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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 4/26/2025

Ivan Reitman

Ivan Reitman is not someone many people would hold up as an example for auteur theory. I think auteur theory quickly ran amok from the original idea as posited by Francois Truffaut in his Cahiers du Cinema article which essentially amounted to a pair of writers were taking control of adaptations and missing the point of the original texts except when working with Jacques Cocteau. Combined with the magazines focus on directors like Hitchcock and Hawks, the idea became "directors are king" rather than "there's usually one role that takes the most prominent creative control of a film." The article itself was arguing that the writers were doing that in everything they did except when they worked with Cocteau, who became the main creative force when he was directing.

Anyway, I start this essay about Ivan Reitman, no one's idea of an auteur, with that tangent because even though his career is mostly dotted with middling to bad comedies that aren't particularly funny, despite the presence of one of the best movies of the 80s, Ghostbusters, under his belt, he had a shockingly clear voice. He just...wasn't a particularly good filmmaker. And that's not the kind of director auteur cultists adhere to (Kubrick? Yes. Reitman? No.). They have to be both great and distinctive. Indistinct and great gets forgotten (think Wyler and even Cahiers own favorite Hawks). Distinctive and not very good? Never embraced at all.

Now, I didn't hate Reitman's body of work. I just found it overall disappointing. However, this post isn't about bashing him but tracing how even a director like Reitman can exert control over his films, and how early experiences can influence a director's entire approach to filmmaking.

Bill Murray

If there's one reason that Ivan Reitman had a feature filmmaking career, it was because Bill Murray decided to show up to the set of Meatballs. Reitman's first two directed features actually predate Meatballs by several years, but after Cannibal Girls (I could never find a copy of Foxy Lady), Reitman directed theater for a while and then produced Animal House, the John Landis film. The producing team, including Reitman, of Meatballs, wanted Landis to come back for Meatballs, but he was too busy making The Blues Brothers to commit. So, Reitman just took over.

If you look closely, Meatballs is actually two movies smashed together. On the one hand, it's the kind of standard sex comedy about teens but set in a summer camp. On the other hand, it's Bill Murray ambling around and being funny. There's a clear delineation between the two because after the initial production period, there were test screenings where Reitman figured out that Murray was the best part of it. So, they went back for more production to shoot more Murray stuff which ended up at least twenty minutes of the final film. Murray completely dominates the final product, far more than the actual story necessitates (whole subplots seem to get completely cut after a certain point), and it was Reitman's recipe for his first success, the biggest money-making Canadian film up to that point in movie history.

Reitman followed that up with Stripes, a film more purposefully built around Murray being himself on camera, and Ghostbusters, his most tightly scripted film thanks to the combination of Dan Aykroyd's insane original ideas and Harold Ramis' rewrite. It also had enough room for Murray to be himself without dominating the film completely (the expense of the film's special effects probably had a not small part of it), while also opening up a small role for Rick Moranis to be funny freewheelingly like Murray.

These three movies set the production process that Reitman would follow for the rest of his career: Get a script and put people in it while waiting for them to be funny. It's how he established his career. It was how he learned to make movies in the Hollywood system: rely on your actors, preferably stars to help sell the film, to lead to laughs and financial success.

The problem was his taste of scripts was...suspect at best.

The Post-Ghostbusters Era


His immediate follow up, though, seems more like an attempt at respect. Legal Eagles is a largely unremarkable Robert Redford vehicle and comedy/drama hybrid about an assistant district attorney who finds meaning and love when he helps a new defense attorney with a case. It's not funny or particularly memorable, and it reveals the problem with Reitman's mode of production. He needed Redford to be Bill Murray. He needed Redford to carry scenes on charm, charisma, and the ability to make people laugh. And yet, every time Reitman demands it of him, the scenes are just kind of dull.

That's not to say that everything is terrible through the late 80s and early 90s. It's just that the scripts, even at their best, often felt like they needed more work. The obvious example is Ghostbusters II, thrown together last second from some random ideas Aykroyd had and in order to meet a release date and with a lot of reshoots after some botched test screenings, but even the films I like, like Kindergarten Cop and Dave, they just feel like first drafts where the right combination of things came together for Reitman, his cast melding with the material rather well. I mean, the contrast of Arnold Schwarzenegger corralling a bunch of 6 year olds is fun. Kevin Kline being charming and in over his head as the fake president is fun. The scripts just have the kind of issues I would expect to get ironed out in some quick rewrites. The basic conceit of Cop makes no sense, and Dave straddles this line between fairy tale and real world-expose of DC malpractice and methods poorly, so to speak.

But nothing was terrible, and nothing did badly at the box office. Reitman's career was showing no signs of slowing or even needing a rethink. And then he decided to get Arnold Schwarzenegger pregnant.

In Search of Comedy


Junior is a terrible movie. It's a single joke (Schwarzenegger is pregnant) played out for nearly two-hours. That's barely enough material to fill an SNL skit of five minutes, and Reitman drags it out forever. The sight of Schwarzenegger in a pregnant suit and eating weird food is mildly entertaining, but that sort of image doesn't show up until the movie is over an hour in. What's supposed to be entertaining up to that point? Are there written jokes? Are there funny gags to play out? Did the guy who made his career out of filming Bill Murray be funny ensure that the script was in that state before he went to camera?

No, he didn't. The film is supposed to be a screwball comedy (Emma Thomson is playing Katherine Hepburn from Bringing Up Baby badly), but there's precious little comedy which then butts up against the melodramatic tones of the movie's final act (apparently all reshoots, from what I've read). Reitman trust Arnold and Danny DeVito to find the comedy in an unfunny script...and they couldn't find it. Neither are unfunny people in general, but they were simply lost in this terrible script and Reitman was just waiting for them to find their ways out. It didn't work.

And things kept going after that in the same direction. Get Billy Crystal and Robin Williams in a movie together, and it'll be hilarious, right? Not if it's Father's Day. Get Harrison Ford and up and coming starlet Anne Heche in a thriller/comedy (with massive, massive script issues) in Six Days and Seven Nights, and Ford's charm will carry everything right?

Reitman had been professionally making movies since the late seventies, and twenty years into his career, it felt like he had no idea what actually made movies good or bad or funny or not. The drag of his later career is so bad that it's the kind of run you expect from people who never made a name for themselves, desperately getting any work they can, rather than the guy who made Ghostbusters. the only saving grace of his final stretch of comedies, for me, is Evolution. It's a mess, not good, but it feels like the cast find the right groove (especially Orlando Jones) and someone saved the final act (I assume a studio editor) from falling into melodramatic nonsense like Reitman's films had been descending into for more than a decade.

After that, it's unremarkable the confused and unfunny (My Super Ex-Girlfriend) followed by the unremarkably bland (No Strings Attached) and then the perfectly competent if not terribly compelling (Draft Day). His final work at all in the movie business before his death last year was producing the Ghostbusters films, the first written and directed by his own son, Jason (who has many cameos across his father's filmography).

Auteur Theory


So, why did I start this article talking about Francois Truffaut and Cahiers du Cinema?

Because, despite my not really liking most of Reitman's body of work very much, I found the same kind of repeated threads across his filmography as I did other directors I enjoy more.

The easiest thing to see is the rise of the schlub. This is most potently manifested in Meatballs where Bill Murray is a complete slob who cares about nothing (leading his fellow campers and counselors in a chant about nothing mattering after a bad day of inter-camp Olympic competition) and then wins the competition anyway. This continues through Stripes where the slovenly class gets the special assignment in Germany to the outsider con-artists and scientists turning their ideas into a successful business and saving New York in Ghostbusters. But it continues well beyond that, manifesting in Twins, Dave, Father's Day, Six Days and Seven Nights, Evolution, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, No Strings Attached, and Draft Day.

It's just that, in Meatballs it was the poor guys. By No Strings Attached, it was the son of a famous television star who was trying to make it on his own and in Draft Day the general manager of a professional sports team (that sucks).

These aren't small things that pop up from here to there, they're driving narrative concerns that define character traits and overall contours of the drama. They're as important to Reitman's filmography as the idea of identity in in-groups is to Martin Scorsese's.

It's just that the movies are simply...not good enough to merit that much attention. There's good stuff. There's mediocre stuff that slightly entertains me. But who wants to dig into the everyman aspect of My Super Ex-Girlfriend? Does the fact that most people don't like the film negate the fact that Reitman obviously has something particular he wanted to say through the medium of film? Nope, not in the least. If you love his work, that's an angle to dig into and discover like all the other film nerds and their preferred filmmakers.

I think Reitman is as much a creative with something to say as some of my favorites. I just don't think he was very good at it.

The Ultimate Ivan Reitman Film


I do think there's a movie that most perfectly encapsulates who Reitman wanted to be as a filmmaker. The combination of script, movie star, comedy, and light melodrama that he was obviously searching for.

And that's Dave. It's not his masterpiece Ghostbusters, which he's more of the director for hire managing the set while the cast makes the most of a good script, but Dave, the Capra-esque story of an everyman who looks exactly like the president taking over when the president suffers a massive stroke. It's got a decent script (again, I think it needs a rewrite, but whatever), and room for Kline, a genuinely funny actor, to stretch himself in both comedic and dramatic ways within a relatively small box with some fairy tale aspects. It's where Reitman was able to combine his production process of letting Kline find comedy, his thematic focus of the everyman winning the day against the powerful figures, and having a feel-good, lightly melodramatic ending.

If there's one movie to define Reitman's career, it's Dave.

Ghostbusters is better, though.

So, thank you Mr. Reitman for some good times, but it might have been better if you'd gotten Jason to pick your scripts as soon as he was able to read.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

The Accountant 2

Until Dawn

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Meatballs (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It's funny, and a celebration of the slob mentality, but its final act suffers just a bit too much for my tastes." [Prime]

Stripes (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Still, it made me laugh. I laughed consistently. I was entertained. Successful comedy, in my book." [Personal Collection]

Ghostbusters (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Whatever the circumstances, the combination came together perfectly to create an all-around entertainment that still works decades after its release." [Personal Collection]

Legal Eagles (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I mean, this isn't good. However, I find it frustrating and thin rather than outright bad." [Library]

Twins (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "But the final product isn't bad. It's just kind of a mesh of different ideas not done that well while the bulk of the film is carried by likeable leads well within their acting ranges." [Netflix]

Ghostbusters II (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It's a mess, helped none at all by the tortured screenwriting process, terrible previews, and reshoots, but it still has the core charm of the film in somewhat lesser, safer form." [Personal Collection]

Kindergarten Cop (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Really, I enjoy this film pretty thoroughly. It's fun. It carries a couple of different genres decently. It effectively uses its lead in the small acting box he operates in. It's a good 110 minutes at the movies." [Library]

Dave (Rating 3/4) Full Review "An easy film with a winning central performance, Dave is one of Ivan Reitman's proudest achievements." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 5/17, and it will be about the last three eras of the Godzilla franchise.