Word: lilah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Lilah Krytsick (Sally Field) is discovered skulking into the kind of 24-hour diner that, in movies, betokens a Mafia presence. And sure enough, a disreputable little man is soon slipping her a mysterious packet. Dope? Money for laundering? No, jokes. As it turns out, terrible jokes. Jokes that produce a distillation of pure flop sweat when she tries them out at a comedy club called the Gas Station, where beginning comics mostly improvise their own humiliations. For Lilah is a bored New Jersey housewife who has been told all her life that she is a funny lady and dreams...
...Need you ask? Will these two succumb to romantic entanglement? Well, no. Despite nicely managed temptation, they avoid it, and credit goes to David Seltzer for that intelligent choice. And for a movie that is full of terrific comic material and well-cast second bananas (John Goodman as Lilah's befuddled husband, Max Alexander and Mac Robbins as ne'er-do-well comedians...
...Field's company co-produced the picture before Hanks was Big, and Oscar- winning stars do have certain hierarchical rights. In the final sequence, where Lilah and Steve must duel onstage over a TV contract, his routine is muted and cut to clear the way for her star turn. And she gets to make all the interesting moral choices. But that is just Hollywood housekeeping -- neatening up after the picture has been stolen...
...Lilah herself undergoes a series of apparently miraculous transitions in this movie--from housewife to would-be comic, to love-object, to successful comedian. The film's happy ending fails to answer the question of whether she's really found her true self, or if screenwriter Seltzer is just bowing to convention...
What's the punchline, you ask? In Steven's words, "All of our lives are funny. We're God's animated cartoons." Humor can be an escape valve. But it can also be a way of expression, and for both Steven and Lilah, it becomes a means of sublimating the unhappy truths of their lives...