Word: horrid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Along the way, though, a lot of the fun goes out of this tale of a maladroit family and hapless, unwilling tax inspector. There is a dark and extremely unamusing family secret that has made the Catchprices so miserable and so horrid to one another. What begins as slapstick evolves into tragedy, and Carey does not adequately prepare the ground for this transition. In the end, a reader is left with the uncomfortable sense of having laughed in all the wrong places. If that was Carey's intention, he succeeded, but he should perhaps expect only a muted form...
...every horrid neurotic thing the good doctor has sworn to stamp out. But to Leo's family, Bob is the one thing Leo is not. He is available. For stupid fun. For off-the-wall counseling. For generally shaking things up. Murray, with his curious blend of pathos and aggressiveness, is terrific, and so is an acutely uptight Dreyfuss, never once copping a plea for our sympathy. At the end What About Bob? skids into silliness, but not before Frank Oz proves that he's a director with just the mean sense of humor these bland times desperately need...
...worth preserving. Those who encourage Gail Godwin to include more nastiness, more hard-edged portraits of evil in her novels, have missed the point that this one, her eighth, makes again: it can be just as heroic, and as aesthetically rewarding, to be nice as it is to be horrid...