Death to Smoochy

There's almost nothing as reliably amusing as hearing the host of a children's show dipping into the adult end of our common vocabulary. The delicious transgressive thrill of hearing such people explode f-bombs speaks both to our common resentment of people who always appear happier than us and our envy of people who get to play with kids all day for large sums of money. Yet, even deeper in our hearts, most of us really would like it if everyone treated each other with respect and love and generosity and all that other pie-in-the-sky crap the kiddie show hosts spout.

The new film "Death to Smoochy" tries to exploit and resolve that tension. Rainbow Randolph Smiley (Robin Williams), a longtime idol of the younger set, is also a profanity-spewing, bribe-taking, trust-abusing machine. When the machine breaks down and he gets caught, Kidnet executives Frank Stokes (John Stewart) and Nora Wells (Catherine Keener), both of whom felt comfortable with Rainbow Randolph because he was so like them, must hold their noses and search for a vaguely respectable kiddie host to inherit Rainbow Randolph's now-vacated time slot.

They find their man in Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton), a "bottle of pancake syrup with legs" in Stokes' phrase, who plays the titular purple rhinoceros (no, no reference at all!) and uses his new platform to promote family understanding, conscientious consumption, and vegan eating. All that doesn't sit well with the dark side of children's entertainment, which besides the mercenary Stokes includes Burke Bennett (Danny DeVito, who also directed and produced), charity-based heavy Merv Green (Harvey Fierstein), and a whole mess of gangsters, sleazeballs, and American Nazis. But Sheldon is surprisingly resilient, and the more he resists the siren song of sin, the more Nora feels she might be missing something in among all the blatant money-grabs and deft profanities.

The phrase "deft profanities" is apt because Adam Resnick's script for this film provides some of the cruelest, darkest, funniest lines to hit the screen in a long while. Besides the apt similes as referenced above, Resnick throws in misguidedly sincere songs ("Your Stepfather's Not Mean, He's Just Adjusting"), a description of Green's Parade of Hope as "the roughest of all the charities," and several scenes, including a near-immolation in Times Square, where you gotta be callous to laugh and you'll laugh really hard if you're callous. Even when the plot appears to be in stasis, Resnick always provides a line or two good enough to hold your interest.

And that's important, because after a fizzy exposition, "Death to Smoochy"'s plot chases its own tail to very little humorous effect, with unnecessary complications that are never resolved piling on top of each other. DeVito tries to pump certain of these scenes up with his direction, using extreme close-ups and lurid color schemes and neat details made blatantly obvious. Sometimes this stuff works; the camera reacts marvelously to Rainbow Randolph's various antics, almost seeming skittish at times. Sometimes it doesn't; a scene between Burke and Merv shot entirely in extreme close-ups is overbearing to the point of making you want to turn from the screen. However, you can't fault DeVito for his choice of actors, and they are what will make "Death to Smoochy" worth watching for most devotees of dark humor. Robin Williams enjoys his return to manic dementia and bleeding edge, exorcising memories of treacle like "Patch Adams" and "The Bicentennial Man" by ripping into his vicious soliloquies, running almost everywhere, careening drunkenly through a parade of accents, and using the f-gerund with gleeful abandon.

Keener, as usual, is effortlessly sexy, casually cynical and an unerring thrower of verbal darts. It would take a truly angelic presence to turn her to the light, and Norton provides that.

If Norton's performance mocked his character, it would be death for the film, which would have then had no one worth caring about on screen for two hours. Some things about Sheldon are ridiculous, of course, but Norton is so easygoing and earnest and just plain goshdarn likable that you root for him in his battles with the increasingly outlandishly corrupt execs and toughs, despite his occasional smarmy tendencies ("I don't believe in guns! When my brothers and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker!").

Norton's performance allows "Death to Smoochy" to have its acid-laced cake and eat it too, and more than the deadly one-liners, the over-the-top plotting and direction, and the spine-tingling rush of hearing children's show hosts curse, his core of decent purehearted goodness is what makes "Death to Smoochy" as successful as it is. After all, even if you love to wallow in comedic moral decrepitude, you probably like it better if something can pull you up out of the muck afterwards. Even if it is some joker in a puffy purple suit.

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