Movie satire is always tough. Sometimes it works -- as in This Is Spinal Tap or Best in Show. Sometimes it seems labored and arch -- as in Waiting for Guffman, a movie that some people nevertheless found hilarious.
Unfortunately, writer-director Harry Shearer's spoofy Teddy Bears' Picnic falls into the latter category.
In Teddy Bears' Picnic, Shearer, who co-starred in Spinal Tap and has a program on National Public Radio, goofs on a real-life annual event called the Bohemian Grove. For more than a century it has brought together America's movers and shakers -- corporate executives, university presidents, banking and political and military leaders -- for carefree days of fun and frolic in the California woods. Or, as the movie puts it, "to cavort like college sophomores on an unlimited budget."
Drinking and schmoozing and meetings to define the state of the world are all part of the program in Teddy Bears' Picnic, although the biggest event is the annual amateur show starring the attendees. This year it's a spoof of Shakespeare's plays. Because the picnic is a stag event, some of the men take the women's roles in drag.
The scenes involving show preparations are like getting a backstage look at the eighth-grade play at the middle school. The show itself isn't much better, a painfully unfunny experience.
Shearer has assembled a strong cast of once-famous and semi-famous faces -- Fred Willard and Michael McKean, who are veterans of satirical films; George Wendt, Morgan Fairchild, Howard Hesseman, Henry Gibson, Kenneth Mars, even Alan Thicke and Peter Marshall.
Occasionally some of Shearer's irony scores. A TV reporter congratulates a woman outside the gates of "Zambesi Glen" who is protesting the lack of females at the picnic with "good sound bite" after she delivers a zinger. A TV reporter reminds her husband "I am not a journalist, I work in television news." Later, this inept reporter becomes her station's star for being first on air with the story of a helicopter crash, a story she helped create when her chopper crashed and started a raging forest fire.
Too often, however, Shearer goes way beyond the near-realism satire needs to be successful and winds up just plain silly. A waiter says he's only waiting tables to raise tuition for clown school. Later he accidentally drops his bulbous clown nose into a diner's meal. This is almost as unfunny as the prostitute who swears she's only working to get ideas for her "art" as a standup comic or the sight of Shearer himself playing the kitchen manager who is incensed over a missing case of decaf coffee.
Willard, as a former football star-turned U.S. senator from Rhode Island, delivers a speech about how we should "take the handcuffs off the nuclear power industry and let the magic of the marketplace join hands with the power of the atom." Wendt, as an Air Force general, holds an audience captive when he tells them a nuclear strike on America might not really be such a bad thing.
There's crisis in Zambesi Glen when a local TV station gives a video camera to a waiter in hopes of catching embarrassing moments perpetrated by the famous guests. He does, although in the spirit of irony, this subplot is hung out to dry.
A few sequences have been badly edited, making awkward jumps in the story, as though scenes were missing. In the case of Teddy Bears' Picnic, however, that's probably a blessing.
**
Teddy Bears' Picnic
Starring: Michael McKean, Fred Willard, George Wendt, Alan Thicke, Morgan Fairchild, John Michael Higgins, Ming-Na, Howard Hesseman, Henry Gibson, Justin Kirk, Kenneth Mars, Kurtwood Smith, Harry Shearer, Dick Butkus, Peter Marshall.
Rated: Not rated, contains profanity, nudity.
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