by Jason Daniel Baker

Created on: July 08, 2008   Last Updated: July 09, 2008

The Money Pit (1986) Starring Tom Hanks, Shelley Long, Maureen Stapleton, Alexander Gudonov, Joe Mantegna, Wayne Knight, Phillip Bosco, Yakov Smirnoff, Josh Mostel, Carmine Caridi, Brian Backer, Douglass Watson.

Directed by Richard Benjamin.

Running time: 91 minutes.

Rating: PG

Upwardly mobile Entertainment lawyer Walter Fielding (Hanks) and gifted concert violinist (Long) are a young engaged couple who buy a handsome, spacious and formerly majestic home with a tasteful Victorian interior seeing it inside and out without managing to see any of its flaws. They project onto it their most extravagant fantasy of a residence that most closely defines whom they are as people. Close examination can ruin the mystique of almost anything, which is why it is such a necessity in fields like real estate.

Everything in the renovations that can go wrong goes wrong in every kind of way right from the beginning turning their dream house into perhaps a fixer-upper and soon after a seemingly definite disaster and right-off. The elaborate sight gags are brilliantly staged and a whole lot of fun especially if you have never had the same problems with your own place.

Walter, for his part, is drawn like a nearsighted vulture to a deal that is just too good to be true. Yet since he is also marrying a conflicted woman who is fleeing a bad relationship with a self-absorbed conductor (Gudonov, in his very best role) there is consistency to his gullibillity.

The All-American aspiration for owning one's own home is sent up in a big way yet again in this vastly underrated comedy. The 1980s economic boom in North America yielded relative prosperity to a country that had been plagued by a terrible economic depression and high gas prices in the 1970s.

The continent began to hope again as many people suddenly began earning more than they needed and started borrowing on credit again. Working stiffs became captivated because many of them were sick of waiting for their own piece of the American dream to materialise. They mortgaged their future to buy places bigger than they could afford and bigger than they actually needed. Many of them have been turned out of their homes in the decades since.

The plot is not that complicated and maximises the empathy audiences can have for the characters by keeping the situation pretty down to earth. Here we see the lovably earnest main characters try to live happily every after and we hope that they will. But it is still fun watching them fumble around a bit in getting there.

I give Hanks his due. His performance in the male lead's role is the main reason this film finds laughs in as many ways as it does.

Notes:

Tom Hanks graduated from TV sitcom stardom to film quite smoothly in the mid-1980s but other stars like his leading lady here, Shelley Long, never did. The sitcom he was on (Bosom Buddies) was not even that popular and if you have seen it you know why. Enough of the right people have liked him over long enough a period of time for him to skyrocket him to the A-list in an extremely brief amount of time. But I don't think he deserved either of the Oscars he won.

As for Long, she found her niche on Cheers but the show got better some time after she left. That should not be any reflection on her though it turned out to be just that in Hollywood. Though the weather is generally warm and skies usually sunny, business in Hollywood still has a remarkably dark and cold quality on occasion.

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