The World According to Garp

1982 Garp movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Garp.

All of the posters seem to have Robin Williams making that goofy Robin Williams face while appearing to play a rigorous game of pocket pool. The one I liked the best had a much smaller Robin Williams looking up at a gigantic naked baby. That baby starts and [spoiler alert] ends this thing, and it's really hard to criticize a movie that has a penis in its framing device.

George Roy Hill made some of my favorite movies in his not-all-that-prolific career. Slap Shot, The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are all great enough that it should have inspired me to watch this much earlier. Nevertheless, this was one I'd never seen, and when I put together a list of favorite 1982 movies, a couple people pointed it out as a possible omission.

It was not.

Part of the problem might be that I just don't understand it. I understand the narrative, as sprawling and haphazard as it seems to be. Character motivations, especially characters giving into indulgences that we don't even know they have, don't always make sense, but the story's fine and probably even intriguing. What I don't understand is what it all adds up to. With militant self-mutilating feminist groups, a mother proudly recalling how she raped a guy, unnecessary fathers and male heroes, and castration, it seems that there are obvious feminist themes, but it's strange to consider what those might be. A male authored the source material, that same author co-wrote the screenplay with another guy, a male directed the movie, and a male plays the title role, and that further muddies the feminist waters. There are all sorts of weird connections to make. Garp temporarily loses something that connects him to the wacko feminazis, a word I'm using just to get some hits from the Fox News crowd. Lithgow's transsexual former tight end, a surprisingly non-exploitative performance for a movie made in the early 80's, has to add something as his character seems to be the one with the least flaws. Swoosie Kurtz, who I just saw in A Shock to the System, plays this hooker who keeps popping up unexpectedly. Wrestling has to be some sort of symbol for something--structured masculinity or something. There's references to flying, mostly because that's the only thing that Garp knows about his father. The same joke about the reproductive inabilities of basketball players is heard at least three different times, only once with the punchline. Parallel scenes with undertow or undertoads. It seems like these pieces are things we're supposed to put together, but the edges don't quite fit. It's frustrating.

The performances from Glenn Close as Mom, Lithgow as that former football player, and Mary Beth Hart as Garp's love interest are all pretty good, the former two even being nominated for Oscars. I didn't like Williams nearly as much, probably because he plays all of his dramatic characters the exact same. There's this everyman likability he brings to his dramatic characters, but the quirks he gives them, the way he shows various emotions, and the facial expressions he makes are all roughly the same. Granted, these are all things that only Robin Williams could do, but this movie really shows his limitations as a dramatic actor, at least in this stage in his career, and he's a little distracting.

I've never read the book, but from what I can tell, this is a faithful rendition of Irving's novel. So I have no choice but to blame the source material for why this just doesn't quite work.