Luke Owen looks back at the 1991 big screen adaptation of The Addams Family….
December 13th 2013 marks the 22nd anniversary (here in the UK) of Barry Sonnenfeld’s big screen adaptation of The Addams Family. It was a movie that, while not exactly ground-breaking, would spark a creative curve in Hollywood akin to X-Men’s impact on the comic book movie landscape. With its success noted by the bigwigs who make the decisions, studios started to churn out other feature length “adaptations” of popular sitcoms from yester year. And while the likes of The Flintstones, The Beverly Hillbillys and Charlie’s Angels were mostly useless (although The Brady Bunch Movie is pretty funny), The Addams Family stands head and shoulders above them all. It may not be the most memorable movie from Sonnefeld’s back catalogue (which really belongs to Men in Black), but there is a lot to be liked and admired about The Addams Family.
Although The Addams Family started out as one-panel comics in the New Yorker, they are perhaps best known for their 1960s sitcom adaptation (for the theme tune alone) which survived on one central gag – they’re weird and odd (or creepy and kooky if you will) and the people around them are not. This suburban dynamic would certainly work for a 22-minute show, but could it be stretched out over feature length?
Well, not quite.
The biggest problem with The Addams Family is the plot is almost perfunctory. They have this convoluted and frankly confusing main story thread in which a mother figure poses her son Gordon as the Addams’ missing Uncle Fester. However it transpires throughout the movie that perhaps Gordon is actually Uncle Fester and he just didn’t realise it. This does lead to a few funny moments between Gordon/Fester and Gomez as he tries to bluff his way through his lie, but the whole story feels tacked on, rushed and underdeveloped to be anything worthwhile of note. If this was a sub-plot it would be one thing, but this Uncle Fester storyline is what drives the movie forward.
Thankfully, the movie is saved by pretty much everything else.
The Addams Family is hilarious and almost every one of the gags involving the show’s initial joke (creepy, kooky etc.) works with precision timing. These gags often make the movie feel like short scenes were written to highlight the characters strengths and then had a weak, half-baked plot line knocked up solely to tie them all together. Scenes with Gomez and Morticia don’t exactly serve the plot in any capacity and nor do the scenes with Wednesday and Puglsey, but these are the parts of the movie that make it so good – and they are the ones people remember.
But none of this could be accomplished with the level of gusto The Addams Family needed to succeed without superb scenery chewing performances from its actors – and this movie has that in spades. Raul Julia is perfectly cast as Gomez and his over-the-top performance is spell-binding to watch as he embraces the wackiness of the character to create a truly magical performance. This is counter-balanced beautifully by Anjelica Huston as Morticia, whose subtle sexy performance is a fantastic opposite to Gomez’s wacky madness and the two have outstanding chemistry. However the king of the scenery chewing belongs to Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester. Despite his make-up job and fat suit looking unbelievably goofy, Lloyd has enough charisma and his facial expressions are so good that he works through the costume so that it doesn’t become a hindrance to his performance. He gets to stretch this out more in the sequel where he gets to be Fester 100% of the time, but he turns in a genius amount of scenery chewing in Sonnenfeld’s original movie.
Of course, the stand out (and breakout) performance was Christina Ricci’s turn as the morbid Wednesday Addams. Lindsey “Nostalgia Chick” Ellis put it best when she claimed that Ricci had been genetically created to play this role she’s that good at it and while Jimmy Workman is perfectly serviceable as Pugsley, it’s Ricci who steals the show. Julia and Lloyd certainly chewed every inch of the scenery available, but Ricci looked on with huge distain and indifference to be one of the most memorable aspects of the film.
Having just been released (remarkably for the first time) on DVD and Blu-Ray back in October, The Addams Family is worth picking up for more than just a nostalgic trip. It may not be a perfect movie and the plot is utterly pointless and stupid, but it’s a huge amount of fun and it will have you laughing out loud on many occasions. 22 years on, and The Addams Family is still creepy and spooky and all together ooky and deserves two clicks into two thumbs up.
Its sequel and forgotten second sequel on the other hand are not so good.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published December 13, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
