Word: lilah
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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...
When we see Lilah's family life, we understand why she runs away to the club every night. One particularly awful morning, Lilah battles the tangles in one daughter's hair while making French toast, trying to locate lost socks and arguing with her husband, John (John Goodman). Goodman gives a solid but dislikable performance as he grills his wife about her nocturnal whereabouts and lambastes her for being late to prepare dinner...
There are some implausible moments. Steven's unrequited love for Lilah seems juvenile in contrast to the pedantic approach he takes when teaching her how to be funny. The maternal role she assumes seems much more believable. When Lilah makes a long speech to her family about her proclivity for comedy, her stab at poignancy seems forced: "I love being a mom. I love being a wife, and I love being able to make people laugh...It makes you feel special." The movie succeeds in communicating its theme however indirectly, when the characters reveal their thoughts on stage...
...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...