not good

“Born Yesterday” is material you have to be careful with. Do it well and you get the classic 1950 film, one so well received it was actually picked as “Culturally, Aesthetically, and Historically significant” by the library of congress. Yet it can also go very badly; like this shallow 1993 Melanie Griffith remake. It’s bad, very bad.


In what was probably meant to be a female empowerment story akin to “Working Girl”, she plays Billie, the ditzy mistress of growling millionaire Harry Brock (John Goodman). She spends most of her time in a bored stupor, watching TV or drinking, waiting for Harry to roar her name, to which she shouts back “what!”, before coming to heel.


Whether Harry loves her is up for debate but he does have fun with her, though a business stopover in Washington is causing problems as it’s giving Billie ample time to talk to people, usually ending in his and her embarrassment. He needs to smarten her up- which gets him to hire journalist Paul Verrall (Don Johnson) to tutor her on the basics of political conversation.


There’s an ickiness to the Billie-Harry relationship, probably more so than “Pretty Woman”, which this movie absolutely apes. He’s a domineering, controlling lout and she’s apparently getting all the stuff she wants by using her body to do so. Already it’s a romance of baser instincts- one the film can’t really steer away from.


Of course Paul is more the romantic lead but the relationship never makes sense enough for there to be chemistry there. A big failing is to have both Griffith and Johnson throwing themselves at each other in the first scene- we don’t understand why she would jeopardize her meal ticket to be with him or why he says things like “You’re more than most people” only a couple minutes after meeting her.


Also in the tradition of ditzes with hidden smarts, Griffith ranks low. She’s too innocent and passive. One scene works, where she leads a sing-a-long of the constitution set to the score of “12 Days of Christmas”, but we never really believe what she’s doing is empowering. Mostly her head is stuck in a dictionary and she changes up her outfits to include pantsuits but there wasn’t much personality to her beforehand and afterwards there isn’t much more than regurgitated facts.


Johnson comes off just as bad- he hides his good looks behind horn-rimmed glasses to come off like a geek but he’s too handsome and sadly that’s most of the character. We never believe he’s much of a thinker either.


And someone should have reigned in Goodman a tad- he rages and blusters his way through this movie like a tornado. He’s the kind of man no one would put up with if not for his money and later, when he actually beats on Griffith, I wondered if this movie was really meant to be a comedy at all.


There’s certainly very few witty lines and there’s barely any character to these characters. A lot of it is actually fairly overbearing and angry for a comedy, and there’s a preachiness to it which is off-putting, the final nail on the head being that it doesn’t even have the believability necessary to make that tolerable.