>>PREVIEW
STRANGERS WITH CANDY
STARRING Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert and Paul Dinello
DIRECTED BY Paul Dinello
Friday, August 18
Uptown Screen
It’s not her penchant for appallingly racist comments. It’s not her unrestrained sex drive and lax hygiene. It’s not her permanently wayward fashion sense. It’s not her inability to grasp even the simplest aspects of acceptable human discourse. It’s not her habit of bellowing "I got something to say!" whenever she has, y’know, something to say. So, what the hell is it that makes Jerri Blank so lovable?
A 47-year-old junkie prostitute who has returned to high school 30 years after dropping out, Jerri made for a skanky enigma on Strangers With Candy, the Comedy Central series that ran for three seasons over 1999 and 2000 and has since become a DVD staple among comedy geeks prone to repeating salacious Jerri-isms like, "I’m gonna make your pinky all stinky."
Now that a feature film version is being unleashed in theatres – with series veterans such as faux-blowhard Stephen Colbert being joined by enthusiastic newcomers like Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker and Philip Seymour Hoffman – it’s an excellent time to analyze the character’s appeal with the woman who brings her to life, Amy Sedaris.
In a recent phone interview from her home in New York, the rubber-faced actor and comedian displays little of Jerri’s crassness but much of the manic exuberance she exudes in her appearances on The Late Show With David Letterman. (Her friends there came in handy: the movie was produced by Letterman’s Worldwide Pants production company and Paul Shaffer helped write the score since most of the music budget was spent on the use of the Floaters’ seductive disco classic "Float On" – fun fact!)
"The thing with Jerri," says Sedaris, "is she’s such a clown but she’s also such an innocent and so childlike. She can be fascinating to watch. She’s like a cartoon – one day she can have a full set of teeth, then the next day she doesn’t have any and you just accept it. I know for me to play her, it’s probably very much like Johnny Depp in his Pirates of the Caribbean character. It’s just like a kid playing make-believe."
Though Sedaris has proved to be a remarkably versatile comic actor on TV (recurring roles in Sex and the City and Monk), in movies (Elf, School of Rock and upcoming features by David Gordon Green and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Jeff Garlin) and onstage (The Book of Liz, written with her famous author brother David) – and we can’t forget the cupcake and cheeseball business she runs out of her apartment – Jerri is the character that best reveals her genius as a performer. And as Sedaris notes, so much of Jerri lies in her battery of facial tics and expressions.
"The good thing about it is I’m not using prosthetics or anything," she says. "I can be Jerry in a split second – I can switch it on and off. Once I make the face, she just comes up."
The character was born when Colbert and Paul Dinello — Sedaris’ friends and collaborators since their days together at Second City in Chicago -- saw a TV special about Florrie Fisher, a real-life ex-prostitute turned motivational speaker who cautioned youngsters about walking on the wild side. Their idea for Jerri merged with a character that Sedaris had already developed with David, with whom she would perform under the self-mocking moniker of "The Talent Family." As for an environment for Jerri, the comedians struck upon the idea of spoofing high school life as it appeared in moral-heavy TV after-school specials.
"We didn’t draw from our own experiences," says Sedaris. "The three of us are so unhip, anyway – that’s one reason why we made up everything. We made up things. And whenever I see something that’s supposed to be based in high school, I think, ‘Wait a minute, why is everyone so frigging pretty and acting so well?’ That always confused me. I haven’t seen a movie about high school that felt real except for maybe Welcome to the Dollhouse."
Like the series, Strangers With Candy is more grotesque than accurate in its depiction of Jerri’s return to adolescence. It also serves as a prequel to the show, beginning with Jerri’s homecoming and discovery that her departure sent Daddy (Dan Hedaya) into a coma decades before. She enrolls at Flatpoint High with the hope that proof of her specialness will wake him up. The best way to do this is to win the science fair, but Jerri being Jerri, she’s distracted from her goal by everything from a hunky jock’s squat thrusts to pictures of monkeys washing each other on TV.
The teachers don’t have any more focus, what with the secret affair between teachers Chuck Noblet (Colbert) and Geoffrey Jellineck (Dinello) hitting a rough patch and Principal Blackman (Greg Hollimon) worried about covering his gambling debts. The returning cast is joined by enthusiastic newbies like Broderick as a science-fair impresario, Parker as a brittle school counsellor, Sir Ian Holm as the Blank family doctor and Hoffman and The West Wing’s Alison Janney as school board members.
While the movie doesn’t entirely escape the problems that afflicted previous big-screen incarnations of beloved cult comedy shows (expect the same erratic pacing and scattershot gags that marred Brain Candy and Run Ronnie Run), Strangers With Candy is still clever, funny and wickedly vulgar. Yet for all of Jerri’s grossness, she retains an endearingly human sweetness, which may be the ultimate source of the character’s appeal.
"I like playing characters like her," says Sedaris. "I tend to play them very broad, but I do try to ground them in something. I know how I feel when I see someone play a character very campy, and maybe people think I’m that way when I’m playing Jerri. But I know why I play her, I take her seriously – I try to play her as real as possible."
Sedaris adds that she likes who Jerri attracts, "the misfits and outcasts" who make up Strangers With Candy’s fanbase. Their numbers are set to grow with the arrival of the feature.
"Maybe there’s more misfits and outcasts out there," she says, "more ugly people. The audience could be like the Children of the Corn coming at you 80 miles an hour. We might be like, ‘Oh God, what have we done?’ But luckily Jerri’s such a disguise kit for me. Thank God I can still walk down the street." |
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