CLIFFORD 1994
10%
Directed by Paul Flaherty
Written by Jay Dee Rock and Bobby von Hayes
Starring Martin Short, Charles Grodin, Mary Steenburgen, Dabney Coleman, Richard Kind
Synopsis
A mischievous ten-year-old boy sabotages the life of his successful uncle in a quest to visit the amusement park Dinosaur World and win the affections of his uncle’s fiancée.
Why We Love It
In his review, Roger Ebert called Clifford “profoundly not funny,” “irredeemably not funny,” and “a movie that should never have been made.” Ouch. Although, as hilarious as we think this Martin Short vehicle is, the critic had a point with that last dig: Clifford put one of the final nails in the coffin of the already-bankrupt Orion Pictures. The Chicago Sun-Times scribe was hardly alone in his vitriol: people hated this movie. Part of what puzzled the public upon Clifford’s release was that it wasn’t clear who this PG comedy was for. It’s not really for children—pedophilia gags, body-shaming, and a generally icky and cynical vibe run throughout—and the levity Short brought to ¡Three Amigos! and Father of the Bride is largely absent. It’s… a weird one.
But Clifford is almost admirable in its unrelenting embrace of its weirdness. The title character purposefully dresses in a spiffy suit jacket, tie, penny loafers, and schoolboy-formal shorts, like AC/DC’s Angus Young. In this getup, he tosses off antiquated phrases like “a kindly old priest gave it to me, Da” and “thank you ever so kindly, sir” with a gravitas and knowing wink no ten-year-old could ever muster. There’s an odd (to put it lightly) quasi love triangle between a grown-up (Charles Grodin), his bride-to-be (Mary Steenburgen), and Clifford. And the titular character’s father, a howl-inducing Richard Kind, is on the verge of a stroke (something Clifford callously pokes fun at), while his mother is a clear alcoholic (probably, we’re guessing, because of her son). It’s a lot of ugliness packed into what people probably took for a sunny problem-child comedy.
Without the comedic chops to back it up, Clifford would have just been a WTF-inducing curiosity. But the repartee between Short (having fun with the unflagging enthusiasm and eagerness he displayed on Saturday Night Live and SCTV) and Grodin (returning to the smiling-liar routine he nailed in Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid) is incredibly funny and worth rewatching. Not surprisingly, the lambasted feature has since attained a cult status among some comedy fans. One such defender, Tom Scharpling, the host of the podcast The Best Show, regularly brings up its brilliance and even bought Clifford’s outfit at auction. In Ebert’s scathing takedown, he also noted, “The movie is so odd, it’s almost worth seeing just because we’ll never see anything like it again. I hope.” We agree with everything but “I hope.”