Good casting fails to salvage film’s plot
Actors’ talents wasted in ‘Road’ to nowhere; coherent story
absent
The Road to Wellville
Written and directed by Alan Parker
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Broderick, and Bridget
Fonda
The assembly of talent for The Road to Wellville is impressive,
but you know what they say about Anthony Hopkins. Once he’s aboard,
other actors beg to be involved.
They should have begged for a coherent story. Wellville
threatens to be dazzlingly funny or at least amusingly manic, but
it settles for tubefulls of enema jokes and a lame sex romp.
Three stories co-exist in this film. They’d overlap, or
intersect, or any other of those plot-weaving terms, but other than
mutual location and a shared participant or two, the stories are
separate and unequal. But such is life at the Battle Creek
Sanitarium, where egomaniacal Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony
Hopkins), brother of the cornflake mogul, acts as a semi-scientific
messiah to increase the lifespans of the elite. He loves giving
enemas, his cures border on sadomasochistic, and his surgery is
often uncalled for, but during the health craze of the early 1900s,
Battle Creek was considered first-rate.
Will Lightbody (Matthew Broderick) and his hypochondriac wife
Eleonor (Bridget Fonda) end up at the sanitarium at Eleonor’s
insistence. It seems Will’s stomach is giving him some problems.
His sex drive is still in high gear however, and he soon starts
hallucinating about fellow inmates: sickly Mrs. Muntz (Lara Flynn
Boyle) and comely Nurse Graves (Traci Lind). Although the policy at
Battle Creek is no sex of any kind, Will fornicates his fair share
and even indulges in the Doctor’s favorite sin, masturbation.
Other plots involve Charles Ossining’s (John Cusack) capitalist
schemes to gain a share of the cereal market and Kellogg’s mutt of
a son George (the scene-stealing Dana Carvey) who has returned for
glory, or at least revenge. The relationship between Kellogg and
his son is curiously over-indulged in, but the one-note flashbacks
add up to little. As for Cusack’s tedious turn in the weakest of
the stories, it simply should have been excised.
Wellville, based on a novel by T.C. Boyle, occasionally attains
the laughter it seeks. Broderick, Fonda, and no surprise, Hopkins
are comical and some of the dialogue is well-written. Astute
Director Alan Parker should also emerge unscathed.
Perhaps Wellville should have just remained a book. As a
turn-of-the-century period piece and social satire it connects, but
the film won’t play in Peoria. With too many scatological jokes to
recommend and too little linear progress to engage, Wellville is an
acquired taste.
Michael Horowitz