A weird movie that could have stood to be weirder still, this off-the-wall farce teams 40-year-old Martin Short as a diabolical 10-year-old with Charles Grodin as his hapless uncle. Released as part of Orion's Chapter 11 restructuring after three years on the shelf, the misconceived
CLIFFORD serves as a cautionary reminder of why the studio went bankrupt in the first place.
In a framing sequence set in the year 2050, Clifford (Short) is seen as the elderly headmaster of "Wayward Boys-ville," trying to dissuade a youngster from running away because he's hated by the other boys. Clifford tells a tale about how he himself was once the most hateful boy imaginable,
setting up the narrative proper, which begins as a young Clifford is upset that his parents (Richard Kind, Jennifer Savidge) won't interrupt their trip to Hawaii so he can visit the Dinosaurland amusement park. Clifford invades the cockpit and shuts down the plane's engines to force a landing in
LA. When Clifford is barred from reboarding, his frantic parents leave him with his Uncle Martin (Grodin).
At first, Clifford is a godsend for Martin, who is wooing day-care operator Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) by pretending to a (non-existent) rapport with children. But that quickly changes when Martin, an architect, is forced to postpone taking Clifford to Dinosaurland because his demanding boss
(Dabney Coleman) puts him on a 24-hour deadline to redesign a city transit system. Clifford swears revenge. As a result of the boy's machinations, Martin is arrested as a mad bomber, embarrassed beyond redemption in front of Sarah's parents, and fired--his computer-assisted redesign, altered by
Clifford, explodes and burns at its unveiling. Martin retaliates by trying to murder Clifford on a Dinosaurland thrill ride, but he relents at the last second and sends him back to his parents. Back in 2050, the young runaway returns to Wayward Boys-ville secure in the knowledge that, as hateful
as he could ever be, he could never be as hateful as Clifford.
At its best, CLIFFORD is plotless shtick pushed about as far as it can go, recalling the free-form wackiness of The Three Stooges. What seems to be its most tortured conceit--Short playing a kid--is actually quite logical in context. The entire film is an adult recounting his childhood to a
child, who, rather than seeing Short as a child, quite plausibly imagines him as merely a shrunken, less wrinkled version of the elderly narrator. While Short and Grodin fly unfettered by plot and character, CLIFFORD often succeeds with moments of inspired silliness. There is no better slow burner
on the screen today than Grodin, and few better at making flat-out stupidity screamingly funny.
On the whole, however, CLIFFORD is a sorry vehicle, seemingly jury-rigged after the fact to be more like product and less like inspiration, wasting a sweet and skilled Mary Steenburgen performance along the way. It runs completely out of gas in Dinosaurland, when it is at its most strained,
reaching beyond all logic for a conventional "happy" ending. (Adult situations, profanity.) leave a comment
