Caddyshack (1980) is sporadically very funny, but it never quite coalesces. Its plotlessness evolves into flat-out disjointedness; the movie plays like a collection of hit-or-miss comedy sketches. (Toward its back half, they mostly miss.) What semblance of a narrative it has stretches across a few days on and around the Nebraskan Bushwood Country Club, owned by the uppity Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight). Caddyshack’s litany of subplots (though there really isn’t an A plot) suggests a ticklish answer to the British-style upstairs-downstairs kind of drama, swerving through the petty crises of the rich and the comparatively serious ones of those who work for them. If there is one character that comes closest to a throughline in Caddyshack, it’s Danny (Michael O’Keefe), a teenage caddy and waitstaffer at the club trying to wriggle into Smails’ good graces. A few years ago, the latter founded a scholarship program exclusive to caddies, and Danny, with sights set on college and about eight siblings at home to financially compete with, hopes to use the connection to his benefit.
Caddyshack checks in with various colorful characters; director Harold Ramis and his co-screenwriters, Brian Doyle-Murray and Douglas Kenney, use prodigious personalities and unforgettable sight gags in place of conventional plotting. Much is made of the war that ensues between Smails and visiting chaos agent-slash-developer Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield). Smails looks at this “intruder” as a threat to everything he has cultivated at this stuffy country club, where everyone and everything generally moves to the beat of committed prissiness. Czervik, who dresses like a human lollipop and is noisily proud of all the bells and whistles he lugs around (his golf bag has attached to it a phone, a TV, and a speaker), is an emissary of bad manners. He has yet to master the art of not saying everything on his mind — almost everything he says could reasonably be followed by the joke ba dum tss drum sound. Caddyshack also spends time with one of the club’s co-founders’ listless sons (Chevy Chase) and the weirdo groundskeeper (Bill Murray) honing his methods of gopher genocide. The latter’s final solution turns the main golf course into a smaller-scale replication of an Apocalypse Now (1979)-style bonanza. Caddyshack quite literally has an explosive finale.
Of all of this, it’s the Czervik-Smails feuding that’s funniest. Dangerfield so strikingly runs away with the whole movie that you watch his performance and at times notice your brain turning into hyperbolic mush. Is this the funniest character of all time? I often thought, so blinded by Dangerfield’s singularly obnoxious work that comedy history was briefly wiped from my memory. There are a couple of great set pieces that also help define the movie: a recreation of Jaws (1975) at the club’s pool, only instead of a blood-thirsty shark as the predator it’s a misplaced Babe Ruth bar mistaken for a lump of poop; mid-movie, there’s a yacht with a mind of its own with a mission to plow everything in its path down. It’s like watching the nautical version of an escaped zoo animal wreaking havoc.
But that Caddyshack doesn’t have any real sense of narrative, and that not all of its characters are equally dynamic — for the very first time ever, I dreaded seeing Murray, whose character is aggressively unfunny — eventually catches up to it. Caddyshack’s unfocusedness makes a lot of sense, though, given its indulgent production: those who speak of its making describe it like cocaine was synonymous with air. You couldn’t avoid it. But when Caddyshack works, you can see why nostalgists tend to talk about it in overstatement. It’s very likely you’ll start laughing all over again if you try explaining your favorite scene to someone who has never seen the movie before.
Peterson Reviews 