The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981)
written by: Jane Wagner
starring: Lily Tomlin, Charles Grodin, Ned Beatty
Did she begin to shrink because no one cared? Or because no one listened?
Is she a metaphor?
Pat Kramer, a somewhat overwhelmed housewife in a picture perfect pastel community, with a successful husband and two nearly identical children, one day finds her robe is too large. Thanks to the chaos in her household, mostly from the screaming children, but also from her neighbors and friends and their constant barrage of suggestions, she doesn’t make much fuss when her husband’s kiss lands on her forehead instead of her mouth. While she protests that she doesn’t need a new canned cheese, or a new chemical glue, or a new feminine hygiene product, no one listens and so she ends up with all these things anyway, cluttering her home and infusing her life. The products, all promising to make her life easier, simpler, prettier, simply don't do that. In fact, they make her life harder, more complicated and uglier. Due to a quirk of her genetics, which make her particularly susceptible to the poisons of chemicals, these suburban products make her shrink. Incredible but true, Pat Kramer is shrinking.
She is The Incredible Shrinking Woman, star of Joel Schumacher’s first directorial project. Starring Lily Tomlin, who also appears in two other roles (just for fun, I guess?), with Charles Grodin as her increasingly exasperated husband.
Is she shrinking because no one noticed? Is she shrinking because no one cares? Is she shrinking because her role as a housewife is diminishing and therefore her place in her established world is disappearing?
The movies asks all these questions, explicitly, though what it does with those questions is a mixed bag.
But the questions themselves are interesting-- Pat finds her role in the world diminishing along with her size. Becoming smaller puts strains on her family life, as being small makes it hard to control her already unruly children, or even to serve them dinner. Her relationship with her husband also suffers, though he loves her and there's never any doubt about that, which I always appreciate, he misses having an adult-size wife. He wants to help her, but doesn't know how, and finds it increasingly difficult to relate to her. And then there's the horrifying feeling that she will shrink away to nothingness and disappear and, you know, die.
Capitalism, more or less, is killing her, slowly but steadily, shrinking her away and eating her up. Her husband’s marketing coworkers want to make dolls of her, to capitalize on the fame that has come with her incredible story. Pat protests in her small voice: "I don't want to be another product! I'm sick of products!" So she may be, but nevertheless she becomes a different sort of product—a sob story for the American people, hailed on news channels and late night shows alike.
Looming existential horror aside, the movie is a charming, fun sort of farce. Lily Tomlin is delightful, though the movie puts her into a position where she has to straight man maybe a little too much for her particular talents. Though she does an awful lot of startled screaming, at her wackiest moments and when placed in the wackiest circumstances, she can be wonderful (this actually goes for the whole movie: at its wackiest, it's best). Charles Grodin is playing a familiar type-- the stiff, dry husband feeding comic set ups to a wackier comedienne-- but he does it with all the precision and excellence of his best work. And who doesn’t love seeing Grodin in a movie?
The script is fine, if a little meandering, but with a few great lines and a few more charming gags. Perhaps it sets up more than it pays off, but, c’est la vie.
For all the levels on which this movie succeeds, there is one major level where it does not succeed. It fails at being funny. The premise of the movie is a horror, and the questions the film raises are pretty heavy. How much can we laugh about our own impending death and irrelevancy? I would say “a lot”, but this movie doesn’t deliver on the chucks. It's a comedy, sure, but it's not... funny. Not once did I laugh out loud, nor did the movie wring from me anything more than an appreciative smile. It's charming, pleasant, utterly harmless, but not riotously funny, or even more than mildly funny, which would have helped a lot. To lean into the silliness would have softened the hard edges of unanswered existential dilemmas. It's a farce on its surface, a daffy little number not without its charms. Yet it fails to reach any real heights.
But! It is very charming! It has many successful elements. Much of its success comes from the visual style it exists in-- and I'm willing to give a lot of that to its direction. It's a first picture, but it has some real flavor. What really sang for me is the production design and yes, the direction.
Through most of the 70s, Schumacher had been a costume designer (which seems to clearly influence his use of color and shape, even in this first feature) and then had written the scripts for Sparkle and The Wiz (how he got those jobs I don't know, but damn). Those, I presume, pivoted into this first directorial project, which shows the beginning of that special Schumacher touch.
The community the Kramers live in is a Leave it to Beaver 50s visual dreamscape that culminates in a perfectly manicured cul-de-sac. Every house is a cotton candy color, every outfit is a perfectly curated ensemble. The Kramer kitchen is entirely pink, their hallways are entirely purple. Their home is a Barbie dreamhouse to rival the literal doll house Pat ends up living in once she has shrunk to a measly six inches. Grodin wears a series of exquisite pastel three-piece suits in pinks, greens, powder blues, salmons and seafoams.
I love the colors of this movie, the dreamy lightscape that accompanies Pat's surface-perfect world. Contrasting with the conspiracy subplot that is filmed in sharp gray with noir shadows, the peachy suburban landscapes seem even prettier and more appealing. It works wonderfully. And that use of color and shadow to heighten mood and tone is what Schumacher becomes best at. Extravagant and heightened, this is such an evident start to the style he would develop and hone more over the course of his career. His camera work is tidy and clear, with a few flourishes that are wonderful. There’s a fabulous slapstick sequence with a bay of elevators towards the end of the film. The movie looks cheap to me (or maybe it just looks like 1981 and I watched it streaming through a less than HD website), but so much is done with what seems to be a serious lack of funds. The effects of the Shrinking Woman are totally believable-- not once does Lily Tomlin look like she isn't existing in the same scene as her full size costars. It’s seamless.
Even better, and I think another thing that when at his best Schumacher is wonderful with, he develops a few genuinely poignant moments of human interaction. He's good with actors and plays occasionally towards melodrama, but he’s good at creating human, humane, moments in more heightened genre fare. After seeing a hoard of doctors who have no answers, Grodin comforts Tomlin by saying that as long as she still has her wedding band on, nothing between them has changed. It's a sweet, quiet moment between a married couple, softly and gently facing something frightening, but facing it together. It's lovely, and small, and this moment occurs naturally in the same movie where a gorilla climbs the ropes of an elevator shaft.
Grounded moments are what make heightened fare work. These gentle moments contrasted with Tomlin, very small, being chased screaming by a dog.
And Schumacher nails it, right out of the gate
Overall: ★ ★
Schumacherness: ★ ★
Up Next: D.C. Cab (1983)