By Marc S. Sanders
Reader, it has been a hard week. Hard because my flat screen has been on the fritz. Finally, today at last, the Best Buy Geek Squad will be paying me a visit and working on a repair. In the meantime, I have had to relegate myself to one of the smaller flat screens within the household. I feel dirty. Cheap. I can’t even look at myself. Just look away!!!! Considering the dire circumstances, I could never look at my next big film to review during the absence of my 9.0 sound system and 65 inches of viewing pleasure. It would be a sin to watch a Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg piece anywhere else (unless it’s in the cinema). Therefore, I settled, and I hit rock bottom. I opted to for Netflix meh!
All I have, all I can give you, all I can offer, all I can claim for you during this dark, sad time is Herbert Ross’ attempt at shaping a Michael J Fox thirty second MTV style 1980’s music video into a film. The “film” is The Secret Of My Success.
I recall seeing this movie at age 14 during a field trip to Washington DC with my eighth grade Yeshiva class. Every time the dimply cute yuppie Canadian sensation from Family Ties and Back To The Future graced the screen, the girls in my class screamed with puppy love glee. I liked Fox at that time. I still do. He was a bright guy and while not an actor like Brando or Olivier, he had a unique charm that defined the clean cut 1980s with knit ties and Benneton sweaters. His unforgettable Alex P Keaton was the fictional cheerleader for the era of Ronald Reagan, and no one protested.
I recall the promise of The Secret Of My Success as being the vehicle that would elevate his tv persona to the big screen since he already had luck with Marty McFly and a healthy B-movie following with HBO airings of Teen Wolf (a much better movie than it ever deserves to be). Regrettably, this film never landed. It’s most glaring failure is that it never even lives up to its title.
The assembly of Herbert Ross’ romantic, New York, yuppie comedy occupies itself so much with music montages. It’s as guilty of its own indulgence as Rocky IV. How many times must we see a grinning Michael J Fox hustle through the concrete jungle of the city and then through skyscraper cubicle hallways within a white collared business world? Night Ranger is the ‘80s hair band who provides most of the movie soundtrack and they owe much to Michael J Fox as the face that accompanies their work with trinkling keyboards and electric guitars with the raspy roar of their lead singer. If Michael J Fox is not walking down streets where apparently supermodels live to turn their heads (I saw you Cindy Crawford), he’s got a pen wedged between his teeth and he’s pulling huge three ring binders off of shelves while doing an all nighter. This is oh so boring. In 1987 however, it is all a couple of Teen Beat readers needed in their lives. I can watch Meryl Streep or Gary Oldman read a three-ring binder. Michael J Fox just doesn’t have a knack for this skill.
Fox plays Kansas farm boy Brantley Foster. Now that he has earned a business degree, he has enormous aspirations to climb the top of the New York corporate ladder and make a success of himself with a “beautiful secretary.” Because, you know, you can’t make it without a secretary, much less a beautiful secretary.
Upon relocating into a roach infested apartment, Brantley’s plans fall through, and he has to beg his super rich Uncle Howard (Richard Jordan) into giving him a job in the mail room of his building. Brantley encounters a beautiful blond executive named Christy (Helen Slater) amid a sea of uptight middle-aged men. The depth of this attraction only goes so far as fantasizing about her walking towards him in a cheesy, glittery pink evening gown with a keyboard and saxophone chiming in. On the side is Howard’s bored trophy wife Vera (Margaret Whitton) crowding young Brantley in an illicit Mrs. Robinson kind of affair. Let me clarify. Vera is married to Brantley’s Uncle Howard. So, Brantley is being terrorized by Aunt Vera.
For the purposes of ridiculous farce, that might be funny for a moment. However, The Secret Of My Success takes forever to arrive at the farce it could have hinged on. Instead, Brantley has to discover a way into the white-collar world when he comes upon an empty office and bears the fictional name of Carlton Whitfield to justify his suits and his motivation to work in the heart of the corporate world.
I noted that the film does not live up to the title. When Brantley is working the persona of Whitfield, we never get an idea of his brilliant ideas for business success and operations. We never learn what turned Uncle Howard’s high-rise building into the towering reputation it apparently stands upon. We never understand the threat of a shareholder’s takeover that Howard and his team fear is imminent. Where’s the value in anything that Brantley is doing to be that corporate hero and what is he trying to improve or salvage?
Instead, we are left with a very poor chemistry pairing between Helen Slater and Michael J Fox. Slater is flat out boring with no dynamic to her. If you want to see how to deliver any variation of a line in a flat, monotone way, then observe what she has to offer. Fox is on another level of energy that Slater cannot match and Herbert Ross and the script from Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr (Top Gun, Legal Eagles) chooses to occupy itself more with this romance than the corporate world at play.
The following two years after this film’s release would do better for this hustle and bustle setting with Oliver Stone’s cynical Wall Street and Mike Nichols romantic comedy Working Girl. The latter film follows a near exact blueprint of The Secret Of My Success. Yet, it wins because we actually see the main character, portrayed by Melanie Griffith, actually demonstrate her prowess for the cutthroat world of business power and politics. By comparison, Michael J Fox just wants to play hooky and make out in the back of a limousine.
A last-ditch effort is made though when the big wigs assemble for a weekend getaway. What seems like an attempt at bedroom farce barely gets started with the players climbing staircases and tip toing behind doors and hopping into bed together and blah blah blah. It doesn’t serve, however, because the idiot plot intrudes where everyone has to act as if they have no idea of who is sleeping with who and who is Brantley and who is Whitfield amid the fast-talking dialogue edited within. You want to scream at the screen and tell everyone to shut up because this can all be explained in sixty seconds.
Again, as Mike Nichols’ Oscar nominated film eventually proved, there was a better film to be made here for Michael J Fox. It could have included all of the cynical realities that go with the natures of a corporate American beast. Instead, The Secret Of My Success relies on music video montages with the teardrop keyboards and the yearning saxophone that seemed like a requisite for the adoring Michael J Fox of the 1980s.
Enough already!!!! I need to cleanse my palette. GEEK SQUAD, WHERE ARE YOU?????
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 