Hav Plenty is basically an amateur movie, with some of the good things and many of the bad that go along with first-time efforts. Set in a comfortable milieu of affluent African Americans, it’s ostensibly the autobiographical story of its writer-director, Christopher Scott Cherot, who plays a homeless writer named Lee Plenty. As the movie opens, he’s cat-sitting for a woman named Havilland Savage (Chenoa Maxwell), who has just broken up with a famous musician. She’s with her family in Washington for New Year’s Eve, invites him to come down and join them, and he does. (So much for the cat.) At the end of the movie, there’s a thank-you to “the real Havilland Savage,” and I gather most of the things in the movie actually happened, in one way or another. How else to account for an episode involving the offscreen explosion of a toilet?
Cherot plays Lee Plenty as a smart young man of maddening passivity. The plot essentially consists of scenes in which Havilland’s best friend Caroline throws herself at Plenty, who rebuffs her. Then Havilland’s sister, who has only been married for a month, throws herself at Plenty, but he rebuffs her, too. Then Havilland herself throws herself at Plenty, and he does his best to rebuff her. Although we see the beginning of a sex scene, he eventually eludes her, too. The movie ends with a scene at a film festival, at which Plenty speaks after the premiere of a film that is a great deal like this one.
As a young man I would have been quite capable of writing and starring in a movie in which three beautiful women threw themselves at me. I would have considered this so logical that I would not have bothered, as Cherot does not bother, to write myself any dialogue establishing myself as intelligent, charming, seductive, etc. I would assume that the audience could take one look at me and simply intuit that I had all of those qualities. So I can accept that the homeless Lee Plenty character is irresistible, even to a newlywed and to a beautiful, rich, ex-fiancée of a big star. What I cannot accept is that he fights them all off with vague excuses and evasions. “He’s not gay,” the women assure each other. That I believe. But either he’s asexual or exhibiting the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Hav Plenty is not a film without charm, but, boy, does it need to tighten the screws on its screenplay. The movie’s dialogue is mostly strained, artificial small talk, delivered unevenly by the actors, who at times seem limited to one take (how else to account for fluffed lines?). There are big setups without payoffs, as when Hav’s grandmother insists, “You’re going to marry him!” And nightmare dream sequences without motivation or purpose. And awkward scenes like the one where the newlywed sister tells her husband that something went on between her and Plenty. The husband enters the room, removes his jacket to reveal bulging muscles, and socks poor Plenty in the stomach. This scene illustrates two of my favorite obligatory clichés: (1) The husband is told only enough of the story to draw exactly the wrong conclusion, and (2) all muscular characters in movies always take off outer garments to reveal their muscles before hitting someone.
Hav Plenty is basically a three-actress movie; Cherot, as the male lead, is so vague and passive he barely has a personality (listen to his rambling explanations about why he “doesn’t date”). All three actresses (Chenoa Maxwell as Hav, Tammi Katherine Jones as Hav’s best friend, and Robinne Lee as the married sister) have strong energy and look good on the screen. With better direction and more takes, I suspect they’d seem more accomplished in their performances. But Hav Plenty is more of a first draft than a finished product.
Heartbreak Hotel
(Directed by Chris Columbus; starring David Keith, Tuesday Weld, Charlie Schlatter; 1988)
Here it is, the goofiest movie of the year, a movie so bad in so many different and endearing ways that I’m darned if I don’t feel genuine affection for it. We all know it’s bad manners to talk during a movie, but every once in a while a film comes along that positively requires the audience to shout helpful suggestions and lewd one-liners at the screen. Heartbreak Hotel is such a movie. All it needs to be perfect is a parallel sound track.
The film tells the story of an Ohio high school kid (Charlie Schlatter), back in 1972, who has his own rock and roll band. But the fuddy-duddys on the high school faculty don’t like rock and roll, so they ban the band from the school talent show. Meanwhile, the kid has problems at home. His divorced mother (Tuesday Weld) is an alcoholic who sleeps with a guy who works at the junkyard. She’s also a diehard Elvis Presley fan. Things are not so great at home for Schlatter and his kid sister, who live upstairs over mom’s business, a fleabag motel. And things get worse when Weld is hospitalized after a traffic accident.
What to do? Well, Elvis himself is going to appear in Cleveland on Saturday night, and so Schlatter and the members of his band concoct a desperate plot to kidnap Presley and bring him home, to cheer up mom. How are they going to get him away from his cocoon of security guards? They come up with a brainstorm. Rosie, the local pizza cook, looks exactly like Elvis’s beloved dead mother. So they’ll give her a black wig, adjust her makeup, and convince Elvis that she has returned from the grave for one last visit with her son. Rosie, portrayed by Jacque Lynn Colton in a role the late Divine was born to play, sends Elvis flowers and lures him outside his hotel at three a.m., and then the high school kids chloroform him and whisk him away in a pink Cadillac.
Once Elvis enters the plot, the movie ascends to new heights of silliness. Elvis, played in the film by David Keith (a good actor who doesn’t look one bit like Elvis), is mad at first, of course. But then he begins to listen when this teenage punk tells him he’s lost his sense of danger and is playing it safe for his fans, who are mostly blue-haired old ladies. Elvis also sort of falls for Tuesday Weld, and he takes a special liking in his heart for her little daughter Pam (Angela Goethals), who is afraid to sleep with the lights out. The tender bedside scenes between Elvis and the young girl are hard to watch with a straight face, especially if you’ve read Albert Goldman’s muckraking biography Elvis, with its revelations about the King’s taste in pubescent adolescents.
I don’t know what Chris Columbus, the writer and director of this film, had in mind when he made it. One of my fellow critics, emerging from the screening and wiping tears of incredulous laughter from his eyes, said maybe they were trying to make a Frank Capra film—Mr. Presley Goes to Ohio. Elvis gives Schlatter tips on picking up women and holds lessons in pelvis-grinding, before agreeing to make a guest appearance at the high school talent show. Any resemblence between this behavior and the real Presley exists only in the realm of fantasy.
And yet Elvis fans are a special lot, and will enjoy some of the small touches in the film, such as the name of Weld’s motel (the “Flaming Star”) and the way the movie reproduces the famous juke box dance and fight scene from one of Presley’s aging classics. Some scenes are tongue-in-cheek send-ups of hoary old B-movie clichés, as when Elvis grabs a paintbrush and helps Weld redecorate her motel, or when he says a tearful good-bye at the airport before flying back to reality in his private jet (he reserves an especially fond pat on the head for the young daughter).
I never know how to deal with movies like Heartbreak Hotel. Sure, it’s bad—awesomely bad, contrived, awkward, and filled with unintentional laughs. And yet I was not bored. The movie finds so many different approaches to its badness that it becomes endearing. The organizers of Golden Turkey film festivals have been complaining lately that they don’t make truly great bad movies anymore. Heartbreak Hotel is proof that the genre is not completely dead.