Movie Review

Grand Theft Parsons (2003)

A friend recommended this movie to me, saying it was hysterical. The plot involves the theft of Gram Parson's body by his friend and manager Phil Kaufman after Parsons died in 1973. I hardly knew who Gram Parsons was before I watched this movie, so I have to rely on Wikipedia's knowledge of the incident. Apparently - it is based on an actual event.

Johnny Knoxville plays Kaufman and he does a good job. Christina Applegate is in it and she's good too. Everybody seems to be doing their best to make this film work. The music is good. The editing is perfectly serviceable. It even made me laugh out loud three times. But somehow it just doesn't work for me.

Maybe it's the subject. If you're going to do a movie about the wacky circumstances surrounding someone's demise I just think you need to push the envelope harder than they did. At one point I could see where the Coen brothers would have done a superb job with this material because they excel at walking on the razor's edge between grim and hilarious. It seemed to me that the director wanted characters out of Raising Arizona, but, perhaps due to weak writing, he didn't get them,

It didn't stick with me. Before it was over I'd already forgotten everything that had happened. I re-watched the first few minutes and saw how the whole thing came full-circle in a very well organized way. But I still didn't think it was tremendously funny. You know why?

Because I didn't know Kaufman and I didn't care about him. The film spends no time telling me anything about him before Gram Parsons died. His lines are bland. The dialog goes no where. It took me forever to figure out that he was the center of the story.

And that hardly seems fair to the man, because the brief biography of him I found here makes him sound hilarious and filled with one-liners so sharp they could shave off your eyebrows.

Take what he said about Keith Richards for example:

"Keith [Richards] might get out of control. He might be up till four in the morning, but at seven o’clock he’d be the first guy up and playing his guitar. Keith could eat nails and piss rust. He has the constitution of a cement mixer. What goes in will come out, and he will live."

So - you might like this movie - as my friend did. The biography linked above calls Grand Theft Parsons "half-entertaining." Talk about damning with faint praise! Maybe a few rounds of Quarters before hand will help.