Evan Almighty
June 22 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 25
Ever since there has been discourse around the personalities of artists and creators there has been an enduring question: What do you do about your problematic faves? How is one meant to react when the work speaks to you but the person doing the work is morally bankrupt? It’s been the same story from Lord Byron’s womanizing to Roald Dahl’s antisemitism to Woody Allen’s credible sexual assault accusations. This week though I found myself pondering the opposite question. What do you do when a person with a clear and righteous moral compass makes dogshit art? Art like Evan Almighty?
Evan Almighty is the story of Evan Baxter (Steve Carell), a former TV news anchor from Buffalo, NY who has just won election to the United States House of Representatives representing district NY-26. As he adjusts to his new life with a giant car and a giant house a giant amount of governmental responsibilities, he is informed by God himself (Morgan Freeman) that he must construct an ark, identical to the one built by Noah in Genesis 6-8, ahead of a flood that will occur at midday of September 22nd of his first year in congress. Evan initially refuses to heed this call, preferring to make good with Congressman Long (John Goodman) who promises to advance his career if he plays ball on a questionable piece of land-use legislation. Unfortunately for Evan, God makes the Ark project impossible to ignore as he first makes pairs of animals begin to follow him around, and eventually forces him to wear the long beard and robe look commonly associated with Old Testament patriarchs. Eventually, a flood does come, just not in the way that Evan expects.
Evan Almighty is the final big Hollywood film directed by Tom Shadyac. If you are familiar with turn-of-the-century comedy, you know Shadyac’s work. Especially if you’re a Jim Carrey fan. Shadyac’s first feature film was the Jim Carrey breakthrough Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). This is a film that was massively successful despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the film’s most memorable joke is the title character bending over and using his butt cheeks as a puppet. He followed it up with Eddie Murphy’s remake of The Nutty Professor in 1996, Liar Liar in 1997, and Patch Adams in 1998. Shadyac’s work revolves around laffs with an earnest message. While I’ll be the first to admit that Ace Ventura has an immensely transphobic (and frankly incomprehensible) “twist” ending, his films mostly have a big broad comedic style (ie fart jokes and funny faces) and a wholesome core. Shadyac makes films about people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place even as they slip on banana peels along the way.
After a brief detour to dramatic filmmaking with the supernatural thriller Dragonfly (2002), Shadyac’s last great success in the comedy realm was another Jim Carrey vehicle: 2003’s Bruce Almighty, a film where God grants Jim Carrey omnipotence, which he initially uses to great comedic effect before realizing that the power is overwhelming and ceding that power back to God. Bruce Almighty is kind of an inverse of the biblical story of Job. Job is forced to suffer as a means of testing his own faith, and ultimately receives no answer to his prayers beyond “the universe is far more complicated than you can possibly understand and your tiny human wants are nothing before the power of the almighty”. Bruce Almighty on the other hand is a story about a man who materially gains everything, but in the course of doing so realizes that the operation of the universe is too vast for his tiny human soul to possibly be able to comprehend. Both stories end with order restored and the protagonist having a greater level of respect for the divine, just, y’know, one has fart jokes.
Bruce Almighty was a huge and unexpected success. It famously knocked The Matrix: Reloaded out of its #1 box office position, both undermining the amount of money Warner Brothers had hoped to make on their sure-fire money printing machine and underestimating the public’s desire to see Morgan Freeman play a benevolent and loving deity. Bruce Almighty’s success caused Universal to request a sequel, and for the first time in his career after being asked to make sequels for Ace Ventura and The Nutty Professor and turning them down, Shadyac felt he had more to say in his divine comedy universe. While Jim Carrey turned down the (doubtless handsome) payout to reprise his role as Bruce, his co-star Steve Carell made for an attractive replacement for a spin-off after having stolen scenery as a correspondent on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and in films like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), and thus began the production process for Evan Almighty.
What’s fascinating about Evan is that Tom Shadyac was in the midst of a personal transformation. He was seeing the artifice in what he was doing, both on a professional and spiritual level. He wanted to start making a difference in what he did. This led to two financially disastrous decisions for Evan Almighty: He would work with real animals wherever possible in his Noah’s Ark pastiche, and the production of the film would be carbon neutral. Both decisions caused the film’s budget to balloon to an astonishing $175 million, making it the most expensive comedy ever made at the time. Working with large numbers of real animals on film is a famously pricey decision that has led to many a boondoggle —see Dr. Doolittle (1967) and Babe: Pig In The City (1998), and the entire notion of offsetting carbon costs by using green technology and purchasing offsets was such a new idea to Hollywood that it probably wasn’t implemented in the most efficient way. What is absolutely true is that the producers of Evan Almighty expected that even if it made half the money that Bruce had it would ultimately turn a profit, so these expenses were approved.
Readers, it did not turn a profit.
It’s not hard to see why. Evan Almighty is not a very good movie. I’m not going to go to bat for Liar Liar as my generation’s Airplane! (1980), but I’ve seen it and it made me chuckle and I didn’t regret the time I spent watching it. Evan was so profoundly unentertaning that it took me about 3 hours to complete its 96 minute runtime. The movie was so boring that descaling the icemaker felt like a better way to use my time. I’m really not the audience for fart jokes, but I do recognize them as jokes and will occasionally laugh at one when delivered well. Evan doesn’t so much have even fart jokes as vaguely joke-shaped pieces of dialogue. The protagonist’s congressional staff is stacked with comedic talent (John Michael Higgins, Wanda Sykes, and Jonah Hill), but their “jokes” don’t come across as funny as much as it comes across as his congressional staff being blithe and incompetent at their jobs. The Old Testament puns are beyond groanworthy: Evan’s realtor is named ‘Eve Adams’, and the lumber being delivered for the ark construction comes from a company called Go For Wood, a pun on Genesis 6:14 “make thee an ark of gopherwood”. I’ve met the corniest youth pastors who can tell a better Bible joke[the classic “does anyone need a boat? I Noah guy” was right there].
What Evan has in spades is Shadyac’s sentimentality. Two of his films with Carrey —Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty— have a syrupy sweet message at their core about respecting family and the divine, but at least they have jokes and compelling plots surrounding them. Evan Almighty’s messages (trashing the environment is bad, congressional corruption is bad, and you need not understand the divine plan to help execute it) clobber the viewer relentlessly. I’ve literally had more fun reading The Bible than I did watching Evan Almighty[The book of Jonah is Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) compared to this], and I’m not religious in the slightest.
Here’s the thing though. I desperately hope that Tom Shadyac doesn’t read this because I genuinely think he’s a good person. I don’t want him to feel bad for making a bad movie. The decision to make art using more expensive practical effects is a noble one. As the world continues to be ravaged by climate change the decision to limit and offset carbon costs of filming is objectively the correct call to make. After completing principal photography on Evan, Shadyac got into a bicycle accident, and his recovery from this made him rethink even more of his life decisions. He moved out of his seaside mansion into a trailer park[admittedly, a fancy Malibu trailer park, but still, a sizable step down in housing]. He donated vast sums of cash to open a homeless shelter in Charlottesville, VA and preserve the natural beauty surrounding Telluride, CO. While he hasn’t officially retired from the film business his last two projects (a documentary about his personal journey called I Am (2010) and Brian Banks (2018), a based-on-a-true-story tale of a high school football player who is wrongfully convicted of a crime and clears his name) have not been commercial successes, and producers aren’t exactly knocking down his door to get him back in the director’s chair. If I’m wrong and he is reading, I wish you the best, Tom. You seem like you’ve really got it together, even if I didn’t like your movie.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ At least you wisely opted to not include the story of Noah and Ham into this movie, Tom.
Economics: 18 years ago today the producers of Evan Almighty were perhaps relieved when it opened to #1 at the box office ahead of 1408, also in its first week of release. This relief would not last as it ultimately cleared $174 million worldwide against its $175 million budget. Evan was a flop that killed Tom Shadyac’s career.
Other 2007 films released this week:
1408: From Stephen King, the author who brought you What if a Car Was Evil? (1983) and What if Machines Were Evil? (1986), comes the thrilling tale that dares ask the question “what if a hotel room was evil?” John Cusack stars as a failed writer who makes a living writing gimmicky travelogues about haunted hotels. Unfortunately his attempt to debunk the haunting at room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in New York backfires when it does actually try to kill him a lot. While not set in Maine, the film does check off a lot of King boxes, including my personal favorite: alcoholic writer having a bad time because of ghosts. Not a masterpiece, but definitely campy fun. ★★★☆☆
Paprika: The final film made by visionary Japanese animation director Satoshi Kon was released in American Theaters on June 22, 2007. Like Kon’s films Perfect Blue (1997) and Millennium Actress (2001), Paprika explores the disconnect between its protagonist as she sees herself and the projection of herself she puts out into the world. Where Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress did this through the lens of celebrity, Paprika does so through the lens of dreams. It’s the story of a scientist named Atsuko Chiba working on a device that can record peoples’ dreams and connect multiple dreamers together. She finds that her device is being misused and enters the dream world as a more charismatic projection: a redheaded free spirit named Paprika. If you ever thought “I like Inception (2010) but wish it had less exposition and more freakdy deaky dream stuff” then boy howdy you’ll like Paprika ★★★★☆
