Tom Jones

As my wife and I got started with our journey to watch all the Best Picture winners, we figured out she'd seen more than I had to start. One of them was Tom Jones. The thing you need to know about my wife for context here is that she is more lenient on movies than I am. So when she said "you can watch Tom Jones without me" and "it's boring", I took that as a warning sign not to be ignored. If she finds a movie hard to sit through, it's gonna be a slog. She wasn't wrong, but "boring" does not begin to capture all of Tom Jones' many, many problems. I would explain the plot for context, but saying Tom Jones has a plot is like saying a Snickers bar has nutritional content because of the peanuts. Tom Jones has a series of interconnected scenes that play out in chronological order, concerning the life of the title character, but by no means is there a plot to this movie. There is only so long one can suffer through the framework of "Tom does something incorrigible, gets into trouble, gets out of trouble by the skin of his teeth" before resentment starts to form in one's heart. Unfortunately, that is all Tom Jones has to offer. By the half-hour mark, I was aching for something to happen, anything to happen, that would deviate from the pattern. I checked the timer at almost the dead center point of the movie, looked at the clock on my mantelpiece, and felt my life energy ebb away, knowing there was an hour left, knowing that nothing of consequence had yet happened and likely would continue that way. This is made all the more difficult to endure by the title character. Albert Finney tries to inject some boyish charisma, but there is no getting around the fact that Tom Jones is an obnoxious lout, in the way a headache hangover is obnoxious. Cement parking barriers show more movement as characters than Tom Jones does. He starts the movie as a drunken clod that sleeps with every woman he lays eyes on, and ends that way too. This is despite the movie saying he and a neighbor girl, Sophie, are destined to be together. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but if I professed my love for someone, and then spent the next year having sex with every woman in town BUT her, I don't think the object of my affection would return my feelings in kind. I think she'd be more likely to stab me with a crochet hook. But in the world of Tom Jones, being an ignorant man-whore isn't a roadblock to true love; it's just a phase he has to work through. I'd offer some kind of commentary on the rest of the cast, but they're all as abrasive as the grinder side of a cheese grater. Scheming, oafish, cruel, predatory, murderous, thuggish ... that's almost everybody, save for Sophie. She does manage to show some spunk, but it feels like an afterthought to being what she truly is: the object of every young man's affection. She's not a character, she's an object. Supposedly, this is a comedy. I've even seen it referred to as a satire of the type of staid period pieces that were common of the era, the idea being that this is taking the piss out of their stuffy nature by bringing down the 18th century upper class societal structure. The problem with this is that calling this a satire of those movies is like MAD Magazine doing a satire of Airplane!. It's a hat on a hat. Movies like Pride & Prejudice, Little Women, and other period pieces are largely built on having a protagonist that pushes back against the traditions and trappings of high society to forge their own path. When that's already the plot of many of them, doing a comedic version of it isn't a satire, no matter how broadly the characters are sketched. Moreover, those movies require a protagonist to cheer for, someone who stands up and fights for what they believe in and the ability to chart their own course in life. No matter how many times Tom Jones' adoptive guardian says he has redeeming values, the viewer is never shown evidence of even a hint of redemptive qualities in Tom. He is Bluto Blutarsky and Carey Mahoney rolled up into one, a smug oaf bumbling through life on a well of charm that is far shallower than he knows. He has no redemptive arc, he stands for nothing but satiating his own selfish whims, and he learns no lessons from his failures. In fact, he's often bailed out by chance, which only inflates his ego. At least Mahoney and Bluto could show some positive aspects when push came to shove; Tom never comes close. I didn't want him to end up with Sophie. I wanted him hung. And on top of all this, my wife was right in saying this is a BORING movie. Utterly, profoundly, unceasingly boring. It doesn't even have enough meat on the bones to be infuriating. It is as dull as unbuttered toast. It feels like a movie a substitute teacher would put on to silence the class. Nothing about it is memorable or distinctive, and certainly not Oscar-worthy, especially not in a year when The Birds and Charade were also released (and ignored by the Academy). I only don't give it half a star because that is reserved for movies that legitimately anger me. Tom Jones doesn't manage that, but that's because I don't think it could. I will forget this in short order, and be glad for it. Unless you're doing a Best Picture run, nobody should put themselves through this.