Sub-Cult 2.0 #12 Clifford (1994)

The poorly received 1994 Martin Short/Charles Grodin vehicle Clifford occupies a special place in the hearts of fans of venerable comedy institution The Best Show as host Tom Scharpling’s favorite movie and a cult oddity that is referenced so frequently that it’s woven deep into the very fabric of the show. 

For Friends of Tom, as super-fans are known, no exchange in Clifford is as legendary or as oft-referenced as the magical moment when Martin Daniels,  Charles Grodin’s curmudgeonly bachelor, unsuccessfully tries to convince his schoolteacher girlfriend Sarah Davis (Mary Steenburgen) that, despite what she might believe, he actually adores kids, citing his nephew as an example. 

“You never mentioned you had a nephew!” Sarah replies indignantly, the perfect straight woman and foil. When she challenges him to name the nephew that he loves so damn much Grodin pauses and squints purposefully before hopefully guessing, “I want to say Mason?” 

That Mason sounds absolutely nothing like Clifford, the actual name of the poor man’s nephew, just makes it funnier. But what really distinguishes that line, and Grodin’s delivery of it, is that it’s not just a good gag but rather a line that doesn’t just say something about the curmudgeon delivering it: it says everything about him. 

But it goes beyond that. It doesn’t just say everything about this particular uptight bastard; it says everything about a character Grodin played better than just about anyone else over the course of his extraordinary career. I’m talking about miserable, misanthropic bastards who find it downright painful to be around other people, particularly children, yet are forced by the unfathomable cruelty of the universe to pretend otherwise. 

When I learned that Grodin died, consequently, a glorious rush of bittersweet memories of one of my favorite actors filled my brain, none more potent or powerful than, “I want to say Mason?” 

So I figured I would close out Charles Grodin Month by taking a look back at a movie wrote about for My World of Flops many years ago but that I did not fully appreciate until now. 

It helps to see Clifford not as a family movie about a mischievous child but rather as a psychodrama on the nature of evil. Clifford could very well be the darkest, weirdest and most uncompromising PG studio movie of the 1990s, although I would argue it should at least have gotten a PG-13 for “Eviscerating Darkness.” 

As played by Martin Short with a smile at once angelic and demonic and eyes perpetually alive with insanity and aggression, Clifford is a precocious ten year old boy who has driven his mother to alcoholism and his father to the brink of insanity. 

Clifford isn’t destructive in the way a misbehaving child is destructive: he’s destructive the way the Joker in The Dark Knight is destructive and the Manson Family was destructive. 

It makes sense that Clifford was shot by the great John A. Alonzo, whose resume includes Chinatown and Scarface. Roman Polanski’s classic Neo-noir, Brian De Palma’s iconic gangster epic and Paul Flaherty’s Kiddie Noir all explore the nature of evil in society through larger-than-life exemplars of greed whose single-minded pursuits of their obsessions have rendered them monstrous and inhuman. 

In Chinatown that monster is John Huston’s larger-than-life incestuous powerbroker Noah Cross. In Scarface it’s crazed drug dealer/user Tony Montana. In Clifford it’s the title character. It’s a toss up as to which of these world-class villains is ultimately the most evil but my money is on Clifford. 

My vibe 24/7.

In scenes shot three years after Clifford ostensibly finished shooting in 1990, Clifford opens in 2050 with a now wizened and ancient Clifford working at a Catholic school in clerical garb.

The film takes the form of an elaborate flashback Father Clifford tells a young troublemaker played by Ben Savage to prevent him from following in his footsteps and causing havoc not just for his parents but for humanity as a whole. 

The kid is as smart and precocious as he is a hellion. In Clifford, being smart is a curse, particularly for children. 

Clifford’s framing device feels like an attempt to deny its fundamental nihilism and present it not as an angry, bitter psychodrama but rather as a family film about a bad little boy who learns his lesson and grows up to be a good man who has spent his life atoning for his childhood sins. 

Nothing could be further from the truth! No lessons are learned in Clifford. No one experiences moral or emotional growth and emerges a better man. True, Grodin’s enraged uncle saves his nephew from dying a horrible death but that’s only because he draws the line, finally, at literally murdering a child. 

Yet Clifford had to at least offer the illusion of change or it would be unbearably grim, particularly for a movie ostensibly targeted at children, with a ten-year-old protagonist. 

Clifford isn’t actually for children, however, and its lead character may be a boy but he is played by a 37 year old show-business veteran in a performance I used to find creepy and disturbing in a pejorative way but that I now find creepy and disconcerting in the best possible way. 

Clifford is nightmare fuel closer to David Lynch or Freddy Got Fingered than Beethoven, Grodin’s big family hit from this era. 

We then travel back to long-ago days of the George H.W Bush administration, when Clifford is ten and driving parents Julian (Richard Kind) and Theodora (Jennifer Savidge) blind with rage by his constant demands to go to a theme park in Los Angeles called Dinosaur World designed partially by Julian’s workaholic brother Martin. 

Kind’s body language makes it apparent that being Clifford’s father has destroyed him psychologically, that it has robbed him of his will to live and rendered him a bitter husk of a man who hates every moment of his miserable life. 

When Julian discovers that he can pawn off the sentient plague that is Clifford on his brother for a few days due to Martin desperately wanting to prove to his girlfriend that he likes children and would be a good father, he looks as relieved as a death row prisoner who gets a pardon and wins the lottery the day before his scheduled execution. 

Re-watching Clifford I found myself appreciating its bold, brazen, uncompromising darkness and pessimism but also its deceptive craft. When superstar architect Martin shows off his new dream home to his girlfriend in hopes she’ll want to spend her life with him, the house in question looks like a sinister black box with a giant cliff for a backyard all but guaranteed to quickly kill any child unfortunate enough to live there. 

The hustling, desperate Martin enthuses of the pit of sadness he has made his forever home, “it’s got a quiet intensity, doesn’t it?”, which is a nice way of saying that it has all the personality and warmth of an Eastern German gulag during the Cold War. 

When he exits the plane in Los Angeles in hopes of making a sacred pilgrimage to Dinosaur World, Clifford makes a point of stealing his fellow passenger’s stuff—including a poor dog—for no reason other than to be an asshole. 

Clifford has exactly two modes, a cloying burlesque of childhood innocence that couldn’t be more fake and wild-eyed rage that couldn’t be more real. Clifford at first tries to put on a good front for his uncle, just as his uncle tries to be the family man his girlfriend needs but he most assuredly is not. 

All it takes to bring out the beast in Clifford is his uncle reneging on his offer to take him to Dinosaur World. After that, all bets are off. Clifford will stop at nothing to punish his uncle for depriving him of the only thing he wants in the world. 

In that respect Clifford and his uncle are like characters in Looney Tunes cartoons in having one overriding desire that dictates everything they do. Clifford’s sole desire is to go to Dinosaur Land. Martin, in contrast, wants to win his girlfriend’s heart. This puts them in perpetual conflict. 

Clifford retaliates against his uncle with what are less boyhood pranks than felonies. He frames his uncle for a bomb scare and destroys his dream of creating a transit system for Los Angeles by blowing up his model for it. 

Pushed to the point of madness and beyond, Martin, who now sports a wild-eyed gleam every bit as insane as his nephew’s, decides to pull a Monkey’s Paw and make Clifford’s fondest/only dream come true in a way guaranteed to thrill him initially then either kill, maim or traumatize him. 

A rage-filled Uncle Martin gives Clifford a private tour of Dinosaur World, only to speed up the ride to dangerous, even deadly speeds. Clifford is at first overjoyed but becomes distraught once it becomes apparent his uncle wants to punish or kill him under the guise of making his dreams come true. 

It’s a testament to how dark Clifford is that it genuinely feels like a cop out that it does not end with the murder of a small child. Instead Uncle Martin pulls back at the very end and eventually finds it in his heart to forgive him, even making him the ring-bearer at his wedding. 

My own mental edit of Clifford removes the clunky framing device and concludes with Martin successfully murdering his nephew at Dinosaur World, only to be found innocent by a jury that determined that they would have done the exact same thing if they’d been in his shoes. 

THAT, to me, would be a much more honest and appropriate happy ending than Martin and Clifford reaching a tentative peace and the pre-pubescent anti-Christ serving as a ring-bearer at Martin’s nuptials to Sarah. 

Clifford thankfully got an unexpected happy ending of its own when the long-delayed critical and commercial bomb, a movie that embarrassed its screenwriters to the point that they had their names taken off it and then spent long years on a shelf ended up finding an appreciative, dedicated, damn near pathologically obsessed cult thanks in no small part to Scharpling, its biggest and most high profile fan and evangelist. 

It has another high-profile super-fan in Nicolas Cage. In his memoir Short wrote of the following unexpected exchange with the eccentric Oscar-winner, “Half an hour into the flight, I was lost in the New York Times when I noticed a figure hovering in the periphery of my vision: Nic Cage, crouched in the aisle beside me, his eyes locked on mine. “Can I just say something to you?” he said, a very Nic Cage-y intensity to his voice. “The dining room scene in Clifford, with you and Charles Grodin, where he’s confronting you and you keep lying to him”–a sustained battle of wits, much of it improvised, in which Clifford drives Grodin’s character to the edge (Look at me like a human boy!)–“well, I broke my VCR watching it. I watched that scene twenty-five times in a row, and I rewound it so much that the machine jammed and the tape broke.” On and on Cage went–and he had just won the Oscar two nights before. When I finally got to speak, replying, “And congratulations on your Oscar, great performance!” it seemed like I was merely returning his compliment–though, Nic, if you’re reading this, I swear, it was always my intention to compliment you first.”

I am obsessed with Cage to the point that I have committed five years of my life to watching all of his movies for the Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast and I will be the first to concede that Grodin and Short’s performances in Clifford are both more memorable and masterful than Cage’s Oscar-winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas.

A flop once seen as one of the biggest embarrassments in Grodin’s career is now appreciated and understood in a way that would have been inconceivable at the time of its release. An unloved cinematic orphan eventually found a lasting home in the hearts and minds of cultists tuned into its unique, tricky frequency. 

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