The release of the Land of the Lost movie actually made no nostalgic for something: the summer of 2001, when I moved to New York, and Bubble Boy the Touchstone release starring a pre-Donnie Darko Jake Gyllenhaal that, by virtue of its very existence, ensured that Audition would not be the single most dysfunctionally weird movie that I saw after my fall off the turnip truck. Directed by Blair Hayes and written by Beau Flynn and Eric McLeod, Bubble Boy stars Gyllenhaal as Jimmy, who, born without an immune system, has grown up in a protective plastic cell in the back of his parents’ suburban house. His mother (Swoozie Kurtz) is a repressive, racist, pathological case who has her husband broken and cowed–no small feat, considering that he’s played by John Carroll Lynch, the most likely suspect in David Fincher’s Zodiac–and who means to keep her son shielded from all the dangers of life, including germs and bacteria and dirty, dirty girls, for his whole life. The satirical implications would be hard to miss even if Hayes had been able to restrain himself from lingering on that close-up of a picture of Ronald Reagan hanging on the wall.
The movie takes off from the same corner of pop culture trivia that inspired both the 1976 TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, starring John Travolta, and a classic Seinfeld episode. But it’s also part of a tradition that includes such memorable, epically uneven ’60s movie comedies as Tony Richardson’s The Loved One and George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck and more recent pictures such as Bill Fishman’s Tapeheads and Adam Resnick’s Cabin Boy–films that just about ruptured their spleen in the effort to break into cultish midnight-movie territory. These are comedies made in the hope that their moments of high inspiration, which might not have been achievable in a more stable environment, will count for enough to make viewers forgive them their overall shrillness and rickety dead patches.
One thing that sets Bubble Boy apart from the bulk of them is that there’s a genuine sweetness at its core, a positive message and a belief in the possibility of true love. Gyllenhaal, whose performance is both as daring and as solid as anything he’s done onscreen, sums this up in his gangly frame and long, jawed harlequin’s face. Having become convinced that the girl next door (Marley Shelton) is the only one for him, with the same conviction he has that his beloved Land of the Lost is the only TV show in the world–presumably, his parents find it easier to humor him in this delusion that to entrust him with the remote–he reacts to the news that she’s getting married to a dipshit (Dave Sheridan) by constructing a portable plastic bubble for himself and shooting out the door on a cross-country quest.
Bubble Boy is not a movie that can be freely recommended without carefully worded advisories and sheepish avoidance of eye contact. It’s a misfire, but an unusually endearing one. Its heart is in the right place, and it wears its concepts on its sleeve in a way that makes you aware that you’re appreciating it more often than you’re laughing at it. But it does have those moments of inspiration, and they stay with your more than the high points of more conventional, “successful” comedies that are engineered to make you chuckle on schedule. The best recurring gag in the movie is the way Jimmy’s plastic ball, which, as if gets more and more scuffed and scratched makes him look like a friendly paperweight snow globe out for its morning run, really does serve him as a protective force field, whether he’s flying through the air after being hit by a van or propelled from an open car or being passed around in a mosh pit. Hayes does his best work as a director in the movie’s off-kilter one-on-one exchanges, such as the encounters between Jimmy and Zach Galifianakis as a bored, furious-looking bus service clerk trapped in a glass booth in the middle of nowhere, and Boti Bliss as a watchful girl in a convenience store. There’s also a role for Danny Trejo as a biker with a sad story. It’s hard not to feel affection for a movie that not only serves up Trejo as a mentor-father figure but fixes him up with a threesome for the happy ending.
It would be even easier to forgive Bubble Boy its faults if it weren’t for the ways in which it feels conventionally Touchstone-like. There’s a lot of screaming and yelling and chasing and even an exploding-fireball sequence. It’s hard to tell if the director meant this stuff as parody; not only does it feel like the real thing, but it’s bludgeoning and over-the-top in a way that actually matches up uncomfortably well with the more ambitiously deadly comic flourishes, such as the subplots involving a religious sect called Bright and Shiny (which gathers at a meeting in the desert presided over by Fabio) and a bunch of “freaks” who have been forced into sideshow slavery by a villainous Verne Troyer. Unfortunately, there’s no way of telling whether this crap was included in the movie as a sop to the studio or if it’s there because the filmmakers fell short of good ideas and needed the padding. It might be easier to tell for sure if we had the rest of Blair Hayes’s body of work with which to compare it to, but Bubble Boy was his first feature film, and we’re still waiting on his second. (For their part, the screenwriters have since collaborated on half a dozen produced scripts, including The Santa Clause 2 and Horton Hears a Who!) This may be one of those unsolved cases that used to keep Robert Stack up nights.
–Phil Nugent
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