{"id":8558,"date":"2012-04-27T21:40:29","date_gmt":"2012-04-28T01:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=8558"},"modified":"2012-04-27T21:40:29","modified_gmt":"2012-04-28T01:40:29","slug":"comfort-and-joy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=8558","title":{"rendered":"Comfort and Joy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It must be refreshing to know that your life is absolutely meaningless. I\u2019m not talking about your life being meaningless from a religious perspective or because you are such a nothing person that you will never make an impact on anyone. But rather that what you do is limited in influence, even if you\u2019re the best at it. You\u2019re not in politics, or in the military, or a teacher, or a social worker. But, instead, you exist — whether it be through your job or otherwise — on a plane where you\u2019re a genial but background figure. You\u2019re a supporting character in the lives of your peers. A case could be made that such an existence would be despairing, but it probably takes the pressure off considerably. It\u2019s a bounty for those who lack ambition, (which is most people).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Alan \u201cDickey\u201d Byrd, the main character in Bill Forsyth\u2019s Comfort and Joy,<\/em> is a morning radio DJ who performs imbecilic antics at work — silly voices, clich\u00e9s, etc. But he commits to it. The title of the film is not just about him finding happiness after his longtime girlfriend leaves him, but realizing that he maintains his skill on the radio — which he visibly takes a lot of pleasure in. And, subtly throughout the film, Forsyth interjects news reports while Alan is at the station, almost always about the most mundane things. Central to these reports is a story about a panda who has been imported from China to Scotland (the film takes place mostly in the suburbs of Glasgow), and the zoo has recently discovered she is pregnant. Why should we care about whether or not a panda is pregnant?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>So when Alan (played by Bill Paterson, who has the same facial structure as Jerry Orbach) tries to add meaning to his life by making a radio documentary about the ice cream truck turf war he finds himself in the middle of, it\u2019s important that he is trying to stretch his limits. At the minimum, Alan needs to find what those limits are. His boss doesn\u2019t take him seriously and thinks he\u2019s delusional about the turf war, and so sends him off to a self-involved psychiatrist* for examination. And every time Alan tries to explain the feuding ice cream vendors to someone new, he can hear how ridiculous he sounds. It takes him a while to realize that he\u2019s the central character of The Godfather<\/em>. Only, instead of killing people and other criminal activity, he\u2019s a mediator in an ice cream war.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Forsyth knows exactly what he\u2019s doing in these scenes, as he specialized in the \u201coverwhelmed fish just above the water\u201d genre (Local Hero, Housekeeping, <\/em>and Gregory\u2019s Girl<\/em>, before faltering with Being Human**) <\/em>Alan Bird is essentially a parrot (Bird) who co-opts metaphors from his acquaintances and never manages to understand what exactly he\u2019s saying. Essentially, Comfort and Joy<\/em> is an Alice in Wonderland<\/a> <\/em><\/span>story, as Alan, drawn in by the physical beauty of Charlotte (Clare Grogan) follows her truck with his car, into a metaphorical rabbit hole. In mysterious territory –the ice cream truck he\u2019s following is owned by the Mr. Bunny company — he finds himself in well over his head as an ice cream mediator. Forsyth constantly points out that Alan doesn\u2019t have a clue about what he\u2019s doing; there\u2019s a hilarious scene where he draws a ridiculously oversimplified diagram of the various parties he\u2019s dealing with and what their interests are. When his kleptomaniac girlfriend leaves him at the beginning of the film, it\u2019s clear he was treading water there, too, and was just happy to be with a woman who was physically out of his league. His friend Colin comes over to console him, and with the very few things left in the house, tries and fails to explain why the items left are important reflections of Alan\u2019s personality (\u201cthis little table \u2026 is you\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Such a scene predates the one in Albert Brooks\u2019 Mother, <\/em>where Brooks sits alone in a mostly empty house bereft of furniture (his wife had just left him), and Brooks spends his time trying the perfect spot to put his chair, in the middle of an enormous living room. Brooks moves back in with his mother to try to figure out what\u2019s wrong with him, but Alan has nothing to revert to, and can only take pride in his job.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>That\u2019s one of the unique things about Comfort and Joy<\/em>, that it comes out of a time (1984), where there weren\u2019t hundreds of radio stations and TV shows. If a DJ says something on the air, most of the locals are likely to hear it, because there isn\u2019t much else they\u2019d be listening to. That\u2019s a key point to Alan\u2019s survival; he knows he actually reaches people. He isn\u2019t reduced to a tiny niche on the Internet, as most of us are now. Alan\u2019s level of celebrity is just as small as the town he\u2019s famous in; which is how he gets away with being a local personality, but not above being overly disrespected. He may know his place, but he\u2019s not a conformist who\u2019s just worming his way through what he\u2019s been given, just as Forsyth did with his movies. And like most Forsyth films, Comfort and Joy <\/em>is warm and gentle without being cloying or maudlin. And it somehow avoids off-putting levels of cynicism. Like Alan, it\u2019s just the right amount of not important.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>* The scene with the psychiatrist is very funny on its own. But it does lead to one of the film\u2019s few problems, which is putting lawyers and psychiatrists into a movie that doesn\u2019t need them. And so the final 25 minutes is overloaded with story and the energy subsequently flags. Forsyth has even admitted publically that he probably could have made the movie about the DJ and dropped the ice cream plot (which is based on a real ice cream war in Scotland). But at the time he was afraid there wouldn\u2019t be enough to the film.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>** Being Human <\/em>suffered major studio interference and Forsyth disowned it. He retired after Gregory’s Two Girls<\/em>, his 1999 sequel to Gregory\u2019s Girl<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It must be refreshing to know that your life is absolutely meaningless. I\u2019m not talking about your life being meaningless from a religious perspective or because you are such a nothing person that you will never make an impact on anyone. But rather that what you do is limited in influence, even if you\u2019re the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12],"tags":[5188,2353,7692,8649,8645,8650,180,8653,153,8644,1337,5490,1104,8655,8646,8652,8647,493,8651,8654,8648,1013,1815,1813,8420,4600,8656,1206,2511,3833,5189,4371,276,4068],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8558"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}