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GRAND
THEFT PARSONS
6/10
USA (US/UK)
2003 : David CAFFREY : 88 mins
At the time
of the actual body-snatching in 1973, Kaufman’s house was being used
as a location for the movie Night Moves [1975]. The director Arthur
Penn and star Gene Hackman were shooting in Kaufman’s house when
the police came to arrest him. Hackman, on hearing the story, remarked,
“I think we’re shooting the wrong movie.”
Grand Theft Parsons production notes
‘The story’
told to Hackman is basically this: when 26-year-old country-rock legend
Gram Parsons (Flying Burrito Brothers, Byrds, etc) died of a drug overdose
in 1973, his body was ‘stolen’ by his longtime best pal and
road-manager, the hard-living Phil Kaufman. The pair had (drunkenly) agreed
that, whichever of them passed on first, the other would ‘free his
spirit’ by burning the corpse in the majestic open-air desert surroundings
of Joshua Tree, California. Grand Theft Parsons is a film inspired
by these real-life events, with Jackass
star Johnny Knoxville as Kaufman and Gabriel Macht in fleeting appearances
as Parsons (alive, dead and ghostly).
As it turns
out, in a way Hackman was dead wrong – Night Moves is a cracking
post-Watergate neo-noir whose reputation justifiably continues to swell
three decades on. Grand Theft Parsons is small beer in comparison,
an amusingly shaggy-dog but plot-thin low-budget indie that milks some
decent laughs out of material loaded with high-farce potential. As best
illustrated by the classic Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Kipper
and the Corpse’, a cadaver can often be the funniest comedy ‘prop.’
Parsons
only very occasionally flies so high – Irishman Caffrey is a
serviceable director at best, with a workmanlike visual style and some
awful soundtrack choices (Primal Scream’s ‘Movin’ Up’
at a crucial stage, when surely a Parsons track or cover would have been
more appropriate). Caffrey adds little to Jeremy Drysdale’s hit-and-miss
script, which inserts an invented character to create some artificial
drama and set up a ‘tense’ climax: Parsons’ ex-girlfriend
Barbara (Christina Applegate), who needs the corpse intact to obtain a
death-certificate and thus cash in on a scrap of paper she claims is Parsons’
will.
As well as
eluding Barbara, Kaufman must also keep one step ahead of Parsons’
father Stanley (a bemused Robert Forster) who has flown from Louisiana
to collect the body. Then there’s also the law to contend with –
or rather not, as the boys in blue are mostly conspicuous by their absence.
Once he’d decided to leave the strict facts (as documented in Kaufman’s
book Road Mangler Deluxe ) behind, Drysdale should have gone the
whole hog and turned Grand Theft Parsons into a full-on Cannonball
Run crazy road-movie adventure.
Presumably
for budgetary reasons, however, what we get is much closer to a quirky
two-hander in the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas mode – Kaufman
hires a hearse from stone-out hippie Larry Oster-Berg (Michael Shannon),
and the oddly-named Oster-Berg insists on coming along for the ride to
ensure no harm comes to his prized, garishly-painted ‘funeral vehicle.’
The interplay between the bikerish, whiskey-swigging Kaufman and the spacey
hippie Oster-Berg is what gives Grand Theft Parsons much of its
charm, even when the ever-stormy relationship turns slapstick-violent
later on. Knoxville brings a jaded, anything-goes charm to Kaufman, but
while he isn’t yet much of an actor the much more experienced Shannon
(he was the scruffy bogus “cab driver” back in The
Game) is luckily on hand to bail him – and the movie - out.
Getting back
to that Hackman “wrong movie” quote, however… Looking at
it another way, he was kind of spot on: there is a great story here, only
it’s not the one Caffrey and Drysdale have chosen to tell. It seems
perverse that, reproducing the Night Moves connection in the press-notes,
the film-makers didn’t see fit to include this in the film itself
– again, presumably the (visibly) low budget ruled this out. But
how frustrating not to have the scene where the cops come looking
for Kaufman, and end up stumble across Hollywood heavyweights Hackman
and Penn. And who’s to say some of Night Moves other colourful
participants weren’t around that day, like the Scots-exile screenwriter
Alan Sharp, or performers like 18-year-old (and nude) newcomer Melanie
Griffith, or a scrappy greenhorn actor called James Woods.
With all this
great stuff lying just off-camera, Grand Theft Parsons – which
feels padded to reach bare-minimum feature length – seems even more
like a missed opportunity. Perhaps Caffrey and Drysdale might now turn
to another now-forgotten real-life seventies tale involving
the snatching of a celebrity cadaver – this time ‘starring’
an even more illustrious corpse: Grand Theft Chaplin, anyone?
3rd
December, 2003
(seen 28th November : Customs House, South Shields – Sunderland
Film Festival)
by Neil
Young
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