Episode 60.5 - The Six Wives of Henry Lefay Review 6/10

The Six Wives of Henry Lefay - 2009 - Howard Michael Gould

The Six Wives of Henry Lefay is a movie whose premise could have been written, pretty much anyway you wanted to with the exception of horror (though the plot would have been just as "good"). This could have easily been a drama about a man's journey through 6 different aspects of his life as portrayed by the different women he married. Or it could have been a suspense, creating mystery and intrigue with the secrets he shared with each that all formulate into some grand symbolic message all Se7en style sans…pretty much all of Se7en. Or it could be a comedy about a loser who, through the course of his life, marries 6 romantically retarded, overly obsessive psychopaths who he dangles on a string even after he supposedly dies in Mexico, leaving them to bitch and bicker about funeral arrangements, making rash and disrespectful decisions while his daughter ponders why she didn't just kill this puppetmaster herself. Take a guess which one I watched? Need a hint? Tim Allen's in the movie.

Now, I really like Tim Allen comedies because when he's not bogged down with censoring himself for network television, he's actually really funny, usually playing a precocious, conceited, thick headed bastard who is fully aware and accepting of his character flaws and has no problem saying "fuck you, arrr arrr arrr" if that bothers you. This film definitely didn't disappoint with that, but the problem here is that…somehow…and I don't know how, he can usually spin that bastardism into a likable character. I just really hated Henry Lefay as a character and perhaps it was everybody around him that just killed it for me but there really weren't a lot of likable characters in this movie with the exception of his daughter Barbara (Elisha Cuthbert in the best composed role I've seen her in) and Barb's mother Kate (Andie MacDowell). Because of that, this was just a hard watch and it was difficult to make sense of any of the relationships and how they got to the point of marriage.

Despite being a really fun concept, this movie suffered from the burden of being overwhelmingly cliché. Now, it's hard to see because it's all mish-mashed into a clusterfuck of a plot line, but nearly every wife was some modern romantic comedy cliché, from "I'm going to kill you psycho-bitch" to "disgustingly oblivious young bimbo" to "perfectly composed voice of reason silenced in a sea of selfishness and overreaction." Usually you hate them in single doses, but here you get a sextet of sex…pets…fuck, I tried. Sorry! Sorry. Bottom line, cliché's bad, clusterfuck plot line bad, attempt at shitty puns, very bad.

I had an interesting struggle with Six Wives. There were a couple of scenes, a couple of attempts at humor that made me want to walk away and just say "no, you lost" and for a while I was thinking "ok, this movie is on pace for a 4." And then there were moments of sweetness where "drama" idea I came up with earlier came into play and the movie focused a bit on sentimentality and it was very sweet and it took it up a couple of notches. Then Tim Allen came to visit his own funeral and explain that he didn't die (not a spoiler, is says it on the box) and the thick-headedness that actually crippled this movie with the six psychopaths knocked it down again and it just went back and forth and back and forth and I got a headache from it all.

So, I took the easy route. This movie did enough things right that it's something I might consider watching again. The fact that it wasn't consistent in anything: humor, mood, characters, knowing whether or not it wanted you to give a shit about someone's story, anything, is what really hurt Six Wives more than anything. Its lack of commitment showed in flying colors and it just used easy outs to get laughs, sighs, and what-the-fucks, mixing cliches into a blender and vomitting them on the screen for all to see. For that, I'm taking the easy out myself. Six wives: Six dustbusters. Nice and simple.