addams family values

Dear Tim Burton,

Yeah, Tim, I really really love you. I love Ed Scissorhands and that scene with the different jellos. I love Beetlejuice and the mom's weird sculptures. I, too, think Winona Rider is the shit, and I, too, admire the squeedles of Jonny Depp, so I'm going to come right out and apologize: I'm sorry, I'm really really sorry that I prefer the product of the hijacking of your vision to your vision itself. Yes, I prefer Barry Levinson's dark lenses to your cracked-out ones. It's Addams Family, and it has Values. (Worship that, Bush-y).

If I'm going to be overly simplistic about it, I'll start with Joan Cusack as a "black widow" in vintage 40s ensembles with kitten heels and drawn nylons who smooches Fester with festering reluctance. "I'm a virgin!" she squeals. Holy cow! Cusack's got a mouth like a trampoline, eyes like dishplates, a figure like a highway cloverleaf—built for speed with all the right curves.

But, unquestionably, the greatest thread in this psycho dark comedy unfurls to rip the Addams' seams when evil Nanny Cusack sends the kids to camp—Summer camp. Girls in floral dresses. Polo shirts. Tans. Canoes. Where The Addams Family stuck mostly to preaching to the choir, here the kids are brought out into the real world where they must defend for themselves. Perhaps this film did more for those outcasts who equate "perky" with evil, who don't even try to fit in, who can't complete their boondoggle arts & crafts lanyards, than for any other film in my generation: For whenever I'm rejected, I instinctively daydream back to the scene wherin the outcasts, cast as Indians, in the camp re-enactment of The First Thanksgiving, pillage the on-set village, scalp their peers, tie the blonde chick to the stake and swamp her in gasoline to the cries from the bleachers of doting parents sporting Ralph Lauren. It's a beautiful scene, in a movie with an even more indulgent artistic director than Beetlejuice. I love you, Tim, but I've chosen darkness.