Ishtar (1987) Review
6/10
Lyle and Chuck are songwriters. They are not good at it, they will 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 genuinely bad songs on purpose, which is 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 is the least funny stretch in the film.
The Songs Are the Achievement
Paul Williams, who wrote genuine standards, was asked to write songs that are specifically and precisely bad, and the results are the best thing in the picture.
They are 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 have done something. That is much harder than parody, which mocks from outside.
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, which 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 is a ladies’ man.
The structure comes from the Hope and Crosby road pictures, which May was working in deliberately. Those films ran on two men who were friends and rivals at once, moving through a foreign country they did not 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 have 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, which is 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, which is 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.
Part of it was personal. Beatty’s handling of the press had made him few friends, and there is 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 is only available if nobody involved is newsworthy. Two stars and a famous director cannot 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 is 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, which is human and specific and cruel. The second act is about two idiots caught in an international incident, which is a plot anybody could have written.
That shift is where the fifty-one million dollars went, and it is 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.
Isabelle Adjani is stranded by it. She was among the most celebrated actors in Europe and is given 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.
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 had not seen it, including on television sitcoms for years afterward.
It has 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 is a footnote about how far the damage carried. Columbia was owned by Coca-Cola at the time, and the company sold the studio a few months after release. Nobody can honestly 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 has 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 superb first act, a weak second half and one genuinely great idea about self-delusion, and it is nowhere near the worst film ever made. It is also not a lost masterpiece, and the people claiming it is are overcorrecting.
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 are 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 is more often true.
On careers: a single expensive failure can end one, and the correlation with the quality of the work is weak. That is worth knowing before you assume the market is measuring anything.
Should you watch Ishtar?
Yes, for the first forty minutes, which are as good as American comedy gets at the specific joke of people who cannot do the thing they have organized their lives around. The desert half is where the money is and the apartment is where the film is.
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