I'm the luckiest boy in the world

PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE

1985

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Phil Hartman, Michael Varhol, and Paul Reubens

Spoilers: high

Pee-wee's Big Adventure—a precious bauble even if it weren't so surprisingly important to the intertwined histories of film and television—probably shouldn't exist, and only does because of a series of accidents.  The least accidental, which is not to say it was altogether devoid of random chance, was the rise of one of its two principal authors, Paul Reubens, an initially not-all-that-successful comedian confederated with the Angeleno improv troupe, the Groundlings, who, after a period of trial-and-error starting in 1977, found his breakout persona.  This was a certain "Pee-wee Herman," undoubtedly of all our acquaintance, which eventually grew to consume his life for years on end, to the point I think we should call it inhumane.  ("Paul Reubens" has no star on the Walk of Fame; his fictional character does.)

For the moment, however, it was a ticket to success, with Reubens refining the character, and by 1980 the basic iconography had been pinned down—the makeup that made him look translucent, the dweeby hair, and especially the tight, not-quite-ill-fitting hipster costume—as well as the concept, which has had its varying iterations, but at bottom the joke always remained the same: a grown man dressing and acting like a rather dipshitty little boy, as suggested by the most self-parodying excess of 1950s pop culture.  That sounds like he ought to be a funny character, but if it also sounds like he ought to be a supporting player, not a headliner, then that is the heaven-sent miracle of Pee-wee Herman: Ruebens's ability to evoke the grating obnoxiousness of a high-pitched, hyperactive elementary-aged geek from the past, without actually being gratingly obnoxious.  (The how of it would probably be difficult to determine without reference to psychology, neurology, and even individual ear anatomy, but despite Pee-wee's penchant for frequently screaming—not to even mention almost constantly laughing in his stereotyped laugh at his own jokes—the voice Reubens came up with to perform this character is as perfectly-crafted as it gets, mewling without being piercing, or, somehow, even cloying, so unlike your kid or your cat, with only a mild effort you can ignore Pee-wee.)  Obviously, I'm speaking personally: I've always found the character delightful, even relaxing after a fashion, while recognizing it'd be wildly disingenuous to pretend Pee-wee could be to everybody's tastes.

But, unexpectedly enough, he turned out to be to a lot of people's, launching a popular traveling stage show that in 1981 turned into an HBO special, establishing the most-definitive iteration of the character, Pee-wee as the host of a satire of a 50s children's variety show.  That is, if you count Pee-wee's "TV host" mode as the same iteration throughout: the glaring difference is how much bluer the stage show is than any later outing for the character, which makes sense (grown-ups probably weren't going to comedy clubs to see a guy get the secret word from Conky!), and it's arguably "funnier"; but it's obviously not as sustainable.  In 1986, Ruebens got his actual children's variety show, treasured morning program Pee-wee's Playhouse, which drew back on the adult (or "adult") humor and became quite a bit more sincere about entertaining kids—plus the pop surrealist art direction and the puppetry had infinitely more resources put into them than were evident in the live show—but remained infused with enough postmodern attitude to know itself as camp, even if it was no longer exactly "parody."  This was sustainable.  Or at least it was until a certain event in 1991.  Because you can't jack off in a porno theater, but if I punched a guy who was on his phone the whole movie, I'd be the one who got arrested.  What a country.

But it was the 1985 film that launched Pee-wee as a star, greenlit by Warner Bros. seemingly just to create an oddball 80s artifact that, with few exceptions, they allowed to coalesce without much apparent oversight or concern for its fate, so long as it didn't cost that much; it ultimately cost $7-8 million, and grossed $41 million,* a legitimate mid-sized phenomenon.  So now we turn to its other author, who really did fall into his stardom by luck, washed-out Disney veteran Tim Burton, who by 1985 had no credits to his name besides TV and short subjects, all of which had been well-received but were, after all, TV and short subjects, so if anyone remembered them twelve months later it'd be surprising; his name was mentioned to Ruebens at a party after he'd complained of not being able to find a director, mainly because the list of directors he'd given Warners had been winnowed down to "nobody who wanted to do it."  Reubens was intrigued and, by his accounting, wasn't sure he ever actually finished watching "Frankenweenie," since he was, after all, pretty busy, and within a minute he was already sure Burton must be his man.  And thus by the grace of an adult baby novelty act began the feature film career of one of the most influential American directors to come out of the 1980s.**  (And then, mutually fans of Oingo Boingo, they said "let's hire Danny Elfman," and the rest really was history.)  Even before that, Big Adventure only became Big Adventure by a random happenstance of its own, with Reubens trashing an already half-written screenplay—a crypto-remake of Pollyanna, in which Pee-wee filled the Haley Mills role—because he noticed that the Warner Bros. lot was full of bicycles, he wanted a bicycle, and when they gave him a really cherry vintage bike that he fell in love with, he realized that his whole movie should be about a boy and his bicycle.  Whether Pee-weeanna would have captured the hearts of a nation is impossible to say; but the new idea did.

What it provided, anyway, was the wispiest framework for a nearly-structureless road movie playing precisely to the character's strengths by thrusting him into a new sketch with a new collection of caricatured strangers to interact with every ten to fifteen minutes, though even "sketch" might be overdefining it.  Things begin on a day like any other for Pee-wee Herman, who, in this iteration, is not a TV personality, just a private citizen who lives in a cutely-tacky house in the suburbs, much-liked by his neighbors who treat this individual—for all we know, he is just an exceptionally-tall orphan, though "full-on magical creature" is also possible, not that it really matters—as a respected and integrated part of their community, despite the fact he's amazingly strange.  (What's interesting, for "a history of Pee-wee Herman," is how many "playhouse" elements get left behind—Pee-wee's live-in playmates number "nobody," unless you count his dog, or the bathroom window with fish swimming in what's possibly the ocean—but Burton and production designer David Snyder still ensure that their hero's home remains, recognizably, a "Pee-wee's playhouse," even if it's not the "Pee-wee's playhouse.")

Pee-wee goes about his morning routine, having a breakfast he doesn't even eat delivered by his overcomplicated Rube Goldberg machine, before saying good morning to his custom Schwinn, hidden in a secret camouflaged bunker and worshipped like a lover, which is probably the most reasonable interpretation of what compels Pee-wee to so firmly reject the romantic overtures of his friend and fellow bike enthusiast (in fact, bike mechanic), Dottie (Elizabeth Dailey), alluding to darker secrets than she could accept; alternatively, Pee-wee is an emotional six year old who thinks girls and probably also boys have cooties, which will not stop one of the odder running motifs of Big Adventure being Pee-wee's apparently enormous sexual charisma, such as most women and at least one man he meets fall in love with him.  The exception to Pee-wee's popularity, however, is his nemesis, the envious plutocrat's son Francis (the most extraordinarily round-faced Mark Holton), very much his opposite number, likewise an adult-question-mark, and he desires that bike, so much so that steals it, but when Pee-wee comes down on the most obvious suspect, he decides to get rid of the evidence of his foul bikenapping.  The machine vanishes, but a phony psychic tells Pee-wee it's at "the Alamo"—in the basement, specifically—and Pee-wee begins a quest across America to save his most prized possession.

That's already streamlined—it brings us to more than the thirty minute mark, out of 91.  The vignettish mode is going to really burst out once Pee-wee takes to the road as a hitchhiker, and I'm not sure any particular moment sums up how vignettish better than the joke where Pee-wee pointedly fails to turn his head to see his bike on the back of a junk truck, a good gag that points to a potential running gag that the script leaves on the table for the reason that it wasn't the script's gag, but that being visually reminded of the quest's stakes at least once before the finale was one of the studio's few notes.  But the vignettishness is pretty apparent even sooner, as in a shopping trip to a magic store that, in fairness, was intended to set up some gimmicks for the finale, but they ultimately cut every callback (for the sound reason that they were blatantly bogging things down), so the earlier scene exists now solely on its own merits.  Even judging it as one of the less-amusing scenes in the movie, those merits are quite fine: goony-but-funny jokes, the funny quasi-jokes that will always accrue to any scene Pee-wee Herman's in, and one stupidly-hilarious satire of consumer choice with an alternative to a shrunken head.  And the bike theft, at least, happens quickly enough, so it's not plotless for very long—there's merely a remarkable amount of attention paid to Pee-wee's mental deterioration afterwards, and if we hadn't recognized it before, from our future vantage point, this is where we absolutely have to notice that this is Tim Burton's playhouse now.

I don't want to downplay the affinities Burton and Ruebens obviously saw in one another, the reason Ruebens hired him in the first place—the disdain for right angles in set design could do it by itself, but they've both spent careers drawing water from adjacent wells, each extremely invested in a half-imagined past and with a great deal of specific overlap in a half-imagined Eisenhower Era, that they half-imagine only a little differently, so with only some reductivism I could describe the core distinction being Burton's predilections towards vintage horror, and, with only slightly more, that Burton's spin on the polychromatic gaudiness of Pee-wee's aesthetic was to paint it black, which never did much to make it less gaudy.  (It might be a self-reference, sure, but Vincent Price's cookie machine in Edward Scissorhands is basically the same as Pee-wee's breakfast engine here, except goth.***  But then, it's possible to describe Edward Scissorhands as Burton's personal version of Reubens's alter ego, which is to say pretty similar to Pee-wee, except quieter.)  And there's the matter of how each man poached as many kitsch props from their movie as possible.  But neither would I want to necessarily declare Big Adventure to be perfectly sui generis, product only of a genius duopoly, and I think it had to have been coming out of a real current in mid-80s film comedy towards what we'd these days call "magical realism," needless to say sharing numerous fuzzy edges with the "live-action cartoon" style that by 1985 had been firmly established, but '85-'86 saw Big Adventure and then After Hours, Better Off Dead, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, all in the same twelve month span.

Maybe the unmistakably Burtonesque, where someone who didn't know who directed it would say "hey, is this Tim Burton?", is limited, possibly to as few as two shots (a stop-motion animated horror gag and a fiercely expressionist hallway in a clown hospital in a nightmare sequence).  But the moment Pee-wee loses his bike, there's more than enough terrific style to point the way forward, for instance the moment of Pee-wee's breakage, amidst of the most nauseously whimsical strains of Elfman's score and before a rack of spinning bicycle wheels; the image is already darned cool-to-look-at (and, in its psychological symbolism's overstatement of objectively-low stakes, darned funny), even without noticing that it's cleverly doing an (in-camera!) evocation of the whirligig language of Old Hollywood altered state montage.  (I think my favorite single image of the first third, however, is the one directly above, regarding the downright Terminatoresque notion of the two legs of a glen plaid suit plonking down into the "bathtub" Francis is hiding in, with its comic ruthless implacability.)  But the flexibility is itself rewarding: it's part of an entire sequence that starts off with hallucinations of Pee-wee's bike in storefront reflections, and moves directly into a marvelous comic parade of everyone else's ridiculous bike to rub his dumb face in his misfortune.  (I'm somewhat resistant to the comparisons that sometimes get made to silent and pantomime comedy, when Pee-wee's voice is such an enormous factor, but this does get Big Adventure pretty close.)

And I don't know if anyone else in 1985 would've managed what feels like Big Adventure's affirmative showpiece, Pee-wee's journey's passage into night, which is so good I almost wish the movie never had to leave it.  There's the true sensation of drifting into dream to the thing, sometimes a frightening dream (or "frightening": it's still full of gags, they just aren't the tonal priority, even if the funny jump scare could startle you), but always a genuinely uncanny one.  And it sustains that mood for a surprising twenty or more minutes, happy to use the low budget as an out-and-out strength, making cars on undressed black soundstages and floating with more the suggestion of momentum than anything akin to actual movement—even something as effortfully wacky and quintessential to the character as Pee-wee's literal animated eyes traversing the dark screen!—into a feeling that reality has fallen away, and all that's left in the unformed void are the ghosts who still haunt it.  Ending up at a roadside diner, Reubens's choice of setting at Claude Bell's Dinosaurs (when it was a delightful curiosity and years before it became a creationist exhibit), and the otherwordly illumination with which Burton and DP Victor Kemper are lighting the beasts (or, for that matter, their Nightmare On Elm Street colors reflected in the diner itself), don't give much impression of reality reasserting itself even now that the lights have come back on.  It's earnestly one of the best stretches of horror-comedy I've ever seen, without even pushing "horror" that far—but as far as Bell's Dinosaurs go, that's just an unusually assertive example of the ace location management that's been going on the whole time and made Big Adventure feel big, and (more to the point) about ten million dollars more expensive than its budget.  (As divorced from reality as Big Adventure is, there's something profoundly tangible about Pee-wee and a hobo hanging their legs off a moving train while the camera operator has no ability to correct for the apparently much bumpier road their car is moving on.)

It does spoil you a bit: the movie slightly deflates when sunrise comes, and remains deflated for about as long as the nighttime sequence had lasted (it's still good comedy; we do get the great beat where everyone in the cruel world laughs at Pee-wee for believing the Alamo had a basement), and to pick itself back up it basically defibrillates itself, or at least that's the level of elegance with which it plots its way into its finale, Pee-wee learning where his bike is—Hollywood, naturally!—from exposition on a TV.  And if we're talking problems, the movie certainly has more denouement than it knows what to do with, for a trip to Hollwood inevitability means Pee-wee's big adventure gets made into a movie-within-the-movie, with a premiere generously-intentioned to catch back up with all the colorful friends made along the way.  What that means, though, is that the movie-without-the-movie just keeps having to buffer itself with James Brolin playing Masc Pee-wee opposite Morgan Fairchild despite that idea having approximately one single shot's worth of humor in it (not to mention that Pee-wee's initially-hilarious absurdly incompetent cameo in his own movie beats itself into the ground with two encores).  For that matter, one of the characters we catch up with is Francis, whereupon you realize the movie's villain hasn't really been in it.

But in between these two points, Big Adventure has one wildcard left to play, Pee-wee's absolutely wonderful escape from Warner Bros. itself after heisting back his bike, through a kaleidoscope of genre filmmaking parody, mostly situated in the 60s, because the chase is as good an homage to 60s megacomedy zaniness as you get, and better than most 60s zany megacomedies because, unlike the real thing, it actually has the discipline to cut the shit sandbagging its action (those deleted scenes from the finale are all Pee-wee getting off his bike; the sequence they used, however, is almost exclusively glorious motion, only surrendered once, with the obligatory Road Runner backdrop gag, the irresistibility of which is understandable even if it is the weakest part, because the Road Runner gag is funny because the Road Runner runs into the fictional backdrop before the Coyote crashes into it).

But that means each third of the movie has its own stand-out stunner of moviemaking, and the whole thing is tied together with the unconventional magnetism that was Reubens's signature in the role, and with the consistent humor and energy of its director being as weird as his star.  Y'know, I think this Burton kid might have potential.

Score: 9/10

*And domestically; presumably it had an international release, but figures aren't available.

**I mean, the objectively obvious no. 1 is James Cameron; no. 2 is more competitive and I might as well argue for Burton as anyone else.

***Burton and Snyder's psuedo-playhouse has a giant glass mosaic of a skeleton in it.