Finger Lickin' Good

A guy I know said he wanted to see Freddie Got Fingered, the new movie from MTV's Tom Green, but he wasn't so sure because he'd heard about the horse penis. Don't worry about the horse penis, I assured him: Tom just strokes it at the beginning of the film, to put us in the mood. The elephant penis that bookends the film just before the final credits is the one that you've got to watch out for.

A bleeding flesh wound, ripe deer guts, and two umbilical cord cameos might stop you too. If you do see Freddie Got Fingered--and if you're thinking about it, you should, because it's the funniest of the faddish squirm movies--sit in the back. My experience was singular. I could hear the same half-dozen sick puppies throughout the theater chortling uncontrollably and uproariously over and over again, and at the same time people were getting up and going home in larger numbers than I've ever seen before. The middle ground of folks who neither broke down nor walked out presumably sat trying to figure out if they were welcoming the new Andy Kaufman or the new Pauly Shore.

On the evidence of this movie, which he also directed, Green belongs somewhere between the two style-wise, although he can be funnier than both of them, maybe both of them put together. If The Tom Green Show is more Kaufman, given the way Green blankly sends puzzled innocent bystanders to the moon in ways that typically tank completely or soar unconventionally, then Freddie Got Fingered is a bit more Shore, only because the setup here is Shore-ishly standard.

As disappointing as this is, the film still speaks to Green's powers: Shore can put himself on a ranch, or in the army, or at the bio-dome, and still come up with nothing laugh-wise. If Tom Green, however, sticks himself in the boring 'burbs and milks out a movie as hilarious as this one, it bodes well for any future Tom Green movie that might actually have a plot.

Green has described the film as "a touching story of a young man who desperately wants to make his daddy proud." His character, Gord, yearns to be an animator, and at the beginning of the film he moves out of his parents' place in Portland and drives to L.A., stopping only to sing "Look at me, I'm a farmer, daddy!" while he fondles a horse.

After failing to impress a cartoon exec (Anthony Michael Hall), leaving his cheese factory job, and getting run over in a deer carcass, Gord moves back in with his doting mother (Julie Hagerty of Airplane!) and fed-up father (an expertly cast Rip Torn). There, when not skateboarding on the half-pipe in his garage, he invents a way to draw cartoons, eat wieners suspended from the ceiling of his living room, and sing along "Daddy, would you like some sausage?" to his own keyboard accompaniment. In his off time, he romances another movie nurse named Betty (Marisa Coughlan of Teaching Mrs. Tingle), and--since too much has been revealed already--let's simply say that hijinks ensue.

Outrageous hijinks, yes, but not as outrageous as you might expect the TV-show Tom Green to be, given an R-rating. Torn's character, Jim, gets accused of fingering Freddie, Gord's younger brother (Eddie Kaye Thomas of American Pie) and gets on the wrong end of that elephant penis, but nothing he faces is so ignoble, or so painfully amusing, as the statue of himself doggy-styling Green's mother that Green's own father uncovered before the cameras on his front lawn in one episode of The Tom Green Show.

The movie is less inventive, and the stakes are much lower, than Tom's TV show, but Freddie Got Fingered is just as funny, and what it loses in reality it partially makes up for in its skit humor. The scene where Tom delivers a baby and kindly cuts the cord himself while two Native American women chant in the background, for one, is the most insanely comic take we'll ever see on the reliable sudden delivery scene. Don't sit by the door, or you won't be able to see it through all the walk-outs.

The second half lags. The story Green co-wrote is so sluggish that it includes the familiar second-act comedown for the hero, where the pace clogs, the music balloons, and Gord's face gets long as he realizes things aren't happening for him. Gord eventually makes it back to us, but Freddie never quite does. When Green brings in a helicopter, and doesn't use it for much at all, Pauly Shore swings back to mind.

After the movie, I thought of Albert Brooks, another guy who started out in TV, turning out mini-documentaries starring himself for Saturday Night Live, before directing, co-writing, and starring (as essentially himself) in his own string of mostly brilliant comedies. (Green also invites the comparison because he casts Hagerty, Brooks's wife in Lost in America, and Torn, Brooks's defender in Defending Your Life, as his parents).

It's too early to tell if Green will be rejected by the general public and embraced by small audiences, as Brooks has, but a similarly fruitful career--on the opposite end of the sophistication spectrum--is hardly unforeseeable for him. His next film will likely be better if, like Brooks, he thinks of a clever situation first and builds the jokes off that.

Then again, this movie is 10 times better, in every way, than The Muse, Brooks's last. Maybe it helps to think of Green in terms of other comedians because he's so bizarrely off the radar that it's nice to have a point of reference. His gifts are his own, and that's never been clearer than the moments in Freddie Got Fingered when Drew Barrymore, Green's fiancée, tries to act like him in a couple of cameos. She embarrasses herself. If she likes him so much she can marry him, she still shouldn't assume she can copy him. It ain't easy being Green.