The 1989 James Belushi/Whoopi Goldberg Mismatched Buddy Road Movie Homer and Eddie Is Like a Real Life Version of Tropic Thunder's Simple Jack
If you've ever wanted to see a movie that begins with John Waters robbing a mentally challenged man played by James Belushi then brother do we have a movie for you!
There are movies that I will always associate with my formative years as first a preeminent video store lurker, then a video store clerk for Blockbuster Video, and then Four Star Video Heaven.
These are obscurities whose existence and appeal flummoxed and perplexed me. How were these movies real? And why on earth would someone rent, or, god forbid buy one of these abominations?
The 1989 mismatched buddy road movie comedy/melodrama Homer and Eddie is one such movie. It feels less like a real movie than a fake movie from Tropic Thunder or 30 Rock.
More specifically Homer and Eddie is a non-ironic version of Tropic Thunder’s Simple Jack. Only in this case the actor portraying the mentally challenged gentleman who teaches us all about love and life is played not by Ben Stiller’s action star Tugg Speedman but rather by James Belushi.
That’s right. The same year he made the interspecies buddy action comedy K-9, Belushi starred in an inter-racial buddy comedy-melodrama opposite EGOT winner Whoopi Goldberg.
I should note, however, that while Goldberg has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony she did not win any of those prestigious awards for her portrayal of Eddie, a woman who is simultaneously
An escaped mental patient
Afflicted with a tumor that gives her one month to live
An enthusiastic armed robber of gas stations and convenience stores
A murderer
Other than that, it’s a very understated and subtle character and performance.
Homer and Eddie, which I will forever confuse with 1991’s Rubin & Ed, opens with a mentally challenged gentleman played by John Belushi’s less talented brother getting robbed by John Waters.
Waters is of course a prolific hitchhiker himself but his nefarious bad guy makes poor Homer’s life harder by relieving him of the eighty-seven dollars that appear to be his life savings.
For better or worse, the film maintains this level of WTF weirdness to an end credit sequence that recycles an earlier scene where Homer tries to cheer up Eddie by dancing around with a paper bag over his head in what can only be deemed a shoddy and unconvincing impersonation of beloved stand-up comedian The Unknown Comic.
Homer then encounters Eddie in his ramblings. Eddie becomes obsessed with tracking down Homer’s lost eighty-seven dollars so she can claim it for her own. From the way the money is treated, you’d think that it was enough to live on for years, not slightly more than you’d need for a night’s lodging at Motel 6.
Homer and Eddie has three primary modes: road movie wacky, screamingly histrionic, and maudlin. Belushi’s performance as a kind-hearted, child-like dishwasher is redolent less of the various screen portrayals of Lennie, the child-like man-child at the heart of Of Mice and Men than Looney Tunes’ mean-spirited canine parody of the character.
We begin wacky and wild, then lurch into the realm of psychodrama when Eddie freaks out in a bathroom about shrinks and nuns and society, man, and smashes her head against a mirror until it cracks. This is an indication that there may, in fact, be something wrong with her. Actually, everything is wrong with her, and the movie as well.
Goldberg is not just an award-winning actress: she’s famously won all of the big awards for acting. For all of her experience and acclaim, she’s defeated here by a role that, like the film itself, is nothing but self-satisfied quirks and whiplash-inducing tonal shifts.
Homer, a dishwasher despite having wealthy parents, is a pathological liar with the big heart and cartoonish innocence of a small child or golden retriever puppy. He is perpetually fibbing but in a wholly harmless way.
Eddie is all darkness. Homer is pure light. Eddie at first sizes up Eddie as a rube to grift but under her gruff facade she’s lonely. She needs a friend and company even more than she needs that sweet, sweet eighty-seven dollars so they soon embark on the kind of unique, original, and colorful misadventures you find in literally every road movie.
Being a good friend, Eddie decides that what this brain-damaged man-child compatriot needs is to lose his virginity. So she takes him to a bordello in the middle of nowhere so that he can make sweet love to Eddie’s aunt, a large, elderly African-American woman who shows Eddie the ways of physical love.
Eddie doesn’t know whether Homer can drive but she puts him behind the wheel in the middle of a massive snowstorm so that he’s veering wildly in every direction.
This might seem wildly irresponsible and dangerous but the slow-motion, upbeat music and the ecstatic expressions on the faces of Homer and Eddie all signal that this is actually incredibly heartwarming and inspirational.
In Homer and Eddie melodramatic developments keep popping up in a ridiculously overloaded screenplay like clowns fleeing a clown car on fire. We learn that Eddie escaped from a mental hospital, is off her pills, and acquired a gun she uses in the manner intended: ripping off small-town businesses and murdering the occasional clerk.
She’s an armed robber/killer with a heart of gold who quickly overcomes her differences with Homer en route to becoming best friends. Then again, I strongly suspect that Homer might be her only friend as well. When it comes to mismatched buddy duos, Homer and Eddie can’t compare to the classic twosome of Whoopi Goldberg and Theodore Rex.
Homer gets upset when his new best pal uses her handgun to murder people. That goes against his moral code but he’s not a stickler about it.
During their travels Homer and Eddie encounter the kind of random-ass character actors that fill oddball comedy dramas like these: Tracey Walter as the grown-up version of the kid who threw the curveball that resulted in Homer’s brain damage, Tommy “Tiny” Lister as a tough guy with a gun, Karen Black as a madame, Anne Ramsey as a waitress, Vincent Schiavelli as a priest and of course the aforementioned Waters.
Homer and Eddie was directed by Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky, who also directed Tango & Cash, which came out the same magical year as Homer and Eddie. Needless to say, he had a very strange 1989.
I’m glad that I finally got to see this ridiculous motion picture because it is every bit the shit show that I imagined.
Homer and Eddie is a movie about a man with brain damage and a woman with a fatal brain tumor that is itself positively brainless.
I refuse to believe that this isn't just an director's cut of "Eddie" with all of the Jim Belushi scenes left in and before the basketball stuff was shot.
I, too, have seen way too many of these "video store special" movies, especially when they fall into Whoopi's mid-to-late-'80s period. I have had to convince several people that there was a string of movies that paired her (both romantically and buddy-cop-ically) with Jonathan Pryce, Sam Elliott, AND Bobcat Goldthwait. What a time.