Checking Out (1989)
Movie rating: 5/10
If nothing else, Checking Out nails how absurd and counterproductive it can be to obsess over our own mortality. Directed by David Leland and written by Joe Eszterhas, this dark comedy has an intriguing and relatable premise. Unfortunately the execution — no pun intended — leaves something to be desired. While the film generates decent laughs, after a while it feel like it’s running in circles, with its one joke repeated and plot threads that go nowhere. Eszterhas’s script appears to swing for the fences at the end before pulling back, finishing on a note that feels strangely inconsequential.
Ray Macklin (Jeff Daniels) is an airline executive who becomes a fanatical hypochondriac after friend Pat Hagen (Allan Havey) dies from a massive heart attack halfway through telling a joke at a barbecue. “Why don’t Italians like barbecues?” Pat asks before kicking the bucket, leaving the unresolved punchline hanging over his friends. Almost immediately, Ray begins fearing that every mild ache or twinge means he too is on death’s door. He sees multiple doctors and gets every test possible done, but comes to believe they’re lying to him when they say he’s fine. Ray buys up devices to monitor his heart and pulse. He ignores pleas for sex from wife Jenny (Melanie Mayron) while he sets up a hydrotherapy unit in the bathtub, at which point she effectively kicks him out of the house.
As I said, there are some funny moments, such as Ray’s conversation in a psychotherapist’s waiting room with eccentric Spencer Gillinger (John Durbin), a fellow hypochondriac who feeds into Ray’s paranoia. The psychotherapist, Dr. Duffin (Felton Perry), assures Ray he’s simply feeling anxiety from the shock of his friend’s death; that Ray is perfectly healthy, and that there’s no point in fixating on one’s death because it’s something that happens to us all and we can never know when. All this passes over Ray, who instead asks Duffin about a band-aid on his thumb. The doctor says it’s nothing, just a small cut from a razor. A few scenes later, Ray learns the doctor has died. All his fears, he thinks, have been confirmed.
Checking Out is an interesting snapshot of 1980s-era America and how much has changed since then. One thing that stood out to me is its image of “normal” family life. To start with, Ray has a house, a nice one. He has a car. The image of suburbia taken for granted at this time now feels like an unattainable pipe dream for most millennials and zoomers, who under capitalism and a persistent housing crisis are unlikely to ever own a home.
Then there’s Ray’s job as an airline executive. To this day, it’s still surprisingly (?) rare to see working class characters at the centre of Hollywood movies and TV shows. Instead the focus tends to be on well-off professionals who can offer some aspirational image of upward mobility. Ray starts off the movie with a secretary, which by itself is something alien to any working class viewer. For some reason he later ends up with two. Ray’s fellow (male) executives are fairly open in sexually objectifying their female subordinates and having extramarital affairs with them. On the other hand, there’s a scene where Ray’s secretary Barbara (Jo Harvey Allen) discovers him bloodied and hungover in his car, confesses her love, and the two have sex. Boss Harry Lardner (Michael Tucker) discovers them in the act and fires Barbara, but only Barbara, for sexual harassment — because, he says, “she’s on top.”
It’s frankly amazing what Ray gets away with in this movie while keeping his job. He only gets fired after panicking on board a plane and screaming that there’s a bomb onboard to force it to land. Before that, we see him flirting with his new secretary Diana (Kathleen York) and then showing up to her home after Jenny throws him out. The entire subplot with Diana goes nowhere, and I’m wondering if material was left on the cutting room floor.
The main joke of Checking Out is how, consumed by fears over his death, Ray is no longer able to enjoy life and ends up alienating everyone around him. That’s a valid point to make, and one that hypochondriacs would do well to remind themselves of. Unfortunately, the film is less effective in knowing where to go beyond that. Daniels does what he can in the lead role, but the script ratchets up Ray’s hypochondria way too quickly. The morning after Pat’s death, he’s already leaping out his bedroom window and standing on top of his car, screaming for someone to call an ambulance because he thinks he’s going to have a heart attack. Perceptive as always, Roger Ebert wrote, “The problem with Checking Out is that it provides us with fears we can understand and responses that seem to have been phoned in from a sitcom.” Daniels’s reactions get so wacky so soon, we don’t get enough of a baseline for his character.
Spoilers ahead.
At the climax, Daniels suffers from a ruptured appendix. Whether or not that’s related to stressing himself out so much is unclear. But he appears to die and meets Pat in an afterlife that resembles something out of a Coen brothers or Wes Anderson film, checking into a motel in the desert. Frank DiLeo of Goodfellas makes a pointless, silent cameo as his roommate. Ray and Pat head over to a pool apparently overseen by Howard Hughes. It’s all pretty baffling and confusing. Then Ray wakes up and it seems all this was a near-death experience. He reunites with his family, happy to be alive again. But why has he now apparently overcome his obsession with his own death? Is this simply a case of facing your fears? The script doesn’t say.
Checking Out is still worth, uh, checking out. Sitcom-level humour or not, it has some funny scenes and is good viewing for hypochondriacs as a reminder of why worrying about your own death will only worsen your quality of life. It’s more ambitious than a lot of comedies, even if it doesn’t fulfill the potential of its premise.
