Funny Farm (1988)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2019) Chevy Chase heads to rural Vermont in a comedy that pretty much plays as you’d expect. As Funny Farm begins, a Manhattan sports journalist and his wife head over to the country in the hopes of transforming an advance for a novel into a fresh start for them both, away from the busy rhythm of the city. Of course, they don’t know squat about the new house, the town, its people or even how to make friends with the locals. Hilarity, or at least predictable gags ensue. The inversions happen, the ironies pile up and yet Funny Farm isn’t much of a comedy. The comic style is very broad, to the point of feeling overly familiar even before seeing what happens next. You can call out the jokes from their setup, and even a slightly less predictable third act doesn’t really improve the entire thing. Chase is up to his usual self (which is either funny or not—his specific brand of comedy can go both ways), while Madolyn Smith is more remarkable as his wife. As someone who fetishizes the idea of writing full-time, I did get a kick out of some aspects of the film. Alas, that’s not quite enough to make me like the film. On the plus side, I didn’t quite hate Funny Farm either. But it would be fair to say that I found it almost useless, and not really worth revisiting.