Stuart Saves His Family is a Tragicomic But Mostly Just Tragic Winner!

If you like SNL movies that are almost unbearably sad then boy do we have a movie for you!

1995’s Stuart Saves His Family is an anomaly among films cranked out by SNL Studios in being fundamentally dramatic rather than comic. 

The character of Stuart Smalley, supportive nurturer, public access host and member of several 12 step groups came from a deeply personal place for creator Al Franken. 

Stuart was inspired by Al-Anon meetings that he attended with his wife, who was battling alcoholism, as well as his relationship with his writing partner Tom Davis, who chronicled his own struggles with heroin addiction and other substances in his 2009 memoir Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss. 

At the warm, beating heart of Stuart Saves His Family lie some of the weightiest issues known to mankind. Can you help someone who does not want to be helped? Can you keep your loved ones from killing themselves with alcohol and unexamined rage or are they innately doomed? Why is life so goddamned hard and why does everything hurt like hell? 

This TV spin-off starring Al Franken, no one’s idea of a traditional cinematic leading man, attracted, in Harold Ramis, one of the greatest comedy directors and writers in film history. 

If that wasn’t impressive and audacious enough Ramis was coming off 1993’s Groundhog Day, a timeless masterpiece that isn’t just good: it’s perfect. It could not be improved. The screenplay for Groundhog Day should be studied in film schools as an exemplar of the form. 

And the man who gave the world Groundhog Day chose to follow it up with a Saturday Night Live movie for a very good reason. Ramis knew that he could bend the material to his will and create something utterly unlike anything that Saturday Night Live had done on the film front before.

Ramis set out to make a Saturday Night Live movie with genuine dramatic stakes, that works as a drama as much, if not more, than it does as a comedy. Ramis and Franken were going to make a movie that was genuinely about something beyond catchphrases and cheap laughs, that had real characters that audiences could identify with and root for.

The old pros succeeded creatively in making just about the least commercial Saturday Night Live movie imaginable. Pretty much every film that’s widely released theatrically makes millions of dollars. Not Stuart Saves His Family. It grossed less than a million dollars.

I’ve seen Stuart Saves His Family six or seven times at this point and while I did in fact remember that this comedy climaxes with an intervention I had forgotten that it concludes with an unsuccessful intervention.

At the end of the film Stuart’s rage-choked, alcoholic, snake-tongued father is still on course to drink himself to death if an anger-fueled heart attack doesn’t get him first but our hero is at least in a better place to accept what he cannot change. 

Stuart Saves His Family opens with Stuart happily hosting a show on public access full of touchy feely positive affirmations and New Age therapy talk for fragile souls who cannot handle the world’s casual, habitual cruelty. 

Stuart is a figure of mockery but here at least he’s defined by empathy as well. Ramis and Franken allow us to laugh at Stuart while rooting for him at the same time to overcome personal travails that are all too real. 

Stuart clings to his gig at the public access channel as a bright spot in a life otherwise light on achievements so he is devastated when his station manager bumps him to a graveyard slot and then knocks him off the air. 

Our eternally well meaning protagonist, in his zeal to try to help people become more like himself, has an unfortunate habit of accidentally insulting people instead, often by obliviously fat-shaming them by suggesting that they join him in Overeaters Anonymous. 

Stuart Smalley is a creature of therapy. Therapy shaped him. Therapy molded him. If a support group became sentient it would probably act and talk a lot like Stuart Smalley. 

Stuart Saves His Family takes this living embodiment of the touchy-feely self-help, 12 step, I’m Okay You’re Okay lifestyle and sends him to an emotionally rigid, constipated realm where no one even thinks about going to therapy because that would make them weak and unmanly. 

Ramis’ tricky dramatic comedy sends Stuart back home, to the birthplace of all of his formative trauma and despair to figure out the details when his beloved aunt dies. 

Stuart’s family is ruled by Harris Yulin, a verbally and emotionally abusive bully and angry drunk who has been terrorizing his family for decades. Stuart’s mom (Shirley Knight) sublimates all of her feelings of hopelessness and despair into cooking hams while Stuart’s brother Donnie (Vincent D’Onofrio) is a stoner with a drinking problem to match his father’s whose life is going nowhere and taking its sweet time getting there. 

Ramis established what kind of a movie he was making through his cast. If Stuart Saves His Family were a typical Saturday Night Live movie you could cast Jon Lovitz as the brother, Chevy Chase as the dad and Jane Curtin as the mom. 

Stuart Saves His Family is not a typical Saturday Night Live movie, however, so he did not seek out Saturday Night Live alum. He did not seek out funnymen or funny women. Instead he hired the best actors for the role. 

Yulin, D’Onofrio and Knight are all heavy dramatic actors who deliver heavy dramatic performances. That works because the often very dark comedy comes out of characters and situations and a vividly captured milieu rather than mugging or slapstick shenanigans. 

My favorite moment in the movie, for example, occurs when Stuart’s mother, whose self-esteem and sense of self are both wrapped up inexorably in her ham-making prowess, tells in-laws she’s squabbling with that she can’t believe they’re treating her so shabbily when she made them a ham. 

With a pitch-perfect Minnesota accent, the relation played by Joe Flaherty responds forcefully , “That was not a quality ham!” 

Stuart Saves His Family’s plot hinges on Stuart securing an easement from the neighbor of his late aunt so that the house can be sold and the money can be split among the surviving family members. 

Shockingly, having an easement-centered plot failed to make Stuart Saves His Family a Wayne’s World-style blockbuster and pop culture phenomenon. Stuart does such a terrible job negotiating that the neighbors demand more and more money. 

Stuart Saves His Family has two main plot threads. In the conventional one Stuart bounces back from losing his show and his aunt dying by getting a show on a cable channel thanks to a supportive friend played by Laura San Giacamo. 

In the much less expected but far more personal and satisfying thread Stuart tries to break through his family’s decades upon decades of toxicity and dysfunction and reach them on an emotional level. 

When Stuart’s father drunkenly shoots his son the family comes together for the ultimate comedy crowd-pleaser: an unsuccessful intervention for a bitter Midwestern patriarch intent on drinking himself to death rather than accept help or acknowledge his own weaknesses and vulnerability. 

It’s a bracingly dark ending only slightly lightened by having Stuart end the movie legitimately older and wiser and with a better sense of perspective on his family’s dysfunction and the role that he has played in it. 

The laughs in Stuart Saves His Family tend to be of the bleak variety, like during an early montage of male members of Smalley’s family drunkenly plummeting off roofs to their deaths. 

As Stuart acknowledges, there are lots of ways to end up dead when you’re a drunk. You’re roughly seven million times more likely to make the kind of stupid accidents that kill people. 

Beyond everything else Stuart Saves His Family is a very nuanced and perceptive exploration of the insidiousness and far-reaching pain of alcoholism. It’s about wanting to do better and be better but feeling like the universe is just not on your side. 

At the end of the day it comes down to this: Stuart Saves His Family is good enough. It’s smart enough and doggone it, I like it. 

Up Next: Wayne’s World!