Day 26 - The Brady Bunch Movie (1995)

Don't mind me, okay? I'm just sat here wondering whether or not I have the energy to open this entry with a quickie rewrite of the theme from the Brady Bunch TV series. It's tempting, granted, but any time sit down to try something like this I land up looking up and suddenly an hour's gone past and I've written about twenty words, at least five of which I'm not entirely sure about.

Seriously, though, it's just strange the way I know all the lyrics to the Brady Bunch theme, particularly since I don't remember having seen an episode in my life. Was it ever even on British TV? Apparently so, but it was last shown in 1982, when I would've been five years old. One of life's great mysteries, I suppose, albeit not a particularly interesting one.

As far as I can tell, it wasn't a particularly interesting series, either, belonging to that era when US audiences wanted nothing more from their sitcoms than bright colours and simple repetition of catchphrases and life lessons. Of course, I could be talking out of my backside here, in which case, please forgive me? I'm sure I could locate some on YouTube if I was feeling particularly diligent, but I'm just that little bit too frightened as to what I might find.

Anyhow, for the uninitiated, The Brady Bunch was a sitcom that ran from 1969 - 1974. It told the story of widowed Mike Brady and his three sons, and his marriage to Carol Ann Martin, who had three daughters. Interestingly, Carol Ann's former marital status was never disclosed, since the networks were reluctant to have an openly divorced character on mainstream television. The show presented a warm, loving family, with episodes dealing with typical childhood and teenage dilemmas, generally from the point of view of the kids themselves. The original run was followed by a plethora of spin-offs and sequels, but by 1990, no further new material was being produced.

1995's Brady Bunch Movie takes the slightly unusual step of taking the very, very 1970s Brady family and shifting them, unchanged, to 1990s LA. It gives them a fairly generic story of an evil property developer trying to displace them from their beloved family home, and then spends its brisk 90-minute running time riffing on all of the above. The fish-out-of-water elements and the gentle parody meant that this one was something I'd always meant to watch, but somehow it managed to slip beneath my radar for the better part of twenty years. All in all, that 5.9 IMDB rating was the perfect excuse.

The good

I cannot lie, it took me a little while to warm to this one. The Brady Bunch Movie is a send-up, yes, but its preferred method of lampooning seems to involve faithfully copying the old series. The central family themselves, therefore, are as saccharine and sanctimonious as one might (or might not) wish. The performances, too, are highly exaggerated, with every single word and facial expression pushed just a fraction of an inch too far. It's no bad thing and definitely a stylistic decision, but it's not necessarily a style I find easy to appreciate on a personal level.

Before long, however, I was won over by the sheer warmth and good nature of the endeavour. Yes, the Brady family are awful, but they're also awfully endearing - they make it hard not to feel at least a flicker of nostalgia for the good old days, even if we don't remember said days and even if they probably never even existed at all.

Gary Cole and Shelley Long shine as Mike and Carol, the former taking mansplaining to new heights while the latter looks on in wide-eyed adoration and awaits her cue to agree with his every word. The kids are similarly appealing - particular credit goes to Jennifer Elise Cox as Jan, whose every glare and hair-flick are absolutely spot-on.

For a movie about pop culture, the Brady Bunch Movie has dated surprisingly well. It resists the temptation to try too hard to shock either the audience or its central characters, too. Sure, it plays with the family's naiveté in the face of a cynical modern world, but it definitely does so with mischief rather than malice.

The bad

I was hard-pressed to come up with anything I particularly disliked about this one - it was cringeworthy, yes, particularly in the early stages when I was getting into the right headspace, but that's not something I'm prepared to criticise given that cringeworthy is clearly what the filmmakers were aiming for.

Roger Ebert claimed that the modern world it presented was too innocent, and that something more bleak was required; perhaps he was right, but I do think a darker setting would have risked darkening the tone of the movie as a whole and losing the sunny warmth that the team were trying to recapture. I'm not a great fan of cruel humour in general - black humour, yes, but that's something different entirely - and I really liked the fact that this was a film where nobody really got humiliated.

Other complaints seem to be that the film felt a little long, and I think this is harder to dispute. Obviously, there's a certain minimum length that you can expect multiplex audiences to pay for; The Brady Bunch Movie perches right on the edge of it, but it would have been nice to have a little more story to fill it.

The verdict

Here's the story
Of a girl named Sarah
Who wrote stuff about a bunch of different flicks
She thought some were really underrated
Though others made her sick

Here's the story
Of a film named Brady
That the critics greeted largely with dismay
It was about a family from the 70s
In '95 LA

And then one day, Sarah saw the movie
And then took a little time to think it through
And then offered both her readers her final verdict
And told them that on balance "It'll do".