Life Stinks (1991) - film review

Goddard Bolt is an unscrupulous, insanely wealthy businessman who would not think twice about bulldozing the Brazilian rainforest to expand his business empire.  His immediate ambitions are more modest - to clear a large slum area in Los Angeles and build in its place a modern city complex.   Before he can do this, he must first persuade rival entrepreneur Vance Crasswell to sell him his half of the land in the slum.   Unfortunately, Crasswell also wants to develop the site for profit and so cons his competitor into accepting a wager which he knows he cannot win.  Bolt must spend thirty days in the slum, living as a down-and-out, without money and any outside assistance.  Confident he will win the bet, Bolt accepts but soon discovers that living on the streets is much harder than he imagined...

Life Stinks marked the nadir of Mel Brooks’s career as a film director, a critical and commercial failure from which he had great difficulty recovering.  Yet, watching the film today, this seems hard to believe.  Brooks’s most thoughtful and sincere film, Life Stinks is a well-judged satire which delivers a powerful indictment of the socially harmful policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations and compels us to give some serious thought to the plight of the homeless and the failings of our society.  It is a film with a clear, unambiguous message - capitalism (at its worst) stinks.  How much better life would be if we did not allow ourselves to become slaves to the Moloch of corporate greed, if creating communal well-being rather than individual wealth was our goal.  The film was highly topical when it was released during the recession of the early 1990s, but it is somewhat more so today.  How depressing that so little has changed in the intervening twenty years.  Except, perhaps, that capitalism has lost some of its deceptive allure.

Life Stinks is certainly quite a radical departure for Mel Brooks, away from the boisterous spoofs that brought him fame and fortune in the 1970s - Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974).  The most ‘serious’ of his comedies, it uses humour (in a similar vein to Chaplin) to lighten what would otherwise be a pretty grim riches-to-rags morality tale of personal redemption.  Yet, as it does so, it never loses sight of the reality of what living on the streets, with next to nothing in the way of support, is like.  The jokes are few and far between but they are strategically aimed to deliver the maximum impact, in contrast to the scatter-gun approach that Brooks tended to employ on his previous comedies.  Just because Life Stinks has a serious social message doesn’t mean that it can’t be funny.  

To his credit, Brooks tacitly avoids the kind of gratuitous heartstring tugging and political posturing for which Hollywood’s socially oriented movies are renowned.  His wryly comical approach (as irreverent as ever) compels us to empathise with his down-at-heel characters and their goddam awful predicament.  The jokes are great but what have greater impact are the moments of sober reflection (such as the scene in which a down-and-out’s dead body is cleared from the street like a piece of refuse); without labouring the point, these eloquently convey the unending hardships and injustices experienced by those who live rough (most of whom do so not by choice but through an abject failure of the system).  Life Stinks may lack the inspired comedic touch of Mel Brooks’s earlier films, but it makes up for this by telling a humane story in a way that can hardly fail to move us and which may possibly help to nudge us in the direction of a more civilised society.  Contrary to what its title may suggest, this is Brooks’s most life-affirming film, and one that definitely demands a fresh reappraisal.

© Steve Chandler 2011

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