It seems fitting, in a way, that Overboard is released on Blu-ray the same month that the California milk council retracts a series of advertisements championing milk’s apparent beneficial effects with regard to PMS. In the film, Goldie Hawn is depicted as a snooty, condescending debutante (really, the only operative word here is the all-purpose ‘uppity’) who gets her just desserts when (through an elaborate amnesia plot) she spends the rest of the film being derided and humiliated as a member of a low social class. In the ads, shrimpish men look on in terror as they apologize through Orwellian logic for whatever it was that they did to displease their wives/girlfriends. In both instances, it’s a pretty clear-cut case of woman as monster, her miniature size being all that is preventing her from extending her cruel grip across the whole world. While the milk ads seem in keeping with a society that’s cultivated an image of twenty-something men as incompetent children, Overboard has a far more empowering solution: exploit women for their clear irrationality and weakness.
Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell) is your pretty average composite of everything that a major studio believes will appeal to working class audiences; frequently drunk, beleaguered by financial problems, and only concerned with the search for rarely-elusive good time. He is called to the yacht of Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) and Grant Stayton III (Edward Herrmann) to build a compartment for holding her extensive shoe collection, but when he builds it of oak rather than cedar he is dismissed withour payment. Later, Joanna falls off her yacht and suffers an injury, causing her to lose all memory of who she is. As revenge, Dean convinces Joanna that she’s his wife, and relegates her to a life of domestic servitude looking over his four children. But much to his surprise, she actually begins taking to her new role, and, much to his horror, he finds that he doesn’t mind it so much either.
Overboard doesn’t feel like a film that needs to be reviewed so much as catalogued, its offenses tagged and numbered so that they can never be repeated in posterity. Far beyond the utter preposterousness of the plot (which, under other circumstances, could probably be forgiven), the film sets up such a disgusting portrait of both marriage and the working class that it’s hard to know who should even be offended, but it’s easier to focus on women just because there’s a more established framework to work with. At least once, Dean refers to Joanna as his slave, and several 80s-form montages are devoted to making us understand just how incompetent she is at just about everything. Even when she becomes more comfortable with her role as wife and mother, she’s only empowered enough to confront Dean when she thinks he’s cheating on her, not to take him to task for his myriad deceptions that, under most legal definitions, would qualify as rape.
But let’s be honest with ourselves; none of this would stick out in the way that it does if the movie were any funnier, or if it played off an apparent LaBute setup as the Stockholm Syndrome that it is instead of a courtship. When we finally get to the inevitable happy ending, and the only way that it could have become more sentimental is if ‘Time of your life” by Green Day had played behind it, one would hope that it would strike even people who had found the film gunny as distasteful. It’s one thing for misogynistic humor to appear in comedy directed at male audiences; at the very least, it’s expected there, and there’s no real subtext to chew through. But in a romantic comedy marketed to women, where there’s some presumption that this is a healthy relationship and that these two people belong together, it comes across as more than a little insidious.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The Theatrical Trailer is included.
"Overboard" is on sale July 5, 2011 and is rated PG. Directed by Garry Marshall. Written by Leslie Dixon. Starring Edward Herrmann, Kurt Russell, Roddy McDowall, Goldie Hawn.
