Punchline

The late Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed said that dying was easy, comedy was hard. I think most entertainers would agree with that. One thing for sure is that if the laughs don't come and in the right places you are doing something wrong.

Tom Hanks and Sally Field are a couple of hopefuls looking to break and they're regulars at the club where Mark Rydell is the emcee. Field is a wife and mother with two girls and married to John Goodman. She's also been told she's funny and wants to see if she can make a living at it.

Hanks is the son of a top flight doctor who has forced his son into going to medical school where he flunks out. There are some real issues here with Hanks desperate to succeed and get to the top of his own field as his father has done.

Hanks best moment is when he does get to perform before some TV executives he breaks down completely on stage. It was a beautiful piece of acting.

Punchline more than most films I've seen, shows that these funny people go through a lot of heartache to make it in that business. Hanks and Field are really good pair of leads and the rest of the cast, most of them playing the denizens of the comedy world lend wonderful support.

If you think you might want to be a comedian, see this movie.

There is something not right about this movie. What is it? I don't know. It could be one, a few or all of many things:

Characterizations change by the minute, with flimsy and/or no explanation. It bounces back and forth and back again between slapstick, light-hearted comedy, gritty drama, and sappiness. It spends painful stretches focusing on comedy acts that are supposed to be funny (everyone on the screen thinks they are) but they really aren't. It runs far too long.

But at the same time, it's okay. Amusing at least, and it has it's decent moments, among the forgettable and awkward ones.

Memorable.....but bad memories outweigh good, at least for me, with this movie.

That's my recollection of this film which, frankly, I haven't seen in over a decade. However, this movie left some indelible impressions in my sensitive memory, and perhaps I'll re-visit it again one day.

Tom Hanks was mesmerizing as the haunted comedian, a man with a lot of talent to make people laugh but a guy tormented by the lack of support from his father. There is a scene or two in here with this dad that is so uncomfortable to watch that it has prevented me from seeing this another time.

Too bad, because I do remember some wonderful, funny scenes such as Hanks in the hospital entertaining the patients. Sally Field also gives a touching performance as a housewife trying to break into the business, and John Goodman is likable as her husband.

An interesting film with very emotional scenes you won't forget. It's almost too much for me, for some reason.

Look at the poster. "Laugh!" It says. That is an ill conceived promotion material for this movie that is sold everywhere as a comedy when it's not. Viewers and reviewers get the wrong expectation and you see this huge amount of frustrated reviews. I didn't laugh once and I'm not mad.

It competently sells the illusion of a successful and a bomb act. We can see the increasing confidence of Sally's character as a performer and clearly see Hanks' confidence on-stage and inner turmoil as the movie goes.

The problem with this movie is that it's a small story in a sense that all we get are small victories and losses. I never felt that those characters were truly pursuing their passions by doing sacrifices. The polar extreme of this is De Niro's character in The King of Comedy, also struggling to break in this business.

It's a good movie, but incapable to make you laugh or cry.

A moderately hard-edged drama about the private and public lives of comedians, with a special emphasis on the desperate lengths they'll go to for a laugh, or to get an edge on the competition. Sally Field is the focal figure, a mousey housewife who feels destined for greatness but can't locate her own voice, while Tom Hanks plays a big supporting role as a natural performer who's an irresponsible, selfish a-hole behind the scenes. It's an uneven picture that doesn't really click for a number of different reasons. Primary among them is this unspoken sense that a movie about comedians should be funny. Though the on-stage segments are indeed quite flat, big punchlines (if you'll forgive the pun) aren't really the point of this story. Less forgivable is the awkward, cloudy relationship between Hanks and Field that dominates the plot, and the constant shifts in tone from one scene to the next. I never got a real handle on where the film was going, what it wanted to be or to say. That writing jokes is hard, I guess? Sometimes the happiest guy in the spotlight is actually a poisonous, miserable bastard? A complicated, tentative take that's puzzling in its lack of a firm identity.