Brewster's Millions is a bad, dishonest movie. It professes to be about the American Dream, but American viewers will recognize none of the movie's characters or environs.
Which is not to say the movie does not feature actors holding American citizenship. The movie stars Richard Pryor (The Wiz, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip) as a minor-league baseball player who comes into a huge inheritance from a distant uncle, Hume Cronyn (Impulse, Honky Tonk Freeway). Along for the fun are a pretty paralegal, Lonette McKee (The Cotton Club), and Pryor's buddy from the baseball team, Canadian John Candy (Splash). Theresa Russell (The Last Tycoon, Bad Timing) is not in the movie.
The movie may have some humorous moments, but the viewer's enjoyment of them is hampered by the fact that he is seeing the same old nonexistent characters doing the same old nonexistent things. As in 99% of all other Hollywood movies, the professions of the characters in Brewster's fall into two basic categories: Exciting Professions, and Writers' Professions.
Included in the former category are those professions which make for more exciting plotlines, e.g. doctors, lawyers, policemen, soldiers, criminals, show-biz people, and extremely rich people. Writers may be forgiven for occasionally using one of these professions to spice up a story, but viewers are tired of every other character in motion characters making an Exciting living.
In the other category are those professions which writers are familiar with professions of most of the people that writers know. These Writers' Professions include: writers, authors, playwrights, journalists, college professors, people in advertizing and PR firms, architects, interior decorators, and show-biz people. When a writer wants to portray somebody in an "everyday" type of profession, he or she almost invariably picks one of these.
In all too many movies every single major character has one of these two kinds of professions, and the viewer has a difficult time thinking of a dozen movies in which none of the characters have one of these professions. Also, a disproportionate number of films are about issues concerning these professions. The viewer realizes these tendencies do not reflect the true distribution of jobs because he himself knows only a few people in any of these professions, and he has day-to-day dealings with no one in these professions.
Also, the viewer realizes that the only class of movies that consistently have no major characters in Exciting or Writers' Professions are those movies like Mask and Norma Rae that are based on the lives of real people. The critical and financial successes of these movies show that it is not public distaste for these kinds of films that keeps them from distribution, but rather the screenwriters' laziness and unwillingness to research either unusual or extremely usual professions.
Despite the fact that Pryor claims to be the "people's" actor, his movie is as replete with these phony professions as anything else coming out of Hollywood. He does deserve some credit for having the central character and his sidekick be on a minor league baseball team, but they are still technically in show biz. And once the plot gets its big twist, Pryor becomes and out-and-out Very Rich Person. Even secondary characters in Brewster's fall into these overused categories: McKee's fiance is a lawyer and an interior designer.
In Brewster's Millions Pryor might have taken a powerful stand for the portrayal of legitimate professions in the cinema. Instead, Pryor's millions have dulled what used to be a keen talent and produced another ho-hum Hollywood comedy.
Copyright © 1985,1996 by Kelvin Thompson
All Rights Reserved
(Updated July 20, 1996)