The 1998 movie Larry David wants to delete from history: “I don’t know what people want”
Directors are capable of creating both genuinely incredible and truly awful pieces of work. Sometimes experimentation pays off, but other times it simply gets lost in the fold, yielding some pretty poor excuses for art.
The thing is, there is no such thing as a strictly ‘good’ artist or a strictly ‘bad’ one. There are filmmakers out there who have made some absolute masterpieces, only to turn around and deliver a stinker or five, such as John Carpenter, with classics like Halloween, The Thing, and Escape from New York later being followed by Village of the Damned, Ghosts of Mars, and The Ward.
Success and failure are never linear, and in that, Larry David is another great case study, because he somehow managed to make two of the most successful sitcoms of all time, yet sandwiched between them was one of the most critically derided movies of all time, his one and only directorial effort.
Following his tenure as a writer and occasional star on Saturday Night Live, David co-created and wrote Seinfeld, with the character of George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander, essentially acting as a self-insert, a show that became a huge hit, running for nine seasons between 1989 and 1998, but when it ended, David needed a new project to sink his teeth into.
So, then came Sour Grapes, a comedy which ends with a character giving himself oral sex. The 1998 film missed the mark on all fronts, and Roger Ebert famously wrote in his review, “I can’t easily remember a film I’ve enjoyed less”. David has always championed a boundary-pushing sense of humour, but here, Ebert simply saw it as distasteful to the point of being plain unfunny.
You see, when a feud develops between two cousins, one of them, an oncologist, leads his relative to believe he is dying from cancer, resulting in his attempt to kill his mother so that she won’t have to deal with the pain of losing him. It’s a pretty outlandish plot, but it doesn’t sound too far off from a storyline that could wind up in a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. It just wasn’t executed well at all; in fact, David regrets it entirely.
He would soon find overwhelming success with Curb, in which David played a fictionalised version of himself. Within the series, he frequently referenced the failure of Sour Grapes, like when he admonishes someone for telling him they liked the movie, as, to him, that immediately marked them out as untrustworthy, because they had to be lying.
Reflecting on the movie, he admitted to The Guardian, “Not everybody is supposed to like it. First of all, a lot of people go and think they’re going to see Seinfeld. And it’s not Seinfeld. It’s different. It’s different characters, you know? Come on, give me a break. You’re not going to like it because you’re expecting Seinfeld? It’s not Seinfeld. He’s not there. Jason Alexander isn’t there. Julia Louis-Dreyfus isn’t there. Michael Richards isn’t there. Kramer isn’t gonna be in the movie.”
He concluded, “I don’t know what people want”, and perhaps that’s where Sour Grapes went so wrong. The writer was finding his feet in the wake of Seinfeld’s end, and his attempt at directing just didn’t work. I think it’s safe to say that the divisive brand of comedy that David tried out in the film works much better when he’s delivering it himself, as demonstrated by the immediate success of Curb.
