Ishtar (1987) Review
6/10
Lyle and Chuck are songwriters. They’re not good at it, they’ll never be good at it, and the film’s first fifteen minutes are the two of them writing terrible lyrics with total sincerity in a New York apartment.
The 6 is for a comedy that commits absolutely to a difficult joke. Bad art performed by people who believe in it is one of the hardest things to write, and Paul Williams wrote bad songs on purpose. That’s far harder than writing good ones. The three and a half points come off for the second half, which abandons the joke for a plot about a map, the CIA and a fictional emirate. The desert material is where the money went and it’s the least funny stretch in the film.
The apartment scenes make me laugh as hard as any comedy of the eighties. Beatty and Hoffman singing awful songs with total faith is a pleasure nobody warns you about when they use the title as a punchline, and it’s the reason the second half lets me down so badly. I wanted the whole film in that apartment and got a spy caper in the sand instead.
The Songs Are the Achievement
Paul Williams, who wrote real standards, was asked to write deliberately bad songs, and the results are the best thing in the picture.
They’re bad in a particular way. The rhymes almost work, the sentiment is enormous, and the structure is competent enough that you can hear the writers thinking they’ve done something.
That’s much harder than parody, because parody mocks from outside. I think Williams deserves more credit for these songs than anybody else on the picture, and I’d happily listen to a whole album of them.
The first sequence is the film in miniature. Two men in a room, fully committed, producing something dreadful, and neither the film nor the performers signal that they know. The comedy is entirely in the gap between effort and result.
Hoffman and Beatty are both playing against reputation. That was May’s stated intention. Beatty, the most confident man in American film, plays the bumbler. Hoffman, then the serious actor of his generation, plays the one who thinks he’s a ladies’ man.
The structure comes from the Hope and Crosby road pictures.
That May was working in deliberately. Those films ran on two men who were friends and rivals at once, moving through a foreign country they didn’t understand, and the form was forty years dead by 1987. Reviving it in the era of Top Gun was a stranger decision than the budget was.
Writing bad work convincingly is harder than writing good work, because it has to be bad in a way that reveals the person who made it instead of the person parodying it. The rule is that the failure must be earnest. Deliberate awfulness signals the author winking, and the audience laughs at the author’s cleverness instead of at the character. Test it by asking whether the character could have written it while trying. If the answer is no, you’ve written a joke about bad art instead of a piece of it.
The Budget Story Is the Whole Story
It was scheduled at around twenty-eight million dollars and came in above fifty-one, against an industry average that year of roughly seventeen million. The overrun came from the location. May wanted the Sahara, Hoffman had argued for keeping it in New York and gave way, and shooting a screwball comedy in Morocco costs what shooting anything in Morocco costs. Then there was the footage. May and Vittorio Storaro reportedly clashed, and she shot something over a hundred hours of raw material. That’s several times what a comedy normally consumes and turns editing into archaeology. May and Beatty were both perfectionists with different visions and Hoffman has described acting as an intermediary between them. Two people with total conviction and equal standing produced a cold war instead of a collaboration.
The origin explains why nobody stopped it. Beatty owed May a considerable professional debt, including an uncredited rewrite on Reds, and set out to repay it by handing her a picture with his own name attached as producer and star. A favor between friends is the one arrangement in which nobody involved is in a position to apply pressure.
The Reviews Were Written in Advance
The press had been reporting the ballooning budget for months. The film missed a Christmas 1986 date and opened five months late in May 1987. That’s a signal the industry reads immediately.
By the time anybody saw it, the story existed. It opened at number one with over four million dollars and collapsed to fourteen million total, and the reviews arrived into a narrative about waste that had been running for a year. It’s unfair that a comedy ended up reviewed as a budget report, and that the jokes in that first act never got a fair hearing from people who’d made up their minds a year earlier.
Part of it was personal. Beatty’s handling of the press had made him few friends, and there’s a reasonable argument that some of the reception was payback instead of criticism. Jonathan Rosenbaum called it the most underappreciated commercial film of 1987 and he was writing against a consensus that had already hardened. He was largely right, and being right in 1988 changed nothing.
A production story that reaches the public before the work does will determine how the work is received, because critics are people who have read the same coverage as everybody else.
The defense is silence during production, and it’s only available if nobody involved is newsworthy. Two stars and a famous director can’t keep a budget quiet.
The corresponding lesson for a writer: the story about how a book was made is the story people carry into the reading. Choose carefully which parts of your process become public.
The Second Half Loses the Joke
Once the men reach Morocco, the film becomes a plot. There’s a map, a resistance movement, the CIA, an emir, a blind camel, and a great deal of running around in sand.
Some of it is funny. The camel is a good extended bit, and Charles Grodin as a CIA man explaining terrible things in a reasonable voice is doing exactly what Grodin does best.
The problem is that the joke changed. The first act is about two men with no talent. That’s human and specific and cruel. The second act is about two idiots caught in an international incident. That’s a plot anybody could have written.
That shift is where the fifty-one million dollars went, and it’s the money that damaged the film in both directions. It bought the material that works least, and its size created the coverage that killed the reception.
It strands Isabelle Adjani. She was among the most celebrated actors in Europe and the film gives her a part that requires her to be a disguise, a plot device and a romantic option in roughly that order, in a film whose interest is entirely in the two men. That squandered talent is worse than anything the budget did. Casting her and then giving her nothing to play is the choice in this film I find hardest to excuse.
The Reappraisal Is Real and Modest
Fourteen million dollars against fifty-one, a loss above forty million, and a name that became a punchline used by people who hadn’t seen it, including on television sitcoms for years afterward.
It’s been reassessed steadily since, helped by repertory screenings and by Elaine May’s reputation recovering generally. May made four features, two of which are now considered close to major, and she directed none after this.
There’s a footnote about how far the damage carried. Coca-Cola owned Columbia at the time, and the company sold the studio a few months after release. Nobody can claim one comedy caused that decision, and the timing is part of why the film became the standing example of a picture that took a whole company down with it. Legends get built out of coincidences that happen to sit next to each other in a calendar, and this one has been repeated as fact for forty years.
That last fact is the cost worth naming. A director with a body of work this distinctive was effectively removed from feature filmmaking at fifty-five, over a comedy that lost forty million dollars, in an industry that’s forgiven far worse from men with less talent.
My own position is the modest version of the defense. This is a good comedy with a first act I love, a weak second half and one great idea about self-delusion, and it’s nowhere near the worst film ever made.
It’s also no lost masterpiece, and I think the people calling it one are overcorrecting. Both camps annoy me a little, because each is busy arguing with the other while the film sits there being pretty good.
The idea worth keeping is the one in the apartment. Two men have organized their entire lives around a talent neither possesses, they know at some level and keep working anyway, and the film neither mocks them for it nor pretends they’re secretly good. Almost nothing else in American comedy holds that position for forty minutes without blinking.
Reappraisal tends to overcorrect, because the people doing it are arguing against a verdict instead of assessing a work. Both the punchline and the masterpiece claim are reactions to each other. The useful position is usually unglamorous. A flawed film with real qualities is a harder thing to say than either extreme and it’s more often true.
On careers: a single expensive failure can end one, and the correlation with the quality of the work is weak. That’s worth knowing before you assume the market is measuring anything.
Should you watch Ishtar?
Yes, for the first forty minutes. They’re as good as American comedy gets at the joke of people who can’t do the thing they’ve organized their lives around. The 6 is what’s left after the desert half drags the average down, and I resent that drop, because the material costing the film its points is the material the money bought.
