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I’m having a hard time thinking about Bobcat Goldthwait’s new movie, God Bless America, without flashing back to his character, Eliot Loudermilk, from the ‘88 movie Scrooged. There, he played a small, supporting role as a sad sack office drone who lost his job, his wife, his kids, and his dignity before taking a shotgun to a meeting with his former boss. Frank Murdoch (Joel Murray), the “hero” of Goldthwait’s latest directorial offering, doesn’t have the benefit of being in a feel-good holiday comedy, so his path takes a much darker, yet enjoyable turn.
Frank’s life isn’t all that great to begin with. He’s a bitter divorced guy with a spoiled brat for a daughter. His coworkers and neighbors are jerks, and he fantasizes about massacring them without remorse. The real targets of his scorn, though, are the parade of reality show starlets and vapid celebrities that fill his TV screen. After getting a pink slip and a possible cancer diagnosis in one day, he shifts from dreaming to doing, picking up a sidekick along the way in teenager Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), who shares his disgust with popular American culture.
While the bloodshed is graphic and darkly comic, who can really disagree with Frank and Roxy’s motivations? Whether your particular poison happens to be cable news blowhards or caustic reality show judges, there are so many examples of questionable or downright offensive celebrity that it would take several TV seasons for the pair to work through them all. The carnage isn’t quite as excessive as you might think, but the odds are good that a representative of your favorite class of media fame-whore will get his or her bloody comeuppance.
It isn’t all pop culture schadenfreude, however. Frank isn’t a raging engine of cultural vengeance so much as an intensely lonely guy who would have been perfectly happy with a quiet, unobtrusive life, if only something had gone his way. He’s less angry white male than apocalyptically annoyed suburban Joe Schmoe. And Joel Murray manages to bring pathos to the role without being pathetic or dulling the film’s satiric edge.
It’s Roxy who provides the aggressive yin to Frank’s passive yang. Tara Lynne Barr plays nearly the entire movie with a devil-may-care grin—either to signify that the character actually has some devil in her or that she’s just really, really enjoying being in this movie. Either way, it’s infectious, and it’s unsurprising that Frank would start to view her as a surrogate daughter.
A quick perusal of the DVD’s commentary and special features makes it clear that this was a labor of love on Goldthwait’s part. He wrote it for and worked with friends and family—and everyone seems genuinely invested. If Frank and Roxy had gotten a chance to spend some time with the kind of people who made their movie, they could have saved a fortune on ammo.
In comparing the two guys I mentioned earlier, Bobcat Goldthwait the filmmaker is probably a lot more Eliot than Frank. Like most of us, though, he’s got some Frank in him—and, from time to time, you’ve just got to let him out on the world. Thankfully, he does it onscreen—and he lets us all come along for the ride.
