Stuck Under the Cleetz follows a painfully terrible baseball team throughout the 1989 season, from the early days of spring training, into the dog days of summer, and, finally, the pennant race and the World Series. The Cleetz finished with a 22-140 record—the second-worst record in major league baseball history—and ended the season seventy-seven games behind the World Series Champion Oakland A’s, a team loaded with All-Stars and memorable players, including Billy Beane, the subject of the Oscar-nominated movie Moneyball.
Were it not for major league baseball’s tradition of having one player from each team represented in the All-Star game every summer, the Cleetz would not have had even one All-Star on their roster; in a purely merit-based contest, none of their players would’ve been remotely under consideration. Thanks to those arcane MLB rules, the consensus least-deserving All-Star in history was named when Cliff Fuzzing (Galifianakis), the Cleetz’ hirsute second baseman—who was batting a team-leading .184 when the midsummer classic rolled around—made the All-Star team.
The opening scene in Stuck Under the Cleetz reminds you of the start of pretty much any other baseball movie you’ve ever seen. It begins with the camera panning the outfield of a medium-size minor-league baseball stadium, on a cloudless, 82-degree day in Tucson, Arizona in March, where players are stretching, playing catch, and shagging fly balls. It’s the kind of day for which people in the Midwestern and New England states pay hundreds of dollars to experience every spring when their own states are mired in a polar vortex, and everyone, player or coach, is reveling in the perfect weather. It’s a good two minutes into Stuck Under the Cleetz before any actual words are spoken, which is fine, because Kevin Nealon’s cinematography during the opening scene is nothing short of spectacular. Then the film jump-cuts across town to the Cleetz facility.
The film focuses largely on the Cleetz’ “star” players: Fuzzing, left fielder Lars Larsmobile (Jason Biggs), first baseman Rigor Clovis (Andy Samberg), right fielder Dummy Hoyt (Keanu Reeves), ace pitcher Chief Bigbottom (Dwayne Johnson), and closer Kermit Gamble (Ashton Kutcher). The first dialogue begins with those six sitting in the locker room after the first day of spring training, discussing their optimism about the upcoming season. You can’t help feeling optimistic along with them. Every team begins the season 0-0, after all.
The optimism fades quickly, however, after the Cleetz begin the regular season with seventeen straight losses, and soon you find yourself hoping these increasingly depressed young men just win a game. The Cleetz’ manager, who is never named nor seen, but instead appears sporadically throughout the film as a shadowy figure with his voice altered, utters: “I’m telling my players to play the best that they can. And the sad thing is, most of them are.”
There’s a scene about fifteen minutes into Stuck Under the Cleetz that’s been hard for me to un-see. Do you remember that part in The Naked Gun where they showed the baseball bloopers between innings of the Seattle Mariners-California Angels game?
Specifically, the part where a player is sliding into second base and he gets mauled by a tiger? Well, that actually happened to Fuzzing during a game. Since The Naked Gun was released in 1988, it wasn’t a case of art imitating life—it was a case of life imitating art, or perhaps confirmation that we live in godless entropy. The scene is needlessly graphic and several minutes long—Nealon proves his mettle as an impresario of viscera, to rival H. G. Lewis—yet you can’t turn away. Nor are you even the least bit confused as to how or why a fully grown, five-hundred-pound Bengal tiger got into a major league baseball stadium. You just keep watching, agape, hoping Fuzzing survives the attack.
The film slows down a bit after that, but it’s just as heart-wrenching when you watch as Larsmobile gets the news he’s been traded to the Minnesota Twins. For a left-handed batting glove. (There’s even a short scene where callers to Minnesota sports talk radio shows complain about how the Twins got screwed in that trade.) Biggs’ performance controls the screen here. When Clovis tries to console Larsmobile by telling him to keep his chin up and reminding him that it’s a top-of-the-line left-handed batting glove, Larsmobile loses it. He completely snaps. Like the Fuzzing tiger attack, it’s uncomfortable to watch. It’s akin to when you see a bearded lady selling bananas outside of an elementary school: you want it to stop, but you can’t seem to be able to do anything about it, so it just goes on.
Shortly afterward, Clovis himself gets traded. This scene itself isn’t nearly as emotional as the previous one—unlike Larsmobile, Clovis was traded for an actual player—but the impetus behind it is flustering. Clovis had recently raised his batting average over .200, and the Cleetz were worried he’d be too expensive to re-sign in the offseason, so they traded him to the Los Angeles Dodgers for a minor league first baseman and cash considerations. The film follows Clovis to Los Angeles, where on his first day in town he’s eating alone at the Koo Koo Roo in Santa Monica. It’s pathetic in its own way.
All-Star weekend arrives, and Fuzzing, despite still being in the hospital, is named as the Cleetz’ lone representative. Gamble, feeling more deserving than Fuzzing, visits Fuzzing in the hospital and punches him in the face. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Stuck Under the Cleetz has more uncomfortable scenes than any sports film in recent memory.
As the season progresses, the film suffers from a lack of a romantic subplot, much as the Cleetz did themselves. Only one of the Cleetz players went on a date the entire season, and for legal reasons, it can’t be dramatized in any medium.
Fan Appreciation Night sees Bigbottom strike out a major league record twenty-six batters in one game, a record that still stands to this day. Of course, it also sees the Cleetz lose 10-2 to the Detroit Tigers, in part because Bigbottom also walked eleven batters, hit six more, and gave up five home runs.
During the final weekend of the season, Hoyt suffered a career-ending shoulder injury. Injuries happen in sports, but usually not like this: Hoyt got injured while chasing a fly ball and running into Jarry Park’s thirty-foot-high right field wall. Forty-seven times. Needless to say, it’s a disturbing scene. Arguably more disturbing than the Fuzzing tiger attack.
The film ends as most feel-good baseball films end: with a World Series victory. Just not for the Cleetz.
Written and directed by Shia LaBeouf. From the memoir by Saffron Mangiopel. Starring: Michael Fassbender, Elle Fanning, Fin Seekel, Laetitia Baldwin, Summit Arapetian, and Nike Doukas.
A mere decade ago, the prospect of a mainstream film with a sympathetic practicing cannibal at its center was nearly unthinkable; now, with financing from the Inclusive Consumption Society, such a film arrives, provoking only scattered protests from a faltering movement transparently laboring to console itself.
Of course, what was scandalous ten years back, when Saffron Mangiopel’s memoir-cum-polemic-cum-groundbreaking-cookbook was first published, is frankly a bit ho-hum today. Resource depletion in the developed world is no longer a terrifying specter but a grinding fact of life. Our fitful, bygone yearnings for an egalitarian nation look touchingly childlike in retrospect. Very few of us today would condemn an under-resourced family’s decision to shrink its consumption footprint by bi-directionalizing its food chain presence.
I’m tempted to write two reviews: one of the film as it imagines itself to be (a daring slap in the face to polite bourgeois sensibilities); the other of the film that, perhaps somewhat inadvertently, has emerged—a gentle, carefully observed story of one woman’s journey from callow gastro-tourist to committed full-spectrum omnivore. But I’ll try to ignore the chasm between the film as it wishes it were and the film as it is, and focus on the latter.
Director Shia LaBeouf, returning to fictional live action after finally uploading 2032’s full-year-length unedited Google glass experiment Follow Me, sensibly excises the non-narrative components of Mangiopel’s literary genre-bender (aside from an effectively mouth-watering opening-credits sautéing sequence). Serving the Un
derserved: A Recovering Vegetarian’s Quest to Forge Her Link in the Lateral Food Chain, focused, naturally enough, on Mangiopel’s personal transformation (even as it plainly sought to raise awareness about the bureaucratic obstacles to responsible intraspecies ingestion). LaBeouf broadens the story’s scope, allotting more than half his precious minutes to the telling of the other side of the tale: the plight of the Wendigos.
Abe Wendigo, played with tautness and cunning by silver fox Michael Fassbender, is the aging patriarch of a destitute California Central Valley family, descended from successful farmers but laid low by decades of extreme weather events and dried-up aquifers. Fierce, proud, and morally complex, Wendigo schemes to bait-and-switch Mangiopel (Elle Fanning), a naïve first-time buyer obsessed with the prospect of consuming his strapping, prime-aged only son (newcomer Fin Seekel, scrumptious indeed).
Of course, perpetrators of such illegal replacement schemes face challenges greater than concocting persuasive manmeat substitutes—the real trick is permanently disappearing the putative main course. But before Wendigos pere and fils get too far in their journey down the oven-escapee underground railroad, the story takes a turn. I won’t reveal whether the Wendigos carry through with their planned deceit; I’ll just say that the film, much more so than the memoir, chronicles Abe Wendigo’s discovery of a depth of generosity—and, one might say, tenderness—that neither he nor we imagined he possessed.
Indeed, the film’s deep humanity is felt in the way it steers clear of blaming this family, or by extension the many subprime families they presumably resemble, for failing to secure adequate resourcing before choosing to reproduce. In LaBeouf’s moral landscape, what matters is the journey forward, not the path one took to get here.
If the film is hard on anyone, it’s the emerging global-omnivore set—our finickiness about sourcing, our occasionally self-serving concern with fair compensation for the consumed, the revival in some quarters of a (let’s face it) primitive worldview that grants quasi-magical powers to metabolized heart ventricles and prefrontal cortices.
Fanning, rumored to be a convert herself, affectionately satirizes the neuroses and excesses of the contemporary urban anthro-predator.
Part of the startling appeal of the memoir was that Mangiopel didn’t fit our then-current stereotype of the full-spectrum consumer—a demographic once dominated by the male, Republican, and rich. As a liberal, lesbian content producer, Mangiopel’s very public decision to become an early adopter of the lateral-consumption lifestyle was a tipping point for the mainstreaming of the movement. Witnessing the stages of her conversion—her dawning recognition that the old write-a-check model of assisting the unfortunate only creates interlocking systems of dependence—is engrossing and instructive. What Abe Wendigo really wants, after all, is what we all want: a shot at dignity. One of this film’s accomplishments is to confirm, subtly but clearly, that unearned access to resources, while technically life-sustaining, is rarely soul-sustaining.
We may wish for a world that lets every inhabitant procreate at their whim and die of natural causes—but it’s not the world we live in. Clinging to a simplistic and time-worn humanist fantasy serves no one. Artists like Mangiopel and LaBeouf choose to abandon sentiment and explore with rigor: What are the ways we can realistically nourish each other?
Not that all is copacetic between collaborators. Mangiopel has publicly slammed LaBeouf’s decision to introduce an undercurrent of erotic tension to the pivotal scene in which the anthropophage initiate goes to “meet her meat,” as she waggishly phrases it. No doubt her outrage is honestly felt, but that doesn’t make it justified; like many authors before her, Mangiopel may not be the most reliable interpreter of her own work. A quick kindlesearch turns up seven instances of the phrase “sinewy arms” in her single volume (three each for “meaty thighs” and “tight glutes,” for what it’s worth). In interviews, she openly acknowledges her objectification of young Master Wendigo but argues that it was entirely clinical and an important part of her personal growth towards fully informed consumer.
Whatever the merits of her case, onscreen it would be hard to avoid eroticism if you tried. Indeed, Fanning’s Mangiopel appears to be trying—which, as with most attempts to smother passion, merely fans the flames. Seekel plays off her smoldering reticence beautifully—rejecting any hint of self-pity, his supple features register a swirl of defiance, pride, and amused recognition of the predator’s inconvenient attraction to her prey.
Consumed clocks in at well under two hours. Some will question the choice to tell a complex story at such a breakneck pace. But it’s enlightening to step away from today’s standard thirteen-hour format, and remember how much power we used to pack into a hundred minutes of well-crafted storytelling. Admittedly, with so much to tell and so little time to tell it, the film drives forward somewhat relentlessly, only rarely repeating important plot points, and, strikingly, eliminating sponsorblasts and tweetbreaks entirely; for an old film buff, this is great nostalgic fun, but obviously will entail some attention span recalibration for the general public.
It’s worth the restraint. Consumed ends up succeeding despite its intentions. Where it aims to be a boldly candid take on a forbidden topic, it succeeds by being knowing and wry about a settled matter. Detractors may call it ironic that Mangiopel’s journey towards embracing this unfortunate family’s full humanity was facilitated by her decision to eat one of its members. It’s characteristic of LaBeouf’s steely moral focus that he doesn’t flinch from such complexity. The result is consuming indeed.
Directed by Wim Wenders. Written by Kilgore Trout. Cinematography by Robby Müller. Starring: Jerry Lewis, Madeline Kahn, Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk, and Willem Dafoe.
Death of a Clown is an odd duck of a film; or, better yet, the sort of rare bird of a film that one only tends to find in moldering books devoted to the extinct—all hand-drawn, pre-Audobon baroquery in faded violet lac and cuttlefish brown blending together on the tea-colored page. A bird so odd it seems as though it could have never walked the earth (much less swum or flown it) but there it is, Latinate binomial (or in this case, its LCC number) burnished proud and chest puffed. It was “released” in 1979.
Even for those who know the story of The Day the Clown Cried, it is a shock to see Jerry Lewis dressed as Hitler. And though, yes, there is the sort of hamming and high-stepping and expectorating one might expect—the borschty, pidgin Hochdeutsch (Lewis, in fact, speaks little throughout the film, preferring instead to vocalize in the enthusiastic manner of Fillipo Marinetti, but when he does, he employs a rather broad take on boarding-house Yinglish); the endless who’s on first? heiling and re-heiling between Führer Lewis and his subordinates every time the former enters or exits a room (including die Toilette)—there is a tearful, torn-up pathos, too—the vaudevillian grasping at the existential—the kind that we all wanted to believe our star tried to summon in Clown Cried but apparently just couldn’t, at least not behind the camera (or so the stories go).
This time, it is Wim Wenders at the helm, directing from a script by Kurt Vonnegut (though he is credited, naturally, as “Kilgore Trout”) and these things, it seems, made all the difference.
Contrary to what one might imagine, the light touch is not necessarily the right touch when it comes to sensitive material, and it is easy to imagine how Lewis must have gotten it wrong in his infamous first attempt at a Holocaust picture—very silly, yes, but not sublimely so; quite stupid, sure, but clearly not insane; way too much schmaltz, of course, but somehow also not enough by half—if the accounts of Harry Shearer are to be believed. Vonnegut’s script—written at the fecund and dissolute height of his strange and considerable powers at a time in which, approaching fifty, marriage to highschool sweetheart Jane Cox dissolving, both he and his son Mark experienced major schizophrenic breaks—is, unlike Lewis’ ill-fated attempt to find a funny, middlebrow approach to the terror at the heart of the twentieth century, just crazy enough
to work.
The plot is a typically Troutian conceit enlarged, much like Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night before it, to Wagnerian proportions by the nightmare of its real-life historical milieu rendered in striking, noirish detail by cinematographer Robby Müller. In it, Hitler is a sophisticated, joke-telling robot, sent to Earth by God (played with trademark weltschmerz by Peter Falk) as part of a routine plan to gauge the development of humanity’s sense of humor and moral scruples. Confident that Hitler will be laughed out of the Munich beer hall as soon as the absurd, preprogrammed words start caroling out from his realistic mechanical mouth, heaven is instead shocked by the unironic ovation and subsequent putsch leading to the eventual deposition of the Weimar government and the robot’s ascendency to the chancellorship of the so-called Third Reich.
Desperate to prevent further chaos but committed to a Leibnizian cosmological ordnung and thereby unwilling to intervene directly in human affairs, heaven sends a technician in the form of the archangel Selaphiel (an ethereal Bruno Ganz) to reprogram the beleaguered clown-bot. Despite the angel’s best efforts, however, including increasing the wiggliness of the robot’s signature funny-man mustache and adjusting the voice and body control knobs to their most barky and spastic settings, almost nobody seems to “get it” and Hitler’s power and influence continue to go unchecked and unchallenged. The fact that Hitler himself is so obviously Jewish, and that his increasingly flagrant anti-Semitism therefore can’t possibly be taken seriously, seems to escape everyone, even when Selaphiel adjusts the knob with the Magen David on it to the point where Lewis is kvetching in Hebrew about it being “like a sauna in here” between lines in his public speeches and mopping schwitz from his brow with a tallit. That the robot’s girlfriend, Eva (Madeline Kahn playing a surreal variant of Lili von Shtupp), is herself so obviously not a goy doesn’t trouble the Volk either, not as one grinning burgher (Ernest Borgnine in an uncredited cameo) remarks, with such “schöne blonde haare!”
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