Let it be stipulated right up front that the Schwab family are monsters. According to a number of sources I've read, they are meant to represent the middle class, but if that's so then they belong to the upper reaches of middle-classdom. They are conspicuously wealthy and conspicuously unworthy. The Schwab patriarch is a bigoted boor, his wife an oblivious alcoholic who thinks she's fooling everyone, the daughter an obnoxious brat and the son was born to sport taped-up hornrims and underwear pulled over his head by the school bullies. These people stepped out of a cartoon. Not a parody, a cartoon. I stress that because the film and its characters are an adaptation of a series of stories published by National Lampoon. We expect satire, but Robert Altman takes the clan a few steps further.
That's an awkward choice, because from all accounts he has played down the antics of the films teenage protagonists Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie and Mark Stiggs. The two are meant to be taken as a couple of laid-back smartasses expressing their contempt for suburbia, for everything bourgeois, and for their peers. We are supposed to snicker at their war waged on everyone in sight. They're smarter than Beavis and Butthead and less manic than Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. Unfortunately, their contempt is not based on moral outrage, like Hunter S. Thompson's, it is because they are a couple of sociopaths. A typical day for them is to buy a Studebaker (so they can feign being too poor to have insurance), turn it into a monster truck, and crash into other people's cars. For them, an amusing wedding gift is a loaded uzi. Their dripping sarcasm spares few: Wino Bob, because he amuses them; a girl that O.C. is attracted to (he's quick to drop her for "some sluts" when she displays some humanity and taste); Dennis Hooper, a brain-fried Vietnam vet, because he can get them armaments; King Sunny Ade, because Stiggs thinks being a fan makes a political statement; and Schwab's neighbor, a self-made millionaire. The guy got rich selling tacky clothing to plus-sized women..."hogs", in his parlance.
So I have to ask, as crass as the Schwabs are, how can they be morally offensive to the titular antiheroes who value nothing? We hate them, Altman hates them, but why do O.C. and Stiggs hate them? Altman goes after familiar targets as easy as they are deserving, but he asks us to accept as surrogates a pair of champions who are every bit as loathsome. Schwab is confronted with poverty when his house is used as a "charity" front, but our heroes have no genuine concern for the homeless folk - they too are fodders for a joke, for which O.C & S hope to make a buck themselves. O.C. is no Hawkeye, and Stiggs no Trapper John. Their misanthropy has no fire in it.
It helps that it's Altman. His style is unmistakable, and he fills the movie with his usual impeccable cast (including Paul Dooley, Jane Curtin, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Mull, Ray Walston, Cynthia Nixon, Jon Cryer, Tina Louise and Bob Euker), his usual quirks, his visual and aural layering, and enough quiet touches that I almost forgot what scumbags I was being asked to sympathize with. Still, the humor never quite finds its groove nor do the nominal heroes ever earn their rewards.
I have not read the original stories from National Lampoon, nor do I desire to. It's enough to have read that Altman has excised most of their destructive swath and taken their edge off. It's impossible to guess if that was a good move....O.C. & Stiggs are too assholish for the film to be amiable, but it also fails as the black comedy it wants to be because Alltman has defanged it. Had he not done so it could have been a success, or maybe an Ishtar-caliber bomb. Instead it's simply forgotten.
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