BEFORE: This will finish off my chain about, well, crazy people. But it's also the start of a new chain, about corporate America, office politics and the working class. Appropriate for the start of Labor Day weekend, no?
THE PLOT: A bitter ad executive who has reached his breaking point finds himself in a mental institution where his career begins to revive with the help of the hospital's patients.
AFTER: We're back in the institution tonight - ah, so comforting. Three squares and a cot, and all we've got to do is finish this layout's copy before tomorrow's meeting - huh?
Dudley Moore plays Emory Leeson, an adman who snaps - but it's not the kind of snap where he ends up on top of a water-tower with a sniper rifle. (Thank god) He just gets tired of lying to the American people, which is what advertising is, at least according to this movie. He decides to write some honest advertising copy - like "Metamucil. It helps you go to the toilet." This honest approach earns him a trip to the looney bin on the company's dime.
But, accidentally some of his honest ads run in newspapers, and the American people go bonkers for the approach. Here's where the movie lost me a little bit, because the idea was to speak to Americans openly and intelligently, and the ads are depicted as working not because Americans are smart, but because Americans are dumb and impressionable. I suppose it would be too hard to depict Americans acting responsibly? (Come to think of it, I'm not sure I even know what that would look like...)
I also have a problem with the suggestion that all advertising is inherently dishonest. Some of it, sure, but all of it? We do have regulations in this country about false advertising, and we do have class-action suits all the time against medicines that make false claims, or ads that depict a product doing something it doesn't. And every advertising agency has a legal department that reads and approves all of its copy - so you actually can't even say some of the so-called "honest" ads shown in this movie. Saying that buying a Porsche will get you laid should, and would, result in your agency losing the account.
Full disclosure: One of my two jobs is for an animation agent, and my boss works closely with the ad agencies to produce animated commercials - so I do have some working knowledge of the ad game (though I've never watched "Mad Men"), and I know it's not easy coming up with original taglines or ideas. But relying on mental patients to write ads? Seems to me you'd just end up with a bunch of unintelligible storyboards.
What did ring true was the company meeting without the mental patients, where the ad writers realized that no one in the room actually had the capacity to be honest, in a way that would sell a product. Something similar happened a few years ago, when the big agencies realized that today's teens had seen so many phony ads while growing up, that they were essentially immune to corporate B.S. I'm sure there were many meetings where people had to shrug and admit they had no idea how to sell to today's youth market. I think some of them ended up hiring teens to sell to other teens, plus this led to today's free-for-all, where companies seem to be texting, tweeting and facebooking in desperation, just to seem hip and catch the attention of a a few tweens. Why the heck does Miracle Whip need Facebook friends? But that's where we seem to be these days.
I would imagine the agency would form a focus group of honest people - boy scouts, grandmothers - before they'd crawl back and give the mental patients contracts and office equipment and secretaries. Hey, is that guy from "Liar Liar" available?
Still, there are some charming bits here - Emory learns to trust his ad instincts again, and finds love and friendship, and the mental patients are given a purpose. But there's no real resolution here, it feels like another case of someone proposing a movie plot without really coming up with a way to end it.
Also starring Daryl Hannah (last seen in "The Pope of Greenwich Village"), Mercedes Ruehl (last seen in "The Secret of My Success"), Paul Reiser, David Paymer (last seen in "Get Shorty"), and J.T. Walsh (last seen in "The Negotiator") And jeez, was that "Uncle" Floyd Vivino as a mental patient? Good casting there.
RATING: 5 out of 10 "Hello"s
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