The World According to Garp

The World According to Garp is a film based, in a very strict sense, on the 1978 bestseller by John Irving. I dreamt it last night, so I realized this was a sign I needed to get up and write about it. Which, by the way, entailed me rewatching it after decades, a rewardingly detached, if enjoyable, experience.

It stars doomed funnyman, the late Robin Williams, whose life ended so tragically when he died by suicide ten years ago. "Mork from Ork" was found hanging in a closet, thus casting a dark pall over his comic and dramatic film legacy. And this film, strangely, seems to foreshadow the absurd, tragic twist of Williams' fate.

Jenny Fields (Glenn Close) is the female black sheep (perhaps she is the only sibling?) of a wealthy New Hampshire family living in a mansion on the coastline. Sometime after the outbreak of World War II, Jenny, an Army nurse, encounters Technical Sergeant Garp, a critically wounded imbecile tail-gunner who can only repeat his name and masturbate. She, ah, utilizes him to impregnate herself in a manner that makes me vaguely queasy to contemplate, thus giving birth to little "Garp," whom she raises against the backdrop of a New England prep school or academy or private college or something. All the houses are two-story, immaculate, and pricey dwellings, and all the lawns are well-clipped and this small-town idyll is obviously as white, privileged, and affluent as the rest of the film.

Garp grows up playing doctor in the bushes, getting his earlobe bitten off by a particularly vicious dog, and nearly falling to his death while pretending he's his dead pilot father, ensconced on a sloping dormitory roof. Mother Jenny, the sexually obsessed and repressed matronly school nurse, plays helicopter parent even after Little Garp becomes Big Garp, a naive and uncertain, not to say despairing, young man whose mother hires a prostitute for him, "just out of curiosity." (As if his entire life, beginning with his strange conception, was nothing but one long experiment she is conducting.)

Garp marries Helen (Mary Beth Hurt), a fellow intellectual and college teacher of "gradual students," and becomes a "real writer" in New York (yeah, I know the pretentiousness is a little thick here), if a sad one. Mother Jenny publishes a magnum opus called Sexual Suspect, becomes an international feminist cult leader, and starts a commune, retreat, battered women's shelter, or something that caters partly to "Ellen Jamesians," a macabre cult of women who cut out their tongues in solidarity with a child rape survivor (whose tongue was cut out by her assailant).

The film is blackly humorous, detailing the evolution of a man whose life is a study of absurdity and grief. The fact that he's an uncertain outsider surrounded by others who feel that they, too, have been left out of the mainstream of American culture (such as "Roberta Muldoon," the transgender former football star wonderfully portrayed by John Lithgow, and, of course, the speechless, tongueless Ellen Jamesians) is counterpoised against the upscale New England backdrop of upwardly mobile and wealthy folks (who seem to have a bottomless well of personal traumas, regardless).

Performances are adequate to convincing, with Williams coming off as an often troubled, tempestuous, and even unconfident or awkward young man, ill-fitting the environment he was born into. Lithgow and others (other familiar faces include actress Jenny Wright, who most famously portrayed "The Groupie" in Pink Floyd The Wall) deliver unsettling characterizations of lives mired in personal idiosyncratic tragedy, in a sense that they do not belong to the beautiful world which surrounds them. They are darkly humorous but representative of the inscrutable aspect of a life where events often jump from the hedges like the dog that bit Garp's ear, no matter how well-manicured the landscape may seem.

The World According to Garp - FULL MOVIE

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