Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 23, 1994 TAG: 9412230126
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
And then sometimes, annoying is just annoying - like "Mixed Nuts." It didn't have a chance to be anything but annoying. Make that excruciating.
The problem is the script, which is stupid and overwritten, and the direction, which is so manic and pushy you've got to wonder what Nora Ephron eats for breakfast. And the acting. And the fact that it takes an hour and a half to be over.
Ephron wrote the script, too, with her sister Delia. It's about a milquetoast named Philip (Steve Martin) who runs a crisis line in Venice Beach, Calif., with a stuffy old widow named Mrs. Munchnik (Madeline Kahn) and a lonely, attractive woman named Catherine (Rita Wilson). Philip knows a little about trauma: His father was run over by a truck full of mixed nuts.
It's Christmas Eve, and Philip has just found out that the crisis line is being evicted by cold-hearted landlord Stanley (Garry Shandling). Philip's fiancee has dumped him, and Lifesavers is staying busy with the usual holiday-season suicide calls, which the staff is either too distraught or cold-hearted to handle correctly.
(The funniest scene in the movie is Steven Wright in a cameo standing in a phone booth with a gun to his head, begging to be talked out of pulling the trigger. You're not going to see this movie, so I'll go ahead and blow the punchline for you: Catherine can't quite hear him because of static and tells him over and over to just go ahead and "click the button.")
Into this hilarity enters Gracie (Juliette Lewis), the pregnant owner of a boutique, and her ex-con boyfriend Felix (Anthony LaPaglia), who is running around in a Santa suit trying to talk Gracie into not breaking up with him. It's hard to pay attention to plot points when you're trying to sleep through a bad movie that you're being paid to watch, but it seems like every whacko in Venice Beach ends up at the crisis line office. Including a suicidal transvestite named Chris (Liev Schreiber).
Thank God for Chris: (S)he gives Steve Martin his one opportunity in the movie to do the kind of physical comedy - in a tango scene - for which he is justifiably famous.
But there is little to laugh at in "Mixed Nuts." And you'd expect more from Ephron, who wrote "When Harry Met Sally." Failing to understand the delicacy of farce, she put the pedal to the metal and flattened a stellar cast of comedic actors - and her own film - in the process.
Mixed Nuts 1/2*
A Tristar Pictures release, showing at Salem Valley 8 and the Grandin Theatre. Rated PG-13 for bad language and adult themes, 1 hour and 37 minutes.
by CNB