Ishtar (1987)

Naive American civilians and a hypocritical, amoral CIA blunder into the Middle East tinder box with its web of Shiite and tribal wars and a roiling opposition to the entrenched Arab despots -- some supported by the US. Other foreign powers, e.g., Turkey, Russia, fall all over themselves trying to get an edge in influence. An ancient map shows borders that could launch the next/last world war.

No, that’s not the latest Oliver Stone. Or CNN. It’s Elaine May’s 1987 comedy Ishtar. The film’s production rumours so soured the press that despite early audience approval it was numbered among the worst films ever made. That’s how far ahead of its time Ishtar was. Though she continued to write, even collaborating with Ethan Coen and Woody Allen on a recent Broadway omnibus, May hasn’t directed another movie since. Now that the DVD release won positive reviews in the New York Times and on IMDB, I’m glad to see the film is finally getting its due. 

In this film May combined the form of the Crosby-Hope Road movies with the spirit of Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. Dustin Hoffman (Chuck) and Warren Beatty (Lyle) respectively play the Hope and Crosby song and dance men, but with two twists. First, May plays Beatty against his reputation as legendary stickman and denies him Crosby’s romantic edge over the delusional Hope character. Here Beatty is shy among women and incompetent:

    “Yeah, but you gotta have the looks, Chuck. I mean, you walk into a place like that and girls just     want ya, ya know, ya got that kinda face. Kinda mean lookin' but with character. And the way you walk, you can only do that with a small body! Did ya ever hear of a big sports car? I mean, if I'd look like you....”

That, remember, is Warren Beatty envying Dustin Hoffman. Lyle doesn’t recognize a woman when he wrestles with her. Even when he holds her breasts. Astonishingly, the critics failed to pick up Elaine May’s tongue in chic.

Secondly, the men are terrible composers and singers. (But Beatty and Hoffman are brilliant in performing mediocrity.) This is where it draws from Spinal Tap. Like that group Chuck and Lyle have a musical ambition entirely incommensurate with their talent and sensitivity. Here’s the composition Chuck sings to a couple celebrating their 53rd anniversary (which, by the way, he had a year to compose):  

“I'm leaving -- some love in my Will. I'm leaving -- some love in my Will. My life is nearly over, and time goes by so fast. So I'm going to give you a present, to thank you for the past.”

Then Chuck wonders why the people threw food at him.

The bathetic lyrics by May and Paul Williams emblematize the shallow sentimentality and naivety of American culture. A doo-wop trio sing “I’m quitting high school cuz you don’t like me.” In another lyric, romance dissolves into pop culture nostalgia:

“I see her standing in the backyard of my mind, she cracks her knuckles and the scab that's on her knee won't go away. I see the woman waiting in her eyes and I can see the love but I can't see the Brooklyn Dodgers in LA.”

Another song simply alternates “Hello”, “Baby” and “Love you.” Here Lyle neatly encapsulates the genre’s cloying sweetness: “Hot fudge love, cherry-ripple kisses. Lip-smacking, back-slappin', perfectly delicious.” Yet as Chuck lauds another Lyle banality, “Shit man, when you're on you're on.”

This musical silliness shades into the film’s political theme when Shirra Assel (Isabelle Adjani, playing the Dorothy Lamour role of exotic temptress) warns the smitten Americans that “This is an ancient devious world, and you come from a young country. Promise me you will keep my secret without trying to understand it.” By film’s end the freedom fighter/terrorist has improbably grown misty-eyed over the clods. She flouts her cell to save their lives. In 1987, of course, the audience could still absolve a freedom fighter of terrorism.

Our American heroes are completely unable to handle the area’s politics, as the government, freedom fighters and CIA all resolve to kill them. For CIA director Jim Harrison (Charles Grodin), “No, if two Americans die it has to be unofficially.” Two other CIA agents reveal the area’s confusion of cultural signs:

-The KGB is here. I recognize two agents.

-The ones dressed as Texans?

-No. The ones dressed as Arabs. The ones dressed as Texans are Arab agents. I also recognize two guys from Turkish intelligence.

-Which ones? The ones in the Hawaiian shirts?

-No, the Bermuda shorts. The ones in the Hawaiian shirts are tourists.

That world is so dangerous that even a simple code -- say, “I want to buy a blind camel” -- can freeze into a burdensome reality. Drawing a “red line,” anyone? When Chuck and Lyle admire their blind camel’s stubbornness -- “Stupid-ass camel! He'd rather sit there and die!” -- they point to their own odd kind of heroism. Their completely unfounded musical ambition and confidence are a desperate attempt to suppress their real sense of their own failure. Chuck lived with his parents until he was 32. Both lose their wives (Tess Harper, Carol Kane). Chuck’s depression hits him both when he’s high -- on a high rise ledge -- and in the windswept desert. Lyle feebly consoles him:

“It takes a lot of nerve to have nothing at your age, don't you understand that? Most guys'd be ashamed, but you've got the guts to just say 'to hell with it'. You say that you'd rather have nothing than settle for less, understand?”

Stranded on the desert, among vultures, betrayed by all, they reach for spirit:  

Lyle:Chuck, this isn't really a good time to get depressed.

Chuck: You're right, I don't know what's wrong with me.

Lyle: Look at the upside: we're not livin' lives of quiet desperation. 

Beckett meets Spinal Tap when the blundering incompetents find a kind of heroism simply in carrying on, refusing to submit to their awareness of their failure.

They have their moments. The scene where Chuck is forced to to fake Berber lingo to auction off black market weaponry is a classic of Hope-ian bafflegab. He stumbles into effectiveness when he pulls a cry out of the very quality he needs to succeed here. Chuck stretches Chutzpah (yiddish for huge nerve) into Chutzpah-yi-yi! When an extemporized shriek carries such wit and weight you know the script is a work of masterful intelligence.

And why wouldn’t it be? It’s Elaine May, the genius of those sharp-eared satiric skits she did with Mike Nichols. She wrote and directed those shrewd satires, A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, and the brilliant Mikey and Nicky, where she outdid John Cassavetes on his own territory. Elaine May couldn’t make a dumb movie. She had already worked with Warren Beatty on the script of his Heaven Can Wait (1978) and would co-write Mike Nichols’ Clinton parable, Primary Colors (1998). But in its political satire Ishtar is closer -- indeed a companion piece -- to Nichols’  Charlie Wilson’s War (2007). The notorious Ishtar, far from being ineffectual, prepared for those later political satires and also, with its awful music and lyrics, the new genre of Cringe Comedy, like the Christopher Guest mockumentaries, the work of Ricky Gervais, and TV series like the transplanted The Office, Girls and Veep. 

Our (of course, anti-) heroes get a happy ending. They coerce the CIA into recording and promoting -- world wide -- a concert recording of their godawful music. Hard to believe? Remember, the CIA furtively funded the lefty British cultural periodical, Encounter, for its odd political purposes. And the losers survive.

The film closes on their most significant lyric: 

Telling the truth can be dangerous business;

Honest and popular don't go hand in hand.

If you admit that you play the accordion,

No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band.

But we can sing our hearts out.

And if we're lucky, then no neighbors complain.

Because life is the way we audition for God;

Let us pray that we all get the job.

Too bad that after Ishtar Elaine May didn’t. Again, she was that far ahead of her time.