I’ve seen many movies about Christ — some of them are really terrific. I’ve always enjoyed them as spectacle, as culture, even as history. But during the big martyr act at the end, I’ve never had anything resembling an emotional reaction. At the end of “Lenny,” when all Dustin Hoffman wants to do is speak human-to-human with the judge who refuses to let down the guard of Establishment for a second and discuss the fundamentals of obscenity, I feel the way Christians feel as they see Christ being led to Golgotha. The movie is great because the story is great and because Bob Fosse was artist enough to shoot it in the style of a Lenny routine — wheels within wheels, zipping back and forth in time, riffing on itself, and already hip to its own ending. If I have one complaint it is that Dustin, while funny, isn’t as funny as Lenny. And he didn’t really get the voice right. But he probably came closer to nailing it as anyone ever could. To call Lenny Bruce one of the most important thinkers of the 20th Century is no understatement. We should fight for him to be on a stamp.
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Jordan Hoffman is a New York-based writer and film critic working for The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Thrillist, Times of Israel, NY Daily News and elsewhere.
He is the host of ENGAGE: The Official Star Trek Podcast, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and challenges you to a game of backgammon.
That’s one stamp I woulnd’t buy. Why? Because Lenny Bruce isn’t funny. “Isn’t” as opposed to “wasn’t.” I suspect if I had been of age when he was still working, I’d have thought he was hilarious. But his routines are extremely dated and, point blank, radically unfunny. He does deserve recognition for pushing the envelope, but that’s where a stamp analogy should end. He wasn’t an important thinker — he was a comedian. Which is nothing to scoff at. But people like Jonas Salk and Albert Einstein were important thinkers. It’s important to make that distinction in our media-saturated world. (You and I aren’t important thinkers, either, but we get by.)
The movie itself … where else but the 70s could you have a closing shot of heroin junky mimicking the body positioning of Christ on the cross? (Please note the same shot is used at the end of The Omega Man, which has a decidely different message with thinly-veiled racist undertones … and I like that movie a lot despite this.) In a lot of ways, the movie feels as dated as the blaxploitation flick you note in the previous posting. Not a bad movie at all, just fully loaded with the 70s anti-hero vibe, which works to tremendous effect in some flicks (like Dog Day Afternoon). Just not feeling it here, probably because I think Bruce is wildly over-rated outside of the context of his ground-breaking obscenity struggles.