Life Stinks

Mel Brooks – 1991 – USA

Unfairly maligned when it was first released, Mel Brooks’ Life Stinks has only marginally seen its reputation improve over the last 25 years.  It is certainly not as great, by any means, as his two classics of 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, but it is nevertheless his most personal and original work since The Producers (1968).  It is one of his few films that is not a spoof of a particular genre, which became – for better or worse – his bread-and-butter since 1974.  It may have suffered in comparison to similar-themed films of the same year like Other People’s Money and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, but it deserves to be seen on its own terms and not merely in the context of its release circumstances.  It may not be incredibly ambitious, but who says it’s supposed to be?  Brooks was chastised for not being as biting in his satire as a younger, hungrier man might have been, but I find the film’s simplicity and focus both charming and admirable.  Brooks plays a billionaire land-developer who – according to movie clichés – is also devoid of any sense of human compassion.  Accepting a wager one day, he agrees to live for a month in a Los Angeles ghetto he owns without being able to make use of his wealth or fame.  While having his heart softened by the plight of the poverty-stricken, he realizes that some of his former associates are even more ruthlessly money-hungry than he was.  Sure, it practically writes itself, but it’s not the plot that matters; like John Carpenter’s equally modest They Live (1988), it is an artist’s sincere plea for some humane sanity coming out of a decade noted primarily for its greed and class divisions.  I don’t see pretention or pandering in Life Stinks; I see a thoughtful filmmaker using humor to critique the worst problems of society in the great tradition of Charles Chaplin and Preston Sturgess.