Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Writers: Charles Addams, Paul Rudnick
Photography: Donald Peterman
Music: Marc Shaiman
Editors: Jim Miller, Arthur Schmidt
Cast: Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Joan Cusack, Christina Ricci, Carol Kane, Jimmy Workman, Carel Struycken, David Krumholtz, Christopher Hart, Kristin Hooper, Dana Ivey, Peter MacNicol, Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Peter Graves
My principled stance is that I avoid most movie sequels. Certainly there have been some that are winners—Bride of Frankenstein, The Dark Knight, Evil Dead II, The Road Warrior, Terminator 2. And, yeah, beyond that some noisy consensus on others I don’t like nearly as much as the originals: The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens. Then there are sequels like Addams Family Values, which may be better than the originals but are just too lightweight and/or marketing-driven in the first place to take seriously. If you want to laugh, however, you could do worse than Addams Family Values.
Director Barry Sonnenfeld absorbed the lessons of the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, who pumped up the gag volume in their Airplane!, Naked Gun, and other parody franchises. The pace of Addams Family Values is not as frenetic but the rhythm of punchlines and sight gags is reliably steady. Sonnenfeld’s IMDb known-fors include two Men in Black movies, which are comparable comedies for a sense of his style. He also did Wild Wild West and the original Addams Family adaptation from 1991 (which is not as good as this sequel). While you can argue that none of it amounts to much, the all-star cast and the overall vibe here indicate at least that people wanted to work with Sonnenfeld. They bring a lot of infectious we’re-having-a-ball chemistry to Paul Rudnick’s rapid-fire screenplay. It’s the director as popular guy, a tradition that goes all the way up the line to Howard Hawks.
My principled stance is that I avoid most movie sequels. Certainly there have been some that are winners—Bride of Frankenstein, The Dark Knight, Evil Dead II, The Road Warrior, Terminator 2. And, yeah, beyond that some noisy consensus on others I don’t like nearly as much as the originals: The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens. Then there are sequels like Addams Family Values, which may be better than the originals but are just too lightweight and/or marketing-driven in the first place to take seriously. If you want to laugh, however, you could do worse than Addams Family Values.
Director Barry Sonnenfeld absorbed the lessons of the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, who pumped up the gag volume in their Airplane!, Naked Gun, and other parody franchises. The pace of Addams Family Values is not as frenetic but the rhythm of punchlines and sight gags is reliably steady. Sonnenfeld’s IMDb known-fors include two Men in Black movies, which are comparable comedies for a sense of his style. He also did Wild Wild West and the original Addams Family adaptation from 1991 (which is not as good as this sequel). While you can argue that none of it amounts to much, the all-star cast and the overall vibe here indicate at least that people wanted to work with Sonnenfeld. They bring a lot of infectious we’re-having-a-ball chemistry to Paul Rudnick’s rapid-fire screenplay. It’s the director as popular guy, a tradition that goes all the way up the line to Howard Hawks.
Well, no, to be clear, Addams Family Values is not The Big Sleep. But look at some of the people roped in here, even for small parts or cameos: Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Carol Kane, Cynthia Nixon, Peter Graves (host of “America’s Most Disgusting Unsolved Crimes,” shades of Airplane! as well as some good-natured mockery of his former co-star Robert Stack), Harriet Sansom Harris, Nathan Lane, David Hyde Pierce, Tony Shalhoub, and maybe more I missed. Special note for Christina Ricci, who was 12 when this was shot and already a perfectly composed player, capable of stealing scenes at will.
Joan Cusack was the biggest surprise for me in this one. Her IMDb known-fors don’t even get to Addams Family Values, going instead for In & Out, Grosse Pointe Blank, Working Girl, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Well, all right, maybe, but this is the single best performance by Cusack that I can remember. She’s too often mannered and self-conscious for me, but here she is nearly perfect, playing her role as black widow nanny Debbie Jellinsky with relish, an absurd conviction, and terrible teeth that make her drool. She hams it up all over the place but practically everything lands. It’s a kind of wonder in itself.
The black widow plot is the main arc here. At the start of the picture Morticia Addams (Huston) turns to Gomez (Julia). and says, “Marvelous news. I’m going to have a baby ... right now.” Cut to hospital. Pubert (rhymes with Hubert) is born with Gomez’s mustache. Gomez and Morticia are in raptures. Pubert’s crib looks like it came from the set of Rosemary’s Baby (along with some of the lines, e.g., “He has his father’s eyes”). But Wednesday (Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) are riven with sibling jealousies and try constantly to kill Pubert in various extravagant and sight-gag-friendly ways (e.g., with a guillotine). Debbie is brought in as nanny partly to protect Pubert. But Debbie is there because she has set out to marry Uncle Fester for her third husband, third murder victim, and third misappropriated fortune. To get Wednesday and Pugsley out of the way she manipulates Gomez and Morticia into sending them to summer camp.
The movie then bifurcates and cross-cuts between summer camp scenes and the courtship and marriage of Debbie and Fester, who is instantly smitten with her but utterly inept. “With your looks, your charm, women must follow you everywhere,” Debbie leads him on in a romantic interlude. “Store detectives,” Fester replies. Meanwhile, at camp, the kids are staging a Thanksgiving pageant presentation called “A Turkey Named Brotherhood.” The show opens with kids in turkey costumes and a song inviting the audience to “Eat me.” Later, Wednesday as Pocahontas switches up on the script, saying, “You have taken the land which is rightfully ours” and burning down the set.
Random, ongoing lunacy is the way things go here but the comedic timing is often impeccable and if you’re groaning about one joke the picture is rapidly moving onto another. It’s a reasonably good homage to a reasonably inspired ‘60s sitcom, part of a less inspired but larger trend in the ‘90s to make movies based on TV from the ‘60s (The Brady Bunch, The Flintstones, Lost in Space, Wild Wild West, etc.). And it loads up on the cultural references all the way to the very last shot. You might as well look at it. What else have you got to do?
Joan Cusack was the biggest surprise for me in this one. Her IMDb known-fors don’t even get to Addams Family Values, going instead for In & Out, Grosse Pointe Blank, Working Girl, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Well, all right, maybe, but this is the single best performance by Cusack that I can remember. She’s too often mannered and self-conscious for me, but here she is nearly perfect, playing her role as black widow nanny Debbie Jellinsky with relish, an absurd conviction, and terrible teeth that make her drool. She hams it up all over the place but practically everything lands. It’s a kind of wonder in itself.
The black widow plot is the main arc here. At the start of the picture Morticia Addams (Huston) turns to Gomez (Julia). and says, “Marvelous news. I’m going to have a baby ... right now.” Cut to hospital. Pubert (rhymes with Hubert) is born with Gomez’s mustache. Gomez and Morticia are in raptures. Pubert’s crib looks like it came from the set of Rosemary’s Baby (along with some of the lines, e.g., “He has his father’s eyes”). But Wednesday (Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) are riven with sibling jealousies and try constantly to kill Pubert in various extravagant and sight-gag-friendly ways (e.g., with a guillotine). Debbie is brought in as nanny partly to protect Pubert. But Debbie is there because she has set out to marry Uncle Fester for her third husband, third murder victim, and third misappropriated fortune. To get Wednesday and Pugsley out of the way she manipulates Gomez and Morticia into sending them to summer camp.
The movie then bifurcates and cross-cuts between summer camp scenes and the courtship and marriage of Debbie and Fester, who is instantly smitten with her but utterly inept. “With your looks, your charm, women must follow you everywhere,” Debbie leads him on in a romantic interlude. “Store detectives,” Fester replies. Meanwhile, at camp, the kids are staging a Thanksgiving pageant presentation called “A Turkey Named Brotherhood.” The show opens with kids in turkey costumes and a song inviting the audience to “Eat me.” Later, Wednesday as Pocahontas switches up on the script, saying, “You have taken the land which is rightfully ours” and burning down the set.
Random, ongoing lunacy is the way things go here but the comedic timing is often impeccable and if you’re groaning about one joke the picture is rapidly moving onto another. It’s a reasonably good homage to a reasonably inspired ‘60s sitcom, part of a less inspired but larger trend in the ‘90s to make movies based on TV from the ‘60s (The Brady Bunch, The Flintstones, Lost in Space, Wild Wild West, etc.). And it loads up on the cultural references all the way to the very last shot. You might as well look at it. What else have you got to do?
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