In 1996's Michael John Travolta Is an Angel Who FUCKS in an Underwhelming Romcom From Nora Ephron

In a peculiar coincidence, within a few years of collaborating on 1997’s Face/Off, stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage both played sexy angels in movies involving either the writer/director or the star of such romantic comedy smashes as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. 

John Travolta famously sashayed his way through Nora Ephron’s Michael as a booze-swilling, cigarette-smoking, waitress-schtupping angel who fucks in 1996. A mere two years later Cage followed in his Face/Off costar’s heavenly footprints by portraying a soulful angel who becomes human so he can make sweet love to a doctor played by Meg Ryan in 1998’s City of Angels.

Both films were huge hits at the time of their release. Michael was the 16th top grossing film of 1996 while City of Angels was the 22nd top-grossing film of 1998. Yet both films have been all but forgotten in the ensuing decades the same way Travolta’s Phenomenon, the 12th top grossing film of that same magical 1996, has. 

I wrote about Phenomenon and Michael for my Forgotbusters column at The Dissolve. Had it continued indefinitely I might have gotten around to covering City of Angels as well. All I remember about City of Angels is that Cage’s eyes have never been more soulful, it’s a tacky-ass remake of the Wim Wenders masterpiece Wings of Desire and it popularized the Goo Goo Dolls song “Iris.” 

Michael isn’t as forgotten as City of Angels or Phenomenon because it’s an utterly forgettable mediocrity with an unforgettable performance by Travolta. Travolta plays the title character as the very personification of child-like joy. In a true star turn, Travolta radiates the pureness and innate lovability of a golden retriever puppy. 

Michael lives forever in the moment. All that matters is squeezing all of the pleasure and life and sensation out of every experience, whether that involves thrilling an overjoyed waitress with his magnificent angel cock or visiting the world’s biggest ball of twine. 

Michael suffers from a terrible identity crisis. For much of its duration, Michael suggests a Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas movie that inexplicably attracted A-list talent like Ephron and Travolta and a mainstream studio budget, although in the Hallmark Hall of Fame version it’d be called An Angel for Christmas and star John Stamos as the rascally, debauched angel and Lacey Chabert as the unlucky in love “angel expert” with the world’s most predictable secret. Alternately Michael is redolent of a XXX porn movie about an angel who doles out heavenly orgasms along with saving lost souls and teaching mortals about true love. This version would be called Fucked by an Angel and would be available in our finest adult video stores. 

Oh, and I suppose Michael is a Christmas movie of sorts and a dog movie and a road trip movie, with Texas filling in for some of the flattest, least visually compelling stretches of the Midwest as our heroes journey from Iowa to Chicago, hitting various tourist traps and roadside bars along the way. Ephron’s confused and underwhelming fantasy comedy is a whole lot of things at once but it only succeeds as a vehicle for Travolta’s mega-watt charm and charisma.

Michael began life as a screenplay co-written by Pete Dexter, a tough guy journalist who graduated to writing tough guy novels like Paris Trout and God’s Pocket and the scripts for gritty fare like Paris Trout, Rush and the ill-fated 2012 adaptation of his novel The Paperboy. Legendary journalist Nora Ephron and her sister Delia then re-wrote the screenplay in a manner so hilariously fake and artificial that it’s surprising the filmmakers that have even read newspapers, let alone written for them. 

A deeply boring, deeply bored William Hurt is a soggy slab of white bread with mayonnaise and American cheese as Frank Quinlan, a hotshot journalist whose thriving career hit a brick wall thanks to some drunken shenanigans. The low-energy loser is reduced to writing about Bigfoot and supernatural phenomenon for Chicago tabloid The National Mirror and its mercurial, perpetually apoplectic editor Vartan Malt (Bob Hoskins, shouting). 

When Vartan gets a tip about a genuine angel living with an old woman in a motel in Iowa, Frank is dispatched to investigate alongside his trusty photographer Huey Driscoll (Robert Pastorelli). Huey’s value to The National Mirror is rooted less in his photography than his status as the owner of Sparky the Wonder Dog, a cute little canine that has ascended to unlikely tabloid superstardom as The National Mirror’s beloved mascot. He even has his own column, although I imagine that someone else probably writes it for him. Then again, this is a movie about a real-life angel who drinks, smokes and screws divorcees so it’s not entirely out of the question that in addition to being cute and photogenic, Sparky the Wonder Dog is the Mike Royko of the animal world, with a cynical, irreverent writing style readers love. 

Vartan convinces Frank and Huey to take along his most recent hire, Dorothy Winters (Andie MacDowell) on their trip. Vartain tells his disgruntled employees that Dorothy is an expert on angels, but she doesn’t seem to know much about anything, including angels. 

Dorothy doesn’t actually know anything about angels. Instead she won her place as part of the caravan to Iowa by virtue of being a dog trainer whose job is to sabotage Frank and Huey so that they screw up the assignment and, as part of a bet, Huey will be forced to give up Vartan Sparky the Wonder Dog, whose popularity is the only reason Huey even has a job in the first place. 

If that sounds like way too much plot, that’s because it is. Ephron and her collaborators keep finding new ways to take the focus off Michael, its only compelling character and performance. That never stops hurting the film. 

In Iowa, the unlikely trio and their canine companion encounter Michael (Travolta), a shaggy-haired hedonist with bona fide angel wings on his back. He’s being lovingly looked after by Pansy Milbank (Jean Stapleton), who sees him as a cross between a surrogate son and a guardian angel. 

When Pansy dies, Michael decides to go on a road trip with Frank, Huey and Dorothy from Iowa to Chicago and let me tell you: our beautiful country has seldom looked more boring or beige than it does here. As someone who has been on long road trips through the midwest, Michael unfortunately captures just how much of it looks the same. 

MacDowell wasn’t given a character as much as a series of quirks: she’s been married and divorced several times, something she references constantly, and not in a terribly healthy or productive way, she aspires to be a country-western songwriter and she is a dog trainer masquerading as one of those angel experts you encounter so often in journalism and life. 

Dorothy is perfect for Frank because they each have the personality of a Yankee Candle store in an outlet mall and the film’s screenplay calls for Michael to serve as match-makers for these two stiffs. But before Michael and his minders make it to Chicago there’s all manner of fun to be had on the road. 

In this column we’ve established indelibly that nothing in a mediocre or sub-mediocre John Travolta vehicle works more spectacularly or consistently than finding an excuse for the star to dance. 

Accordingly, when he puts Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools” on at a randy roadside bar and begins dancing seductively with a pair of hard luck women Ephron’s curdled fantasy briefly but gloriously takes flight. Michael starts by seducing two barflies with his moves but soon every single woman in the bar with the exception of Dorothy is moving and grooving with the sexy angel, lost in a state of pure, erotic bliss. 

Travolta is in his element here as a sort of divorcee whisperer who has the ladies panting in lust towards his heavenly hunk. A 15 on 1 orgy with Michael in the middle seems likely until the men at the bar take revenge on Michael for stealing their women with his big dick angel energy and a scuffle breaks out.

This, friends, is what the movie should be: Travolta swaggering his way through one funky set-piece after another, clearly having the time of his life, playing a role that fits him and his unique skill set perfectly. 

Then the music and the dancing ends and Michael goes back to being misfiring cornball nonsense. Ephron doesn’t seem to understand that Travolta isn’t just the best thing she has to offer audiences; he’s the only thing Michael has to offer. Even the dog can’t compare to Travolta in his prime. 

Travolta is great in Michael, yet another movie unworthy of his talent and his magnetism. Audiences didn’t seem to care that Michael the movie was nowhere near as inspired or entertaining as its title character. The movie’s boffo box-office suggests they just wanted to see this truest of movie stars strut his stuff. There’s something beautiful about that as well as poignant since it wouldn’t last much longer. 

After Battlefield Earth, going to see a new John Travolta movie became a much dicier proposition but in 1996 he was still able to sell hokum like Michael to a mass audience almost exclusively on the basis of his charisma and star power. 

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