The Producers Review

The musical version of The Producers shows how much nerve Mel Brooks has lost in thirty-five years. The original Producers remains to this day a bad-taste masterpiece largely because Brooks understands that the average audience embraces tastelessness when it is presented as camp – as a highly stylized flamboyant excess. That is the point of the original film. The behavior of the lead characters in the original is repellent, but the seriousness of their greed and lying and self-centeredness is very funny because it is pitched at a different tone than the comedy of the dancing Nazis. If Brooks can get you to laugh at a mass murderer like Hitler, then laughing at a pair of selfish criminals is automatically acceptable. Where the musical remake goes totally wrong is that it presents everything in the film as camp. The new film’s tone establishes right from the opening number that “camp” is the only tone the film is interested in. The new version of The Producers fails so spectacularly precisely because it fails to offend at all. This time around the Busby Berkley-inspired rotating swastika offends to about the same degree as the characters’ manipulations, and all of it has been softened by the relentlessly campy tone. This approach might be acceptable if there were some craft on display that could be appreciated, but the songs are at best pedestrian and the direction is static and dull. The performances, with the lone exception of a perfect Uma Thurman who gets the best song, are a mess. Nathan Lane has the timing fine, but he is not threatening, something that Zero Mostel most certainly was in the original. Matthew Broderick has the unenviable task of recreating one of the greatest comedic performances ever, and the only time he doesn’t embarrass himself is when he directly mimic’s Gene Wilder’s gestures or vocal mannerisms. Lenny Bruce said there is nothing sadder than an aging hipster, but the new film version of The Producers offers a compelling argument that there might be nothing sadder than an aging vulgarian.