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Features: DVD, Scene Access, Pan and Scan (TV Format), French, Subtitled
When Chevy Chase as a Manhattan sportswriter abandons his career for the country life, you know "getting away from it all" will inevitably mean getting in deeper. Urban transplant Andy Famer in Funny Farm is "Chase's best work," Siskel & Ebert said. Madolyn Smith co-stars as Andy's supportive wife. Together, the funny Farmers learn that the eccentric people and events around them outnumber even the mosquitos. And that one mustn't brag about becoming "Mr. Lamb Fries" until knowing the truth. This comic city slicker's nightmare also features bouyant direction by George Roy Hill, a vibrant Elmer Bernstein score and the lush cinematography of Miroslav Ondricek. Harvest the good times of this Funny Farm.
"A comedy with very large laughs. Chevy Chase does some of his best work." Good Morning America
Editor's Note
George Roy Hill's FUNNY FARM stars Chevy Chase as Andy Farmer, a big-city sportswriter. Since he and his wife, Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith), are fed up with the tensions of urban life, they decide to buy a house in the country where each of them will be able to work on their book projects in peace. Shortly after they've moved to a spacious farmhouse in a small New England village, Andy begins to realize that his dreams of bucolic nirvana are, in fact, delusions. First the birds sing too loudly, preventing him from concentrating on his work. Then he learns that there's a corpse buried in their garden, not to mention snakes in their lake. They have to make calls from the pay phone located in their kitchen, and the grasping townspeople seem to have their meters running 24/7. To make matters worse for Andy, who can't get started on his book, his wife has sold her children's book, with a squirrel protagonist named Andy, not long after moving into the new house. Hill has toned down Chase's broader mannerisms, adopting the tone of MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE. The film is based on Jay Cronley's novel.
Plot Summary
A Manhattan sportswriter takes his wife to live in the country, seeking peace to write a novel. Country life isn't nearly as bucolic as the clichés, however, and when his novel stalls, so does their marriage. This underrated film is full of hilarious screen moments.
| Features | French Dolby Surround | | Standard Version | | Interactive Menus | | English Dolby Surround |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Warner |
| Release Date: 12/12/2006 |
| Running Time: 101 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1988 | | Catalog ID: 11809 | | UPC: 00085391180920 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English [CC], English | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | 4:3 |
| Cast & Crew
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| | Professional Reviews | Chicago Sun-Times 0 of 10
Funny Farm is one of those small miracles that starts out like a lot of other movies and then somehow finds its own way, step after step, to an original comic vision. It's funny, all right, but it's more than funny, it's likable. It enlists our sympathies with the characters even while cheerfully exploiting their faults. And at the end, I had a goofy grin on my face because the movie had won me over so completely I was even willing to accept the final gag about the two ducks... Funny Farm has a good screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, and yet in other hands it might have yielded only a routine movie. George Roy Hill, the director, makes it better than that because he finds the right tone and sticks to it - a sort of bemused wonder at the insanity of it all in a movie that doesn't underline its gags or force its punch lines but just lets everything develop naturally. Notice, for example, the timing in the sequence where the sheriff first comes to chat about the corpse in the garden. Chase is not exactly playing a fresh kind of role here - his hero is a variation of the harassed husband he has been playing for years - but he has never been better in a movie. He has everything just right this time, and he plays the character without his usual repertory of witty asides and laconic one-liners. It's a performance, not an appearance. Smith makes a good foil for him, although she isn't given enough to do in scenes of her own... Funny Farm is kind of a loony, off-center comedy version of Hill's The World According to Garp, another movie about strange people in bizarre situations. Garp made too much of its significance, however, while the comedy in this film is light as a feather. The final sequence, in which the townspeople are bribed to act "normal," while Chase hands out Norman Rockwell covers from the Saturday Evening Post for them to admire, has a kind of inspired lunacy that is so fragile you almost don't want to laugh for fear of breaking the mood. - Roger Ebert
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