Let's just kick this off by saying that a comedy based on Strangers on a Train was inspired. And then to cast Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal in the lead roles was pure genius. It doesn't even matter that they don't try to hide the inspiration material.
But as awesome as all that is, to then make them both writers who are foils of each other though both with the same problem ultimately (and not the people they need killed, but the writing problem) is what really makes this movie shine.
Larry is a college professor whose ex-wife stole his book and published it under her name. Owen is a student in Larry's creative writing class who is under the thumb of his domineering mother. Neither can write anything worth reading at the moment. Larry is too stymied by jealousy, resentment, and the lofty pursuit of Art with a capital "A." Owen has a vivid imagination and loads of passion but no grasp of the fundamentals of telling a story. One can put lots of badly strung together words on paper. The other can't get past the first sentence.
But both attribute (much like the rest of us) their issues to something outside their control rather than something intrinsic to their natures. For Owen it's his mom. For Larry it's his ex-wife. Both are too blind to see they are their own worst enemy.
So, based on Hitchcock's masterpiece, Owen gets the idea to swap murders so that neither has a motive. Win-win, right?
But enough about that. Watch the movie for the plot and laugh until your face is lined with laugh lines. I want to look at what these two buffoons have to teach us about writing.
As mentioned earlier, Larry can't get past his first sentence.
"The night was..."
(thunder)
"The night was..."
"The night..."
(grunts)
For Larry, it's not art unless each word is perfectly chosen. The night was humid. No. The night was moist. No. The night was sultry. (Thanks, Mrs. Owen's mom.)
Until he can get that single word right, he can't move on. He is paralyzed and can't move on. For a writing teacher, he apparently never learned the age-old trick of just putting down a word, any word, even a badly chosen, ill-fitting one, and just moving on and coming back to fix it later in the editing stage.
He even tells Owen later in the movie:
"That's writing. It's finding the perfect word, the perfect beginning, the perfect start. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Now is the winter of our discontent. See what I'm saying? Perfect beginnings. Perfect words."
He's so wrapped up in perfection, he can't (and won't) actually accomplish anything -- particularly anything he couldn't just fix later.
Rule #1 is always this: Get the damn story out. Tell it now. Turn it into art later if you must.
It's so strong a drive in him that he even turned down paying work from his agent because he didn't want to merely write. His was the calling to create art. He was an artist. To which his agent responds, "I don't represent artists. I represent writers."
At first glance, this may seem like a callous, profit-driven lens through which to view the writing life, but let's compare it to one of Larry's favorite sayings about writers and the life of telling stories: "Remember, a writer writes, always."
It's an axiom he completely ignores because he can't get out of his own head and his hang-ups about art. So instead, he doesn't writer, always or ever. Not in years. Those gigs, even ones that didn't meet his high standards for true art, would have kept him writing, and that would have most likely jarred him out of his own way and opened up the paths to finishing his stalled novel.
Moving on, let's look at Owen. Owen's problem isn't that he isn't writing. He's writing all the time, somehow, in spite of his mom's constant demands on his time. "Fix me supper." "Cut my toenails." "You're trying to kill me."
Owen is living up to the axiom. He's writing, always writing. Only he still hasn't figured out what the real story is. He's so focused on plots that he ignores story. Sadly, though, he's got the imagination for it. That's clearly seen in his vivid daydreams about how he'd snuff the life out of Momma. An eye for excruciating, visceral detail, in fact.
And he understands the heart of story too. He just hasn't yet applied it to his own tales. For example, when showing off his coin collection to Larry, he brings out coins that don't appear to have any special value, at least none that Larry would associate with a typical coin collection. Just a few nickels, a quarter, a penny, etc. But this is all change from excursions Owen had with his father, and he can tell you the story behind each coin. He gets story better than anyone else in the movie in that sense.
But like us all, he just needs to marry those inside things with the outside ability to turn words into stories.
We can learn a lot from both of these buffoons, ultimately.
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