Word: melvin
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...this sketchy, real-life story--really no more than two incidents--director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Bo Goldman have fashioned a movie of extraordinary warmth and affection. Melvin and Howard is a neon Vermeer, a sensitive and funny look at the absurdities of late 20th-century American life in the far west. Demme looks at this amiable lug chased by a pot of gold not with condescension, but with wondrous incomprehension...
Paul Le Mat's Melvin has a body too big for his skin. He stumbles through life swerving away from disaster, chasing wives, ex-wives and future wives with sincere apologies for misdeeds great and small. He spends too much, makes too little, never avoids the repossessors for long. Even though he appears in nearly every scene in the movie, Melvin is always filmed from a distance--no one would learn more from a close...
...Melvin orders his life simply. He experiences and reacts, oblivious to his effect on others. Incapable of malice, Melvin lives as if he took the Declaration of Independence a little too literally; he pursues tomorrow's happiness with a blissful disinterest about next week's. Yet Goldman makes sure that the audience does not confuse Melvin's simplicity with simple-mindedness. Living in a world of milk trucks with plastic cows, game shows with applause signs and gas stations with undulating tire displays, Melvin merely serves as the prism through which we view these and other tragi-comic forces...
Demme's eye and ear for synthetic America make the film more than just the story of Melvin's life. Melvin is constantly overwhelmed by the cacaphony of horns blaring, toilets flushing and cars trying to start. He is always shouting to be heard, usually above something like a game-show audience. "Pick door number one! Number one!" That he never seems to be heard is sad; but though it may bother us that no one listens, Melvin doesn't seem to care. He perseveres...
...MELVIN PICKS UP in the desert doesn't. With a wild mane of white hair and a beard to match, he has obviously given up on society, checked out. Yet in their conversation in Melvin's truck--the first scene of the movie--the bum emerges as more than a derelict. Melvin wants to sing Christmas carols; his guest doesn't. He is ungracious, cold and strangely snide for a man of such decrepit circumstance...