the heavy-handed prestige movies that usually gobble up Oscars.  Gene’s father is a Marine being sent to Cuba, and in his absence Gene functions without complaint as the man of the house, providing emotional support both to his mother and his younger brother.  His love of movies is not an escape from reality; it is a source of pleasure that he reserves for himself whether others understand it or not, though he also tries to share it with his brother and friends from school.  In one enchanting scene, Woolsey pontificates to Gene on the cultural legacy of the movies and our human need for pictorial storytelling; explaining how crude etchings on the walls of caves gradually evolved into projections on screens in theaters.  Gene also deals with issues like the failings of adults and role-models, the tricky terrain of budding romance, and the capacity in smallish communities for mob-mentality and hysteria.  The film works, in my view, because the kids, Gene and his peers, are presented as genuine, not crassly hip or wholesome as in most mainstream movies and TV.  The fact that Gene, for example, has a discriminating taste, (evidenced by his eye-rolling at a corny, Disneyesque comedy), makes him so much more likeable.  But of course Goodman is who really steals the show as Woolsey, based loosely on the king of movie gimmicks in the 50s and 60s, William Castle, who wired theater seats with electricity and flew dummies over the audience’s heads in theaters showing various films such as The Tingler (1959) and 13 Ghosts (1960).  Most of all, it’s the careful handling of the nostalgic elements by Dante that makes Matinee exceptional; in fact, it’s difficult to think of anything comparable since most such movies go so overboard with sepia and schmaltz that they become intolerable.