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| "Pee-wee's Big Holiday" (Courtesy photo | Netflix) |
Netflix feels like a good home for Pee-wee Herman. The aesthetic of Paul Reubens' man-child character always has been a hair too bizarre for primetime. The Pee-wee persona tightropes between childlike innocence and winking post-adolescent naughtiness, and mixed somewhere in there is an adult man playing a little-boy character almost – and please note I said almost – as if it's a fetish. The aesthetic of Pee-wee's adventures blended the earnest playfulness of "The Bozo Show" with a John Waters half-smile; there's always been a splash of booze in the cupcake batter.
Granted, Reubens cleaned up the bit for Pee-wee's mainstream success in the late 1980s, especially for Saturday-morning TV show "Pee-wee's Playhouse." He's remembered most for the Pee-wee dance, performed in 1985 feature film debut "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," which launched filmmaker Tim Burton's career. But I recall seeing Pee-wee's first HBO special as a child – a 1981 taping of Reubens' live stage show – and not quite understanding why he wanted to wear mirrors on his shoes around girls in dresses.
The new movie, "Pee-wee's Big Holiday," is his first film since 1988's "Big Top Pee-wee." It could be titled "Pee-wee's Second Big Adventure," considering it's Pee-wee's road-trip movie, his cross-country trip through America's patchwork culture, to New York City so he can attend the birthday party of "Magic Mike" actor Joe Manganiello, playing himself. Yes, it's quite silly. And quite patchwork – considering the age of the cars in town and the gee-whiz citizenry, Pee-wee's home of Fairville seems permanently entrenched in about 1962. As he travels east, a town, by my estimation, exists somewhere in the mid-'80s. New York is, of course, in the current day, and I'd say Pee-wee's bow tie and flood pants stick out if I wasn't familiar with modern hipsters, many of whom dress head-to-toe in irony.
I wish the film had more focus, and thoroughly exploited this concept – a number of jokes seem left on the table. But I liked members of the rogue's gallery of wackos Pee-wee encounters on the road, including a traveling salesman with a case full of novelty jokes, and a trio of vamping, switchblade-wielding female bank robbers who seem lifted from a 1960s exploitationist film, and turn up a couple times in the plot. Played by Jessica Pohly, Stephanie Beatriz and Alia Shawkat, they're the type of hot-pantsed, tight-angora-sweater-wearing women that might have made steam shoot out the starched collar of shoe-mirror Pee-wee.
A recurring joke is Pee-wee's apparent, inexplicable animal magnetism, which draws out his fear of girls, who bat their eyes and cause him to squinch up and fidget like a 12-year-old boy. His cross-country hodgepodge of hit-and-miss misadventures includes a ride in a flying car, a diversion into Amish country, an encounter with a touring group of hairdressers and a night spent in the barn of a farmer, whose nine randy daughters keep beating on his door. He's almost sexless. My desire to know exactly how Pee-wee's psyche functions was squelched by the thought that the mystery of his true nature is part of his appeal. Also that the contents of his mind may be way darker than I could handle.
Early in the film, Pee-wee reveals he has never left Fairville, and has no interest in doing new and different things. Obviously, he overcomes his reluctance to change, inspired by his pal Manganiello, who shakes Pee-wee from a bitter funk inspired by the breakup of his rock 'n' roll band (he was the flutophonist, of course). I seem to recall Pee-wee traveling to the Alamo to retrieve his bicycle in "Big Adventure," but never mind. There were times I laughed long and hard at Pee-wee's corny puns and throwback sensibilities, a satirical reflection of times when innuendo wasn't always intentional, but was all the funnier for it.
It takes a new friend to reignite Pee-wee's idealism, and a new adventure to rekindle our interest in a character who feels like a weird old friend, back to tickle our funny bones and coccyxes and cockles after a long time away. His return to a still somewhat unconventional release platform such as Netflix is reflective of the wild, liberal 1980s (please read that with a straight face), when mainstream entertainment wasn't quite so calculated, so conservative, so dominated by envelope-pushing gross comedies and overcomplicated superhero franchises. Pee-wee's winking naughtiness is sort of an ironic representation of a time that seems idyllic now, at least to my generation.
John Serba is film critic and entertainment reporter for MLive and The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at jserba@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.
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