Clifford | The Best of the 1990s
the Best of the 1990s is a series of capsules and other writings on some of my personal favorite media of the decade, inspired in part by the series of pieces recently published by Indiewire
A seminal cult film for some, a Blank Check driven rediscovery for others (myself included), and a cursed bit of discomforting nightmare fuel for plenty more; I tend to hedge my affection for this one, treating it as an acquired taste, but ultimately there is no ambiguity to my sense that this is one of the great comedies of the modern era. Despite the ostensible Touchstone-esque family entertainment milieu it superficially seems to operate in and (perhaps unintentionally) subverts, Clifford is instead pure alt comedy, placing a vehicle of pure chaotic will against an empty shell of 90s masculine posturing in a miniature universe of absurdist menace.
Martin Short’s Clifford is a 9-year-old played by a 40-year-old, giving the character a sinister psychosexual energy that implants the galaxy brain notion of the boy contained in the man, and the man contained in the boy — a twisted bit of entendre the character and the film would probably delight in. Charles Grodin is his Uncle Martin, almost akin to his frustrated Beethoven patriarch except imbued with the tragic moral emptiness of his Heartbreak Kid protagonist and the aimless American Ideal impotence that comes with it. When the two collide, it is a collision of two starkly opposed orientations toward the universe: Clifford an id, and a will, that stops at nothing to achieve his dreams, and Uncle Martin an affectless and pathetic man with notions of what a dream should look like and an inability to give them a solid foundation.
While I would never claim Short has the “easier” part, whose outlandishness and intrinsic silliness seem angled toward an easier laugh but must have been a prickly balancing act, Grodin seems to be giving the more invisible, and therefore more pointedly remarkable, performance; his comic beats are necessarily trickier and rooted in a greater degree of calibrated maliciousness and frustration. Of course, the alchemy is all in how Short and Grodin synthesize their disparate tendencies, and the film’s tour de force sequence, despite many large and terrific setpieces, is one in which they simply share a single room together and do great work: Grodin chastises Short for his sinister behavior, at being “made naked” in a jail because of his pranks, at being consistently humiliated in front of everyone who matters to him; Short lies, clowns, trolls, and, finally, upon being begged to act like “a normal human boy, for one second,” contorts his face to look even more robotic or alien. It is the collision of the entire film in a perfect nutshell, driven entirely by the strength of its two breathless, unbelievable lead performances.
