Overboard (1987)

Starring: Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Roddy McDowall, and Mike Hagerty, with cameos from Héctor Elizondo, Sven-Ole Thorsen, and director Garry Marshall
Grade: C+

Overboard did not age well. It’s supposed to be reminiscent of the screwball comedies from the 30s and does this well, but if you watch it now, it comes off a little weird.

Charming but weird…

Basically, it’s a classic 80s movie.

Summary

Joanna Stayton (Hawn) is married and rich. Also, she’s terrible to everyone and everything. This includes her frustrated husband Grant (Edward Herrmann). Since their yacht is docked for boat repairs, Joanna hires a hillbilly carpenter in Dean Proffitt (Russell) to remodel her closet, passing it off as an “emergency” and only giving him 48 hours to do it. Shortly after, he finishes the job, but she’s mad he made it out of oak instead of cedar. Dean offers to redo it but notes that it will double his estimate. She refuses to pay for his mistake, even though she never explicitly asked for cedar. After Dean references Joanna talking shit about him to others on the boat because he overheard her, she flips out and fires him. He’s fine with it, but he still wants the $600 he’s owed for already doing the job. Joanna refuses this as well because the job wasn’t done to her satisfaction. He flips out on her and calls her out for her attitude to everyone around her, much to the delight of the crew on the yacht who are all eavesdropping. As Dean stands up against the railing, refusing to leave until he gets his money, Joanna pushes him overboard and has the boat drive off. She throws all his tools overboard too. Later, Dean tells his friend and co-worker in Billy (Mike Hagerty) about the ordeal, admitting their plans for their miniature golf course may have to be put on hold because of his current lack of work/money.

Sometime after, Joanna consults with her equally snobby mother Edith (Katherine Helmond) about Dean’s comments and how Grant wants to have a baby (with her mother saying if Joanna has one, she won’t be the baby anymore). Dean goes to his small home in the woods and finds that the principal of his children’s school came over to welcome them for their first day, but his horribly misbehaved children threw toilet paper on her and almost doused her with gasoline and planned on setting her ablaze. He passes it off as their “arson period”, saying he’s not worried because he has two fire extinguishers ready for them just in case. She questions where the mother is, but Dean reveals she died three years ago. The principal tells him to his face that they need better parental supervision and she’ll notify the proper authorities if they don’t get it. Even though he’s tried with babysitters, he can’t do much because he’s new in town and low on cash. He doesn’t have the money or time to give them the attention they need.

Later in the night while in bed with Grant, Joanna realizes her wedding ring is on the deck. Since Grant wants to watch TV and she wants her ring back immediately, she finally decides to go get it herself. Because of the ship’s captain being asleep and steering the ship with his feet, the ride is a little less smooth than usual. This causes Joanna to lose her balance while on deck and fall overboard. Somehow, no one notices. The next morning, she’s saved by the authorities, but she’s suffering from amnesia and can’t remember who she is. It’s on the news, and Grant sees it. He goes to the community hospital to see her but after seeing her flip out on the doctor and staff from outside her room, he tells the cop he’s never seen her in his life. He tells everyone on the yacht that Joanna left him, and he celebrates. Following this, the hospital staff places her in the psychiatric ward because she’s such a bitch and they don’t want to be bothered with her. While fixing some stuff at a bowling alley, Dean sees the report on Joanna on the television during his lunch break, telling Billy that this is the person who screwed up his last job. He also sees that Grant skipped out on her, as it’s shown on the television that he came by. Billy talks about how he should try to get his money back, but Dean knows this isn’t possible if she can’t remember who she is, let alone him.

However, after realizing this, Dean’s first instinct for some reason (I’m not kidding. It’s the FIRST thing he thinks of doing) is to go get her, pretend he’s her husband, and make her work for all the money he’s owed.

He refers to her as “Annie” when greeting her and convinces the staff he’s her husband, mostly because they want her gone anyway. She’s not falling for it though, despite Dean’s very plausible on-the-spot lying about their backstory. Since Joanna demands some sort of proof and the doctor and cop admit they need it too, Dean notes that Joanna has a birthmark on her butt cheek. Unbeknownst to all of them, he knows this because he saw it when she was in her bathing suit on the yacht during his job in the opening of the movie. Once she realizes she has this birthmark, she realizes Dean is her “husband” and she reluctantly goes home with him to his house in the woods. Dean then “reminds” her of their home life together and has his four children in on the lie too. She’s still very unsure of this whole thing, but she’s stuck. This ignites Dean’s plans. He tells her that they have to comply with doctor’s orders and to get her memory back, she has to go through her normal routine. This is a chore-filled routine Dean has come up with to clean his dirty ass house and dirty ass kids, to make up for the $600 he’s owed. It’s payback time.

What Dean doesn’t realize is that he will end up relying on her more than he intended, and sparks start to fly because of it.

My Thoughts:

Overboard is supposed to be a fun comedy, but the mean-spirited premise throws me off more than it should.

I understand Joanna is a horrible person. No one is disputing this. I also understand Dean’s plight. He’s owed $600, and he’s not in a position where he can just walk away from a bill. He has to take care of his kids and has aspirations himself. Clearly, things have been hard since his wife has passed and though he has a nice demeanor and seems to be a fun-loving guy, he’s not the parental figure his kids need. Truthfully, he doesn’t have time to fix the situation either. It’s not his fault their mother died. That’s just life, but all he has time to do to help is work. Losing $600 on some trivial bullshit is something he can’t afford, so Joanna has put him in a pickle. At any rate, is it just me, or is his plan a little too diabolical? First of all, how he thinks of this elaborate of a scheme immediately after seeing Joanna on television with amnesia is beyond me. Has Dean ever thought of detective work or something? Maybe if he pursued something like this to satisfy the talents he has, Dean wouldn’t be in the financial mess he’s in. If not, he is the most intelligent carpenter I’ve ever seen. You’re telling me, you see this woman on TV for possibly ten seconds and right off the bat you think, “Oh I have an idea! I’ll pretend I’m her husband and then she can be my slave!”. This is essentially the premise, and it’s kind of wild considering how light-hearted the movie is presented to be.

Remember the opening statement of this review talking about how this movie didn’t age well? This is what I meant.

Again, this is all played up for a joke because Dean’s the cool guy, right? Well, as soon as Joanna is brought home and we see his living situation, the tide starts to turn. The place is disgustingly dirty, and Dean’s kids run wild without a care in the world. From the beginning, we know Dean is a bit careless as a parent based off of the scene with the principal, and we’re like, “Hey, no big deal! Kurt Russell is the man. He’s just having a good time”. Sadly, it’s much more than that. How he acts towards his kids becomes infuriating. They’re reckless, but he laughs off anything they do. His shitty parenting skills change our outlook of Dean, shifting from charming “cool” dad into an almost completely unlikable dickhead. When you combine this with his actions towards Joanna, you just want to start yelling at him. At first, his actions were jokey, and the idea was funny because we know how bad of a person she is, but I noticed everything changed completely in one specific scene. Things were already going in the direction of us liking Joanna anyway because that’s how the narrative is structured, especially when you throw in moments like Joanna being reduced to tears a few times because of Dean’s attitude towards her. However, there’s a scene in which she’s too tired to move (because at this point, she’s been doing everything for this ungrateful man and his jerkoff kids), so Dean picks her up and throws her into a barrel of water to wake her up. He then laughs at her, basically telling her to deal with it.

How much is enough? Alright, $600 is a lot of money. I’ll give him that but at this point, it’s not that serious anymore. How does Dean not see he’s crossing the line a bit? The work load he’s given her isn’t enough revenge? Does it really need to take this much for her to garner sympathy in his eyes? After this scene, it was really hard for the Dean character to recover. You start to realize that Dean isn’t as funny or charming as we thought. You just find him totally incompetent as a parent. Before Joanna saved the day, the house was an absolute mess, Dean’s kids didn’t listen for shit, and one of the kids couldn’t even fucking read! Yeah, Joanna may have been a bitch to him, but Dean needs his ass kicked for that last part alone.

It’s moments like this that take you out of the movie and realize the reality of the situation. Look, I didn’t like her in the opening of the movie either, but you can’t just go and take her captive. If I’m owed $600, I’d probably just take legal action (or rob them), but turning that person into a slave and working them to death because they can’t remember their own identity purely for the purpose of vengeance? That’s just plain evil. For a movie premise, the audience can get past this if you did it for a week. If he did this over a drunken bet it could be funny too but here, he does it for an indefinite amount of time. There’s no end in sight, and it’s hard to say if it ever would’ve ended if nothing stopped him. You start to hate Dean more and more. Eventually, the full reversal happens, and we like Joanna and start to hate Dean (a stark contrast from the beginning of the movie). They do save Dean’s characterization before it’s too late, but I needed him to realize his faults much earlier than what’s shown.

As a quick note, Joanna’s moment of getting amnesia wasn’t the most convincing either. When she falls off the yacht, she’s still yelling at them to stop. So, after the initial fall, she was fine. The next morning, it’s revealed she bumped into a garbage scow and was saved by the captain. The doctor says that it’s either this or the shock of the cold water that gave her amnesia. I don’t buy it. If she bumped into this “garbage scow”, does she have a wound? She must’ve been nailed pretty hard if it happened, right? I needed to see the scene where it happens to convince me. I don’t buy the “shock of cold water” being a good enough reason either. Everything seemed very minuscule for this serious of an injury. If you want to show me how someone can lose their memory for as long as she does in this movie, at least include a comedic scene where she gets hit by a boat. It’s not hard. With the way they did things, I spent ten minutes of the runtime wondering how the hell she managed to get amnesia this badly.

There are some funny moments between Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, with Dean lying about their backstory together being a huge highlight. Another positive is when the romance starts to heat up too because their chemistry is very good. The full reversal is also interesting to watch unfold because of how likable Goldie Hawn’s Joanna begins to be as she becomes a full-fledged mom to the kids and the perfect wife for Dean, despite him not appreciating her like he should. When he realizes how much he needs her and how much he likes having her around, it does get a lot better. All in all, Overboard has some good moments that give it replay value, and Hawn and Russell are always fun to watch. Also, it was pretty impressive that the movie was able to make me hate one character in one scene and then absolutely love them in the next. I have to give them credit there. It’s not hilarious, but it’ll make you chuckle at times.

Overboard is fun, but it’s not like a must-see or anything like that.

Fun Fact: John Candy was considered for the role of Billy, but he was filming Planes, Trains and Automobiles at the time.