Gigli

Train Wreck Cinema

By Jonathon Saia

Gigli (Columbia, 2003) – Director: Martin Brest. Writer: Martin Brest. Stars: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Terry Camilleri, David Backus, Lenny Venito, Robert Silver, Luis Alberto Martínez, Justin Bartha, Christopher Walken,  Todd Giebenhain, Brian Sites, Brian Casey, Les Bradford, David Bonfadini & Dwight Ketchum. Color, Rated R, 121 minutes.

For anyone interested in exploring bad movies, Gigli will be an inevitability on your journey. 

It is truly one of the worst films of all time and lives up to every awful thing that has ever been said about it. It also is the film responsible for the omnipresent media circus once called "Bennifer" so for better or for worse (definitely worse), Gigli has become a permanent staple of pop culture history.

Ben Affleck is Larry Gigli (pronounced "Gee-lee. Like really"), a mobster who cannot be trusted to get important tasks accomplished. So naturally he would be assigned an important kidnapping, well adult-napping (?). Let's call it an abduction. A very easy abduction, I should add. You see, the person with whom he needs to abscond is mentally challenged, or as the film repeatedly calls him, retarded. Or 'tard. Or stupid. Apparently, the place he is living/having a chronic picnic with his sunflower seeds, allows anyone – especially tough-looking guidos with pompadours – to just sashay into the place and leave with their residents without so much as checking in at a front desk. These must be handi-capables, unbeholden to rules or common sense! But why wouldn't Brian go with Larry? He is taking him to the “Baywatch." Or as we call it, the beach.

Brian (played with uncomfortable fades in and out of believability by Justin Bartha; star of The Hangover and the sadly short-lived Ryan Murphy sitcom, The New Normal) is the brother of the DA. The plan is to hold him for ransom until after a gangster (played with surprising amounts of restraint by Al Pacino) is acquitted for...something. I think? The film is not very clear how this will be accomplished. There is no ransom note, no demands. Or maybe Christopher Walken cleared this up during his brief appearance. I can’t recall. He distracts me with his odd inflections and most of the time I have no idea what he is saying. He is like a caricature of a caricature of Christopher Walken. He is like the Nicolas Cage of the ‘90s, still holding onto a career through kitsch and the hope that he will, someday, get another role to remind us why he has an Academy Award. The point is that Brian's abduction (one from which he never once tries to leave, even when he could call the police very easily during one of his MANY prank calls Larry somehow allows him to make) is really just a plot device to bring Larry and Ricki (Lopez) together as some sort of strange family.

Because Larry cannot be trusted, Ricki is sent to babysit. She enters his apartment (looking like she just came from a music video shoot) under the pretense of being a new neighbor who needs to use the phone. He drools and despite Brian in the back (because clearly the best place for a mobster to keep someone they have abducted is IN THEIR OWN HOUSE), he allows her to come in. Because hey, she's his new neighbor. And she's banging! Ricki makes herself comfy, slumping down into his couch, looking up at him with those music video do-me eyes, and extends her leg above her head to prove her flexibility and flash the sweet outlines of her vag. But Brian cannot be contained and he enters. But enough of the foreplay. Ricki, like J. Lo, keeps it real. She is his handler, not his neighbor! She never needed to use the phone.

We learn at dinner about BULLS and COWS, which is of course a very crude metaphor for men and women and who should have the power in the relationship. Then while Brian is getting tucked into bed, he wants a bedtime story. But no! Larry doesn't own a book so must read the back of a Tabasco bottle. This is what we call heavy-handed character development with a dash of irony.

That night, as Ricki is preparing to sleep on the floor, Larry graciously allows her to sleep with him in his bed since they will be working together and all. Ricki accepts and we are geared for Temptation Island, Jersey Edition. Larry preps in the bathroom mirror, flexing his soft muscles (I have to believe Ben Affleck’s Dad-bod was a character choice and not just laziness) and blathers on to his reflection about bulls while Ricki quietly reads a book in bed. He emerges in the Marshall's version of Hefner's signature robe and cuddles up next to her for some nookie. But it is not meant to be because...are you ready?...Ricki is a lesbian. Yep.

OK, so Ricki (of course with the androgynous name) is a lesbian – or as the film calls her, a "clamlicker" – so the common trope of these types of films (although I'm not sure Martin Brest knows what type of film this is) is squelched. They won't be together. So the film's drama must come elsewhere.

Au contraire! On a visit to his mother's house, presumably so he can shoot her up in the ass with heroin (?), we learn that not only has Ricki been with men but Mrs. Gigli (played by Lainie Kazan, Midler's mom in Beaches) has been with women...and then hits on Ricki! After thinking it is her son's girlfriend. Awk. Ward. This entire scene is designed just so his mother can telegraph us the theme of the movie: "Life isn't always black and white.”

So ripped from the pages of Chasing Amy (incidentally starring Affleck), Larry and Ricki have some sort of love affair/hook-up thing after bonding over not wanting to cut off Brian's finger; excuse me, thumb (Pacino clears that up later in one of the worst imitations of Tarantino dialogue possible).

Oh, I almost forgot! This is after Ricki's ex-girlfriend storms in, tells Larry to leave his own apartment, accuses Ricki of infidelity, offers to have a threesome with Larry if that will make her happy, breaks into hysterics, runs to the kitchen, slits her wrists, and collapses onto the linoleum. All while J. Lo is wrapped in a towel, fresh from the shower.

But this, my readers, comes after the most offensive scene in the film where Larry goes on about how lesbian sex isn't real sex and not as rewarding as being with a man. Ricki gyrates through her yoga poses, sensually of course, defending how ALL sex is about vagina because when we kiss, we are aroused because the lips of the mouth remind us of the lips of the labia. I would kill to hear Camille Paglia do a commentary track on this scene.

This scene is also not isolated. It is endemic to Gigli's universe. Gigli is really just a series of awful monologues about relationships, dressed up in some fourth-rate crime comedy. It is like some strange polemic on sexuality and intelligence that doesn't actually end up saying anything except things that people who know nothing about sexuality and intelligence recycle from their senior high school psych class. It leaves you scratching your head in wonder, What is Martin Brest trying to say? Did he get left for a woman? Was he in love with a clingy lesbian? Or does he think he is making some profound statement on the fluidity of sexuality by being crass and sophomoric? It is offensive. And uncomfortable to the max.

The film almost redeems itself when Ricki turns Larry down for a life together because she knows he can never be what she needs. Because she is a les.bi.an. Finally some common sense up in here! But as she pulls away in the end after he gives her his car (um...ok), she circles back to pick him up for a ride out of town. Lest we get confused, she has not "hopped the fence," but as Mrs. Gigli said, "Life isn't always black and white." So who knows where the road may take them? Ricki tells him he would look good in mascara and they drive off into the sunset. Oh, and Brian, now a dancing extra on Baywatch, will live happily ever after with some hot blonde because he took Larry's fatherly advice and "put himself out there." The power of the dance, apparently, bridges all worlds.

Afterwords

What baffles me most about terrible movies is how obvious script problems are to the viewer and how NO ONE, especially the actors, notices them before the cameras roll. Actors are the ones putting their careers on the line with terrible roles. Actors are the ones who have to make the terrible dialogue make sense. Actors are the ones who need to ask the questions, particularly when the director is also the writer and cannot see the forest for the tress. Did J. Lo and Ben think this made sense? Or were they just happy to be cashing multi-million-dollar paychecks?

Clearly, they are not completely to blame. In fact, Lopez and Affleck are the only things keeping this tripe from spiraling into UnwatchableLand. A film falls at the feet of its director. And Martin Brest, veteran of such esteemed classic as Beverly Hills Cop and Meet Joe Black, is all over the place. The film's fatal flaw (besides the 120 pages bound together to pass as a script) is its tone. Brest is simultaneously making a buddy road movie, a gangster film, a melodrama, and a romance with only the screeching score to tell us which at any given moment; the shifts in tone are staggering. We feel as if we have been assaulted. Assaulted by its awfulness. Assaulted by its offensiveness. Assaulted by its very existence. Every negative should be burned, every DVD should be erased, and every download should be deleted. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about this film.