Week of May 24 – 30, 2020
Once in a while you run across a wacky movie that simply charms you in ways you would never expect. Such a gem is Bubble Boy, introduced to me by my good friend Michael Ferguson (I introduced him to Genevieve). Some movies defy easy description and Bubble Boy is one of them; its kooky plot barely hints at its offbeat characters or optimistic sense of adventure.
The poster provides the premise; a hapless teenager spends his days inside a bubble suit, unable to directly interact with the world. But don’t pity him — he is about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime.
Blair Hayes’ film jumps right in with the story of Jimmy Livingston (Jake Gyllenhaal, in his seventh film role), a young man with a compromised immune system who is protected from all the germs of the world within a complicated home environmental system that gives him limited freedom within his bedroom. Everything going in, from food to clothing, is disinfected first, and he is constantly monitored by his adoring mother (Swoosie Kurtz) and silent father (John Carroll Lynch). Within the confines of his plastic, air-purified chamber he is a normal teenager; he watches TV, plays the guitar, and looks out the window at the world passing him by. One day he sees a new neighbor, lovely Chloe (Marley Shelton). Chloe visits soon after and becomes good friends with Jimmy, although his mother is jealous of her attentions to her son. Jimmy loves Chloe, but feels he cannot burden her with having to care for him for the rest of their lives, so he remains silent when she tells him that she is engaged to Mark (Dave Sheridan). They plan to wed at Niagara Falls, and suddenly Jimmy realizes that he has to tell Chloe how he feels about her, so . . . road trip!
This is where the film becomes really inventive and fun. Jimmy cannot leave his house, or his room, without dying, so he puts together a portable containment unit for himself — a bubble suit. Then it’s out the door and into the big, wide, dirty world for the first time to find the woman he loves. What could be more romantic?
Jimmy leaves a cryptic note for his parents and takes to the road. He has no idea how to get anywhere, and no money, so like Blanche DuBois, he is dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Thankfully he meets a biker named Slim (Danny Trejo) and an Indian ice cream / curry vendor named Pushpop (Brian George) and an oldster named Pappy (Patrick Cranshaw) and a group of circus performers who help him out and transport him part way across the country when they can. But these are just some of the kooky characters he encounters along the way — I haven’t mentioned the unctuous bus stop man (Zach Galifianakis), or the circus manager, Dr. Phreak (Verne Troyer), or Pappy’s brother Pippy (Patrick Cranshaw, again), or the Emcee (Ping Wu) at the gentleman’s club where Jimmy mud wrestles a pair of women to win five hundred dollars (his bubble comes in very handy in this sequence).
Nor have I mentioned the Bright and Shiny people. I was sort of ambivalent about Jimmy’s road trip before he was picked up by the yellow-clad Bright and Shiny members, various Todds and Lorraines, who sing the very catchy “Bright and Shiny” song for their new friend. But as soon as Jimmy calls them a cult, he’s out on his bubble butt, looking for another ride. I think this whole subplot is hilarious, especially when the group’s leader, Gil (Fabio), describes their awaited messiah as “The Round One. A Holy Messenger trapped inside a living globe,” and the various Todds and Lorraines realize that they dumped their awaited messiah back on the hot desert asphalt without realizing who he really was. Soon they are back on the road looking for him, along with (but against) all the circus people, Slim and Jimmy’s parents.
Satire and farce blend in wild ways in this often politically incorrect movie, which is the funnier for it. The film is rated PG-13 so it’s never blatantly offensive but it certainly pushes buttons, from the Bright and Shiny satire to the fate of the cow. There are off-color jokes, sexual innuendoes, sight gags and tattoo gags galore, most of which fly right past innocent Jimmy’s happy countenance. He is blissfully unaware of the pain of life, protected as he has been, now bouncing from one adventure to another. Yet the filmmakers revel in satirizing everything around him as he works his way across the country to the Niagara Falls church where Chloe is waiting — and that church is the same one that Dustin Hoffman rushes into at the climax of The Graduate on a similar errand. Look for lots of little, but important, details as Jimmy travels along, such as the sign at Niagara Falls warning people to stay out of the water (“No Bubble People,” it warns).
At its heart, Bubble Boy is about Jimmy’s relationship with his mother, who does not want to let her son go. Her overprotectiveness is both terrifying and hilarious. She constantly cleans everything in the house, especially around Jimmy’s enclosure. She so dominates the family dynamic that her husband has stopped speaking. She provides just one magazine for him to read (a “Highlights” issue) and allows him just one television program to watch (Land of the Lost). She reads him stories like this one: “. . . and the prince climbed up Rapunzel’s hair to the top of the tower and said, ‘Come with me, and we’ll live happily ever after.’ Then Rapunzel left her plastic bubble and died. The end.” And worse. This mother’s love is diabolical.
The film is delightfully off-kilter most of the way through, and its illogical moments are among its funniest. The bubble suit that Jimmy wears could not possibly last a day in the desert heat and environment, yet it seems almost indestructible and protects him as he goes bouncing and flying from one scrape to another. It never seems to get dirty or lose pressure, even in the mud wrestling scene. It was designed to be awkward and imbalanced, so the times that Jimmy falls over are simply part of the show.
Characters flow in and out of the narrative like a neighboring stream, intersecting and crossing the main path of the story whenever necessary and with increasing frequency as the story climaxes. Slim has the most fundamental line in the story, “Don’t live in regret, ese.” The circus people see Jimmy as one of their own, an oddity whose free will is inspiring. Pappy represents unfulfilled dreams, while Pippy has a much happier outcome. Even Jimmy’s parents’ seemingly loveless union gets a kick in the pants by the time the story concludes, in a most surprising way. And Jimmy finally tells the woman he loves how he feels about her. Interestingly it is her fiancé, Mark, who says “I’m not a monster. I’m a human being!” This film is full of interesting insights and unusual perspectives.
It is available on DVD but I don’t think it can be streamed as of now. At only 84 minutes it is a fast, enjoyable watch, well worth a few dollars. For more laughs take a listen to the audio commentary with director Blair Hayes and star Jake Gyllenhaal. At one point, they even get into a (phony) fight! It’s a fun comedy which deserves a better reception than it has received, in my humble opinion. ☆ ☆ ☆. Backdated to May 24, 2020.
If there are similar films to this I cannot think of any at the moment.