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Throw Mom off the train; Black Comedy, USA, 1987; D: Danny DeVito, S: Billy Crystal, Danny DeVito, Kim Greist, Anne Ramsey, Kate Mulgrew, Branford Marsalis, Rob Reiner, Oprah Winfrey
Los Angeles. Novelist Larry Donner hates his ex-wife Margaret, who stole his manuscript and published it as a bestseller. Larry is a lecturer in a writing course and when Larry suggests he watch Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” his student Owen misunderstands the conversation and assumes that Owen must kill Larry’s ex-wife and Owen’s insufferable mother in return. Margaret disappears from a cruise in Hawaii and Owen now asks Larry to keep his end of the “deal”. Larry refuses to kill Owen’s mother and saves her from falling off a train. Margaret reappears because she slipped overboard from the ship, but survived. A year later, Larry writes a crime novel based on his misadventures with Owen.
Danny DeVito’s directorial debut, “Throw Momma from the Train” is one of the best and most underrated films he’s ever directed. Full of delicious little gags, dark humor, inspired ideas and vigor, this is a strong 80s comedy film, although it unfortunately has a chaotic, aimless last third. Billy Crystal is excellent as the novelist Larry, Anne Ramsey in one of her last roles as the annoying, insufferable mother (but the problem is that her character is written to learn more about her personality without any elaborate “acting scenes” but careful performances in DeVito’s scenes. For example, Larry is watching his ex-wife on TV on the Oprah Winfrey Show, there’s a cut to another TV with said show, the mother turns around and yells, The camera pans back across the room to Owen in the next room. In another scene, Owen interrupts Larry’s date at the amusement park and asks if he liked his crime story, but Larry replies:No!“Cut to the next scene of Larry in bed, his phone ringing, he picks it up as he hears Owen’s voice:”why not“Cut to another time jump, we see Owen and Larry sitting on a bench outside the store as Larry explains why his story doesn’t work because of a lack of purpose.
After a wild ride, a car crashes into a tree and stops, the camera pans to the right, and in the next scene the white picket fences “melt” into the white bars of the prison. There is beauty in these visual transitions. Some situations go astray—Owen assuming that stabbing his mother in the ear with a pair of scissors is bad; It could have worked if DeVito had left out the silly idea of the gardener “barking” like a dog to provoke her for some reason, with Owen hiding behind the couch while Margaret has sex with her gardener. Larry and Owen are novelists and rather improvisational and articulate, so the dialogue is not as humorous. Still, the first 2/3 of the film is full of playful allusions to Hitchcock’s style, with no ’empty walks’. Unfortunately, the final third person doesn’t know what to do with this story – Larry wants to pretend he kills Owen’s mother, but is ultimately too afraid to go down this dark path and thus runs in circles, unsure of what to do. The entire last third is a giant ‘copout’ in slow motion, bringing the concept to a close. Despite this anticlimactic finale, “Throw Momma from the Train” has so many merits in the first half that it deserves to be seen. A short episode of the agent, played by Rob Reiner, is wonderfully cynical: “I deal with writers, Larry, not artists. You become an artist. Long live the rest of the world!“
Grade: ++
