Anyone who, like me, is an admirer of Mr. Bean — the inspired,
not-quite mute fuss-budget with the rubber face created by Rowan
Atkinson back in the 1980s — should love Mr. Bean’s
Holiday. Directed by Steve Bendelack, whose career to date has
been in British television, it offers a realistic context for Mr.
Atkinson’s visual comedy by sending Mr. Bean from cold, rainy
London to the south of France. As his knowledge of French consists
of oui, non and gracias, the language
barrier gives many semi-realistic opportunities for his mugging and
miming and pratfalls. Just to complicate things further,
linguistically speaking, Mr. Bean finds himself through a
characteristic series of mishaps in charge of a Russian boy, who
speaks neither English nor French.
The movie then follows the pair of them as Mr. Bean tries to
make his way to his holiday destination in spite of one seemingly
disastrous accident after another, as the boy tries to make it back
to his parents in Cannes, and as the parents try to have Mr. Bean
apprehended for kidnapping. But this is also a movie about watching
movies. Mr. Bean’s touristy videocam becomes a key plot device and
the source of much of the film’s visual humor. Yet what could have
been a postmodern conceit, is kept mostly within the bounds of
movie realism.
Not that Mr. Bendelack is above giving us one or two po-mo
jokes. In one, Mr. Bean is hitch-hiking along a country road for
reasons that are much too complicated (and hilarious) to go into.
He comes upon a wooden shack that might be a tool shed or an
outhouse. It doesn’t matter what it is or what it’s doing there. We
never find out. Mr. Bean must get stuck in it and then, somehow,
get out again. It is a kind of magic box and, therefore, like the
magician’s audience, we can only view it from the outside and
speculate on what Mr. Bean may be doing in there. The first thing
he is doing, we can be told. With a mighty heave, he shoulders the
thing off its foundation. Now we have the much funnier sight of the
shack moving back and forth, its unusual powers of locomotion
invisible to us, by the side of the road and actually into the
road.
Oh no! Can it be that the shack with Mr. Bean in it is going to
be flattened by that approaching tractor-trailer, which we identify
by its air-horn off camera? Surely he will lurch out of its way?
But for once the camera plays coy with us and will not allow us to
see what happens as the shack wanders out of the frame. There is a
crash, as of splintering wood, and Mr. Bean, now shack-less, comes
wandering-back into the frame looking pleased with himself as he
brushes pieces of wood out of his hair and clothes.
It’s a brilliant comic bit, but it also violates, postmodern
style, the unwritten compact by which the viewer is led to expect
that, however bizarre and zany Mr. Bean’s adventures become — and
they become very bizarre and zany indeed — they will not violate
the canons of realism. Afterwards, the film goes back to being
realistic with a smug grin on its face. There are two other
occasions when a similar trick is performed and the otherwise
almost exclusively visual humor gives way to a specifically
non-visual gag in order to cover an apparently impossible event.
The humor in each case is a thing of the moment and perceptibly
off-center with the rest of the film. But if you’re willing to go
with the po-mo flow, it’s good for a laugh — partly at ourselves
and partly at the film-makers, though not, in this case, at Mr.
Bean.
Yet it also reminds us, by its very difference from the rest of
the picture, how very funny Mr. Bean himself is when the camera
plays it straight and lets him do what he does best. At two or
three points, I was helpless with laughter — Mr. Atkinson’s
lip-synching to O Mio Babbino Caro from “Gianni Schicchi”
is worth a particular mention — and always it was at stunts that
might have been done on a stage and didn’t rely on any sort of
“movie magic.”
In a way this is a joke at the expense of movie-makers, and the
climax is precisely that. Willem Dafoe plays an annoyingly
pretentious and self-absorbed director at a Cannes premiere which
Mr. Bean completely disrupts — in the process making his boring
movie into something that wins rapturous applause. Like Mr. Bean
himself, Mr. Bean’s Holiday is the movies’ revenge on
those who make movies about themselves — which makes its final
scene another po-mo joke as the film-makers, like Mr. Bean, in
effect turn the videocam on themselves. You also might want to
stick around through the end-credits for the coda that makes a
similar point better than I can — and for Mr. Bean’s third word of
French, not counting gracias.
