Word: reiner
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...BAFFLING MOVIE, and not because it raises any interesting theological issues. It would be safe to say that the Almighty has never appeared in a very good film, although considering the talent involved in this one--direction by the intermittently brilliant Carl Reiner and a script by the dependably slick Larry Gelbart--Oh God! should have been an irreverent romp. What emerges is an overlong television sketch, a limp, unimaginative, and boring monument to middle-class tolerance; in short, a popular favorite that could set comedy back...
...Carl Reiner's best films bear little resemblance to Oh God!. Where's Poppa?, for example, was pervaded by a manic hysteria, and peopled by feverish buffoons whose monomaniacal intensities constantly collided, resulting in sprawling calamities that were often exhaustingly funny. George Segal's wild-eyed sexual/homicidal obsessions (frustrated at every turn by his incessantly doddering mother, Ruth Gordon) produced scenes of comic genius, and in a lesser film, like The Comic, such moments successfully diverted attention from Reiner's maudlin tendencies in his quieter scenes. But in Oh God! the maudlin preponderates; Reiner chooses, for reasons...
...this inanity is that the movie is an act of homage to George Burns. Ever since the death of Jack Benny, Hollywood and its comedians have gone out of their way to worship Burns, his closest friend. By placing him as God in the center of a movie, Reiner may feel he is paying the ultimate tribute to this cigar-smoking, endearing little man. Too bad Reiner's religious offering did not include a good script. Great pains have obviously been taken to prevent the placid Burns from being upstaged; Reiner has chosen to cast him opposite John Denver...
MOST APPALLING IS the lack of invention. Reiner and Gelbart employ three basic jokes throughout the movie; one, the "God as a funny-rumpled-schlemiel joke," where He talks about the '69 Mets as the last great miracle after the Red Sea; two, the "he'll pop up anywhere" routine, in which Burns will drive by in a cab, control all the stations on a car radio, or appear suddenly in a supermarket aisle (this type of thing has been used from Topper to Bewitched, and was employed to greater comic effect by a steel-jawed villain in this summer...
...makes the picture work. Singer John Denver is agreeable as his reluctant modern Moses, and Teri Garr is marvelous as a model of wifely forbearance, deftly blending skepticism about her husband's claims to contact with the higher-up and faith in his fundamental good sense. Carl Reiner's low-keyed direction avoids some obvious errors. Once Denver begins preaching the latest word from on high, the media get interested, and there is an opportunity to make the customary comments on the circus aspects of overnight celebrity. But Reiner makes the point lightly. Heavy preachment is just...