Tommy

Jul 13, 2007

Tommy movie poster, 1975 I recently bought Endless Wire, the newest album by rock and roll icons the Who. After listening to it, I was so disappointed with what I heard that I immediately sat down to write a lengthy piece complaining about it and expressing my general lack of satisfaction only to remember that I was supposed to be writing about a movie. Needing a quick solution but still having my mind on the Who, I put in Ken Russell’s 1975 film version of Tommy.

The story is as old as time itself and is as much a part of our cultural consciousness as Aesop’s fables and the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm: A boy is stricken deaf, dumb and blind after seeing his mother and her lover whack his father in the head, is physically and sexually abused and has weird drugs forced upon him only to grow up and become a celebrity on the lucrative competitive pinball circuit and eventually be cured of his ailments not by doctors but by violently smashing a mirror, after which he is for some reason revered as a messiah until he ultimately opens a summer camp where people come to learn inner truth, play pinball and shove S&M accessories in their mouths. Truly, it’s a story so eerily familiar it could have been taken from the headlines of any paper in any town across the country. Put on screen, the movie becomes a visual adaptation of the story told on the Who’s 1969 album; it’s all songs and score without fancy pretenses like dialogue to get in the way. Rest assured that with the lack of dialogue and by using versions of songs vastly inferior to those that appeared on the original album, the film’s 111 minute running time flies by as though it were only sixteen hours.

Offsetting whatever difficulties may have arisen as a result of the movie’s unconventional format and at times impenetrably metaphoric imagery is the fact that director Ken Russell managed to assemble an all-star cast. Or, rather, a cast consisting of many stars of the music world and several actors who, while they are names you recognize (Oliver Reed, for example), are not really people you care if you ever see. So, more accurately, I should say that director Ken Russell managed to assemble a semi-star cast with guest appearances by stars in the wrong genre. You may find this appraisal to be somewhat harsh, but admit it to yourself: You’ve never been searching the aisles in the video store and found yourself calling out “Honey! Let’s rent this one! It’s got Oliver Reed!”

Perhaps I’m coming across a bit too negative here, because I don’t really dislike this movie. It has its moments of fun (i.e. a little girl marrying a Frankenstein monster and a skeleton with a snake for a penis) and the songs, while not as good as the original material, are still sufficiently excellent. More importantly than all that, though, Tommy provides you with two sequences that will totally rock your world (each for an entirely different reason) and that, so far as I know, you definitely will not find anywhere else.

One of these moments is when Jack Nicholson–the only actor in the film a viewer might conceivably be interested in–opens up his mouth and belts out the song “Go to the Mirror!” Allow, for a moment, the enormity of that idea to sink into your brain. Jack Nicholson, best known for trying to chop up his family with an axe and for helping stuttering mental patients to get laid, waltzes on screen and fumbles his way through a rock song. During his scene he starts coming on to Ann-Margret pretty strong, so he still seems like a creepy old man under whose veneer of civility brews a frothy cauldron of madness…but he’s singing all the while! You won’t want to miss it!

More noteworthy even than that is Ann-Margret’s lengthy writhing sequence. As Tommy’s mother, guilt and anguish are constantly gnawing away at her psyche, as tends to happen when you severely handicap your son just because you sort of accidentally had a hand in making him a witness to some murder most foul. While she lounges about watching television in her particularly odd-looking sitting room, the knowledge of what she’s done continues to make her feel more and more unclean until her TV explodes and stuff comes out.

I’m sorry, did I do that too fast? Let me restate: As Ann-Margret sits in front of it, her television blows up and spews forth first a torrent of soap suds and then an absolute deluge of beans and chocolate. As each new substance issues from her broken TV set, she first rubs it suggestively over her tightly-clad body then writhes about in it with an expression of either ecstasy, pain, madness or a combination of all three. She also manages to straddle and stroke an undeniably phallic pillow. I suppose it’s all meant to be a big metaphor; she tries to wash away her sins with the soap but all the dirt comes back in the form of messy edibles. What I know for a fact, however, is that the first time I saw this film was in an IMAX theater, with each close-up image of Ann-Margret’s sudsy breasts as big as a building and that as a result this scene provided fuel for my masturbatory fires from age fourteen to the present.

So that, in a nutshell, is Tommy: the Who, Jack Nicholson, pinball, and Ann-Margret’s glorious bust line. If I haven’t done a very good job describing the movie to you, that’s because it’s a really weird movie and thus hard to describe. But it’s still worth seeing at least once.

Just be sure to have some Kleenex handy, because after Ann-Margret gets all dirty, you’ll probably have some cleaning up to do, yourself.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate: