Good casting fails to salvage film's plot

Published: Friday, October 28, 1994

Actors' talents wasted in 'Road' to nowhere; coherent story absent

The Road to Wellville

Written and directed by Alan Parker

Starring Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Broderick, and Bridget Fonda

The assembly of talent for The Road to Wellville is impressive, but you know what they say about Anthony Hopkins. Once he's aboard, other actors beg to be involved.

They should have begged for a coherent story. Wellville threatens to be dazzlingly funny or at least amusingly manic, but it settles for tubefulls of enema jokes and a lame sex romp.

Three stories co-exist in this film. They'd overlap, or intersect, or any other of those plot-weaving terms, but other than mutual location and a shared participant or two, the stories are separate and unequal. But such is life at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where egomaniacal Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins), brother of the cornflake mogul, acts as a semi-scientific messiah to increase the lifespans of the elite. He loves giving enemas, his cures border on sadomasochistic, and his surgery is often uncalled for, but during the health craze of the early 1900s, Battle Creek was considered first-rate.

Will Lightbody (Matthew Broderick) and his hypochondriac wife Eleonor (Bridget Fonda) end up at the sanitarium at Eleonor's insistence. It seems Will's stomach is giving him some problems. His sex drive is still in high gear however, and he soon starts hallucinating about fellow inmates: sickly Mrs. Muntz (Lara Flynn Boyle) and comely Nurse Graves (Traci Lind). Although the policy at Battle Creek is no sex of any kind, Will fornicates his fair share and even indulges in the Doctor's favorite sin, masturbation.

Other plots involve Charles Ossining's (John Cusack) capitalist schemes to gain a share of the cereal market and Kellogg's mutt of a son George (the scene-stealing Dana Carvey) who has returned for glory, or at least revenge. The relationship between Kellogg and his son is curiously over-indulged in, but the one-note flashbacks add up to little. As for Cusack's tedious turn in the weakest of the stories, it simply should have been excised.

Wellville, based on a novel by T.C. Boyle, occasionally attains the laughter it seeks. Broderick, Fonda, and no surprise, Hopkins are comical and some of the dialogue is well-written. Astute Director Alan Parker should also emerge unscathed.

Perhaps Wellville should have just remained a book. As a turn-of-the-century period piece and social satire it connects, but the film won't play in Peoria. With too many scatological jokes to recommend and too little linear progress to engage, Wellville is an acquired taste.

Michael Horowitz