June 3rd, 1994
RENAISSANCE MAN is a really-not-that-bad inspirational teacher movie directed by Penny Marshall (A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN) and written by Jim Burnstein (a rookie who later did D3: THE MIGHTY DUCKS). It’s corny in the usual ways but also benefits from the simple appeal of the formula and a more-subtle-than-usual performance by Danny DeVito (ROMANCING THE STONE, THE JEWEL OF THE NILE, BATMAN RETURNS).
He plays Bill Rago, a fuck up in the world of advertising who gets fired after missing an important meeting with out-of-town VIPs. Ed Begley Jr. (last seen two weeks ago in EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES) appears briefly as his friend Jack who hired him and still cares about him but has run out of jobs for him. While defending him to the boss Jack says “the man’s had a few personal setbacks the last couple years,” and we can infer that one of them is a divorce, but I like that they never elaborate. Maybe it was some weird shit too. We don’t know.
He’s totally broke, but can’t even admit it to his daughter Emily (Alanna Ubach, SISTER ACT 2: BACK IN THE HABIT), who’s crushed he won’t pay for her astronomy club trip to Mexico to see an eclipse. So he starts collecting unemployment and the clerk (Jenifer Lewis, SISTER ACT, THE METEOR MAN) sort of does a microcosmic preview of his character arc by being a jerk to him at first but then warming to him and encouraging him to take a six week job teaching at an army base.
James Remar (BAND OF THE HAND) plays Captain Tom Murdoch, who brings Bill through the base to his miserable quarters and gets him started. It’s kind of cool to see Remar playing a friendly guy – I didn’t expect that. On the other hand I assumed drill instructor Sergeant First Class Cass (Gregory Hines, A RAGE IN HARLEM), would be the guy who sees something in him and encourages him, but he turns out to be an antagonist who thinks all this fancy book learnin’ is getting in the way of real soldierin’. It’s kind of funny how Bill just doesn’t give a shit about military protocol at all and openly flips him shit in the middle of drills and stuff. It’s all set up for Bill to have to climb up a difficult training tower (long story).
His assignment is to teach basic literacy to a class of eight soldiers, who say they’ve been labelled “double-D,” as in “dumb as dog shit.” They all march in but when they realize he’s a civilian they start fuckin around. There’s loud mouth Private Jamaal Montgomery (Kadeem Hardison, GUNMEN), who’s always insulting Georgia hick Private Tommy Lee Haywood (rapper Mark Wahlberg in his big screen debut). Corporal Jackson Leroy (Richard T. Jones, “Gangbanger #2,” M.A.N.T.I.S.) is a once promising football player who breaks them up. Private Donnie Benitez (Lillo Brancato, Jr., A BRONX TALE) is a blabbering New York dude who never shuts up about New York and does Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro impersonations – he’s an endearing kind of stupid. Private Brian Davis, Jr. (Peter Simmons, I’ll Fly Away) is a nerd who the others mercilessly taunt for talking too much about his dad who died in Vietnam. Private Miranda Myers (Stacey Dash, MO’ MONEY) is the only woman in the class, who has a sad family backstory and a good balance of more reasonable than the others but still kinda dumb. Private Melvin Melvin (Greg Sporleder, “Burger Stand Customer,” TRUE ROMANCE) is known for falling asleep all the time. And Private Roosevelt “Nathaniel” Hobbs (Khalil Kain, JUICE) is from Detroit but when Bill tries to bond by asking him what part he says, “The part you drive through going 85.”
Bill is very open about not knowing what he’s doing and not wanting to be there, so at first it’s basically study hall. But one day they’re having reading time, they ask about what he’s reading, and it’s Hamlet. He doesn’t really want to get into it but they show a surprising amount of curiosity as he tries to explain what it’s about in terms they understand. And he’s a nerd for this shit so pretty soon the class turns into going slowly through the play and trying to understand it all.
It’s got some of the hokiness that implies, but not as much as I expected. There are far-fetched touches like that none of them seem to have heard of Shakespeare before, or some of the ways they relate the plot to their Streetwise Urban Living or whatever. But in the scene where he brings them on a field trip to Canada to watch a production of Henry V (on a set that reminded me of the opera in HIGHLANDER II) the looks on their faces really sell that they’ve become invested in understanding Shakespeare. I like afterwards when Donnie says he liked it except for their accents.
By the way, they used a real production directed by Des McAnuff, veteran American-Canadian stage director who also directed THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE. For the record.
So many of these summer ’94 movies are looking back at past decades – adapting shows from the ‘60s, or being set in the ‘70s, for example. The small way RENAISSANCE MAN does it is that when pressed Bill admits protesting the Vietnam War, and seems very proud of it. Later one of the nicest things he does for a student is going out of his way to find proof that Brian’s dad’s death was heroic. I hope the implication isn’t supposed to be that being anti-war was anti-soldier and doing this means he’s now grown. But if I don’t worry about that it works.
There are a couple odd turns in the plot. One is when Private Hobbs is discovered to be a fugitive drug dealer hiding out in the base under an assumed identity! But it’s nice that Bill doesn’t turn on him. The weirdest leap is when he’s pretending to be CID to get access to Private Davis Sr.’s files, and Staff Sergeant Marie Leighton (Isabella Hoffmann, TRIPWIRE) calls him out and won’t give them to him but abruptly smiles like she’s charmed by him, and next thing you know they go to Burger King together and consider it a date. I don’t know how it works – he doesn’t even have cowboy powers like Woody Harrelson in THE COWBOY WAY.
Anyway, it’s mostly what you expect – an arc from prickly wiseass who’s tortured by being here to creating relationships and becoming invested in teaching. One of the big moments is when he’s told not to have a final exam because he’d have to kick them out of the army if they failed, and he’s upset because he thinks knowing they passed a real test would help them believe in themselves. From cynical grump to passionate idealist – a classic tale. What makes it kind of work is that there are relatively few scenes where he’s just doing jokes, and when there are I wondered if they added those out of fear (especially when there’s an ADR joke). Most of the time DeVito treats it as a serious acting role, and is willing to be much more subdued than how we usually see him. Much of the character is the sadness and empathy in his eyes as he listens to the students, and then the way they begin to light up as he starts to find purpose with them.
There’s plenty of production value in the Detroit opening and the amount of army extras training on the base, but a pretty high percentage of the movie takes place in this small classroom, and is just about conversations between Bill and the students. They’re broad characters but not quite as much as in some movies like this (it helps that they’re not playing teenagers), so having that much time to develop their relationships it’s hard not to get a little bit wrapped up in it. I didn’t mind it.
Most critics did mind it, though, and most civilians didn’t go see it – it was considered a big flop. In my mind the one famous thing about RENAISSANCE MAN was that Disney believed in it so much they wanted to give it a second chance and re-released it in the fall under the new title BY THE BOOK. But I’ve mentioned this to people who had no idea what I was talking about and it turns out it’s because that was something they tested out on 17 screens here in the Seattle area and then they gave up. Seattle in 1994 – home of LITTLE BUDDHA and BY THE BOOK (title only).
So in actuality the one thing RENAISSANCE MAN is famous for is being the big screen acting debut of boy band brother turned pop rapper turned underwear model Mark Wahlberg, who had only done the 1993 TV movie THE SUBSTITUTE. He was good enough in this to get a part in THE BASKETBALL DIARIES, which I think helped him be taken seriously before his followup in the more mainstream FEAR got him some real attention as an actor.
His character is a little less central than he would’ve been starting a year or two later. It’s a pretty simple character, he doesn’t try to push a southern accent or anything, he’s pretty natural, never does anything too embarrassing. There’s a scene where the class surprises Bill by performing a rap about Hamlet, and I was surprised he stayed on the sidelines. Everyone else either participates or dances, but he’s sitting down, mostly out of the shot, hitting out a beat on his desk.
I wondered if it killed him not to get to rap, but then I saw on the credits that he actually wrote “Hamlet Rap” with Mervyn Warren. There are also three songs on the soundtrack by “PRINCE ITAL JOE FEAT and MARKY MARK” (which I believe is a mistake, should be Prince Ital Joe featuring Marky Mark). I’m not trying to mock Wahlberg, but easily the biggest laugh in the movie is when you hear him earnestly rapping “statistics show / that kids with no dough / ain’t got no chance got nowhere to go” during a dramatic scene.
Dash of course did her most famous role in CLUELESS right after this. I didn’t recognize Simmons, but apparently he was in BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK, so he’s a legend. I know Brancato from ‘R XMAS, but I guess most people know him from The Sopranos. Unfortunately he got addicted to cocaine and heroin around this time and in 2005 he was busted for a burglary that turned into a gunfight that killed an off duty police officer. He was found not guilty of murder but did four years in Riker’s Island. He’s now reportedly sober and acting again.
He’s a standout in this movie, and the one who gets to pierce through the crusty exterior of the mean drill sergeant in the big scene where he responds to his taunting about Shakespeare by pulling out an impassioned monologue nobody knew he had in him. And Brancato got to continue his cinematic military career, because his next movie was CRIMSON TIDE.
RENAISSANCE MAN a.k.a. BY THE BOOK was also released in other countries as MR. BILL, ARMY INTELLIGENCE or OPERATION SHAKESPEARE. I know the two American titles are spoken in the movie, it would be cool if they fit them all in there.
‘90s shit: RENAISSANCE MAN opens with Us3’s 1992 hit “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” which could also be heard in SUPER MARIO BROS., JIMMY HOLLYWOOD and episodes of Baywatch and New York Undercover.
They jokingly sing “Achy Breaky Heart,” the song made popular by Billy Ray Cyrus in 1992.
Note: I also tried to watch THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN, a 1991 animated musical from Wales that was unsuccessfully released in the U.S. against THE COWBOY WAY and RENAISSANCE MAN. The arguably notable thing about it besides its nationality is that the drawing style isn’t copying Disney, and there are some gremliny goblin guys with their nipples exposed. But after almost a half hour it had not passed my “it’s okay if it’s not good as long as it’s interesting in some way” test, and I also wasn’t enjoying looking at it, so I moved on with my life.
The only June 3rd, 1994 release I did see in theaters at the time was Rusty Cundieff’s hip hop mockumentary FEAR OF A BLACK HAT, which I reviewed in 2015.
June 6th, 2024 at 1:29 pm
This one was released as MR BILL in Germany, which I guess was possible because we didn’t have SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE here.
I know that LIFE IN THE STREETS song, but didn’t know it was on the soundtrack. Prince Ital Joe and Marky Mark made a whole album together, which was only released in Europe and actually was a big deal over here. It spawned one #1 single (UNITED) another Top 10 single (HAPPY PEOPLE) and two top 20 singles (This and BABYLON). Oddly enough neither before or after anybody had heard of Prince Ital Joe or Prince Ital Joe Featuring, so I don’t know the specifics of how this collaboration came together. It was produced by Alex Christensen though, a still quite successful German pop and dance producer, probably best known for his project U96, which obviously took its name from the submarine from DAS BOOT, because yes, the first single was a remix of the theme, which has the distinction of being the first Techno track that landed on #1 in the German single charts.
So yes, I guess my tangent about a partly related music album means that Europeans (or at least Germans) cared as much (or even less) about this movie than Americans.