Emory Leeson (Dudley Moore) lies for a living. A top advertising executive, he gets fed up with writing dishonest ad copy and decides to tell the truth, coming up with such candid ads as, "Volvos: they're boxy but good" and "Metamucil: it makes you go to the toilet." His boss, Charles
Drucker (J.T. Walsh), is so incensed by the unorthodox ads that he not only fires Emory, but also has him committed. The sanitarium to which Emory is sent is populated with the usual movie-variety crazies, along with a token female patient, Kathy Burgess (Daryl Hannah), who conveniently develops a
hankering for Emory. Lonely and confused, she is obsessed with her brother, who, she claims, is coming to get her when his tour of duty in the Army is over. While Emory is "away," his "honest" ads are accidentally sent to papers and magazines all over the country. However, the plain-talking,
sometimes crude ads are a surprise hit, and Drucker, seeing the errors of his ways, rehires Emory. Meanwhile, Emory has been teaching his fellow residents to write ads, and they start a makeshift agency in the sanitarium. The facility's director doesn't take kindly to this idea, but after learning
of the money to be made from the venture, he teams with Drucker to exploit the patients' copywriting abilities. When Emory objects, he is again dismissed, both from the sanitarium and from the agency. The patients are lost without him, and Kathy gets more depressed; then, miraculously, her brother
and Emory arrive in an Army helicopter to rescue her and the other kooky copywriters.
CRAZY PEOPLE is an example of "high concept" filmmaking at its worst, for all that the film has going for it is its concept. The idea of revolutionizing advertising by telling the truth and by using mental patients to do the telling is amusing; however, it is introduced in the first third of the
movie, with no other innovative ingredients added to the mix. Random plot devices--the romance between Emory and Kathy, Drucker's corporate greed--are thrown in to pad the film, but CRAZY PEOPLE never seems to know what it's about or what its tone should be. Although presented with enough comic
exaggeration to be a farce, the film lacks the energy that the genre requires; moreover, it's neither well-written nor biting enough to be a satire. The script also suffers from an infuriating disregard for logic, comic or otherwise. Notably, Kathy tells Emory of her fear of open spaces as she
walks calmly in a large open space, and Emory's ads magically appear on billboards and in print without anyone so much as bothering to check the copy. The ads, which are frequently amusing, are not always wholly "honest," either. Although many are more truthful than conventional advertising, the
script equates honesty with explicitness. An ad for Jaguar, for example, implies that beautiful women will provide sexual favors for the man who drives one in terms that are merely plainer than usual. (The ads in the movie are for real products, except for the cigarette ad that bluntly states the
product's taste is worth the cancer risk. Apparently no tobacco company was hungry enough for free publicity to associate its name with that claim.)
As for the performances, Moore doesn't bring anything special to his role, but Hannah's slightly awkward and befuddled demeanor works to her advantage, since she's playing someone with a tenuous grip on reality. The other performers are generally left adrift by the simpleminded, juvenile script,
which, devoid of comic inspiration, resorts to gratuitous profanity and crude sex jokes. (Profanity, sexual situations.) leave a comment