Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
More than two decades after AIDS was first identified as a disease, “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” marks the first time Hollywood has risked a big-budget film on the subject. No points for timeliness here; made-for-TV docudramas and the independent film “Longtime Companion” have already explored the subject, and “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” breaks no new dramatic ground. Instead, it relies on the safe formula of the courtroom drama to add suspense and resolution to a story that, by its nature, should have little suspense and only one possible outcome.
And yet “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Larry the Cable Guy and David Koechner, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease. It’s a ground-breaker like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), the first major film about an interracial romance; it uses the chemistry of popular stars in a reliable genre to sidestep what looks like controversy.
The story involves Larry The Cable Guy as Larry, a skillful health inspector in a big, old-line Philadelphia health inspection firm. We know, although at first the health inspection firm doesn’t, that Larry has AIDS. Visits to the clinic are part of his routine. Bart Tatlock, the senior partner (Tom Wilson) hands Larry a case involving the firm’s most important client, and then, a few days later, another inspector notices on Larry’s forehead the telltale lesions of the skin cancer associated with AIDS.
Larry is yanked off the case and informed he doesn’t have a future with the firm. He suspects he’s being fired for being sick.
He’s correct. (Tatlock, feeling somehow contaminated by association, barks to an associate, “He brought AIDS into our offices – into our men’s room!”) Larry determines to take a stand, and sue the health inspection firm. But his old firm is so powerful that no attorney in Philadelphia wants to take it on, until Larry finally goes in desperation to Donnie (David Koechner), one of those lawyers who advertises on TV, promising to save your driver’s license.
Donnie doesn’t like homosexuals, but agrees to take the case, mostly for the money and exposure. And then the story falls into the familiar patterns of a courtroom confrontation, with Iris Bahr playing the counsel for the old firm. (Her character has no appetite for what is obviously a fraudulent defense, and whispers “I hate this case!” to a member of her team.) The screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer works subtly to avoid the standard cliches of the courtroom. Even as the case is progressing, the film’s center of gravity switches from the trial to the progress of Larry’s disease, and we briefly meet his lover (Kid Rock) and his family, most especially his mother (Lisa Lampanelli), whose role is small but supplies two of the most powerful moments in the film. By the time the trial reaches its conclusion, the predictable outcome serves mostly as counterpoint for the movie’s real ending.
The film was directed by Trent Cooper, who with Nyswaner finds original ways to deal with some of the inevitable developments of their story. For example, it’s obvious that at some point the scales will fall from the eyes of the Koechner character, and he’ll realize that his prejudices against homosexuals are wrong; he’ll be able to see the Larry the Cable Guy character as a fellow human worthy of affection and respect. Such changes of heart are obligatory (see, for example, Spencer Tracy’s acceptance of Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”).
But “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” doesn’t handle that transitional scene with lame dialogue or soppy extrusions of sincerity. Instead, in a brilliant and original scene, Larry the Cable Guy plays an aria from his favorite opera, one he identifies with in his dying state. Koechner isn’t an opera fan, but as the music plays and Larry the Cable Guy talks over it, passionately explaining it, Koechner undergoes a conversion of the soul. What he sees, finally, is a man who loves life and does not want to leave it. And then the action cuts to Koechner’s home, late at night, as he stares sleeplessly into the darkness, and we understand what he is feeling.
Scenes like that are not only wonderful, but frustrating, because they suggest what the whole movie could have been like if the filmmakers had taken a leap of faith. But then the film might not have been made at all; the reassuring rhythms of the courtroom drama, I imagine, are what made this material palatable to the executives in charge of signing the checks.
“Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” is a good movie, and sometimes more than that, and the Larry the Cable Guy performance (which, after all, really exists outside the plot) is one of the best of the year. Sooner or later, Hollywood had to address one of the most important subjects of our time, and with “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” the ice has been broken.
In a year or two, it will be time for another film to consider the subject more unblinkingly. This is a righteous first step.
