In Defense of Ishtar

I like Showgirls (1995) and Cocktail (1988). I’ve got a thing for the underdog, the Razzie winner. No doubt because I consider myself the underdog (what kind of self-respecting neurotic doesn’t?). Elaine May’s Ishtar (1987) is anything but a shrimpy lightweight duking it out with Brutus Beefcake. May, now 91, stands head and shoulders above the competition, a comedic doyenne for half a century. The film stars Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Even Isabelle Adjani crops up in a side part. Coca Cola, then-parent company of Columbia Pictures, backed the disaster. And a disaster it was. For all its star power, its capital both social and financial, Ishtar imploded.

I recall my math teacher’s whispered judgment after a particularly bad showing on a test: “You know the difference between your test and the Titanic? The Titanic had a band.”

Robin Hood that I am I had to know: is Ishtar really that bad? Did it at least have a band?

Ladies, gentlemen, those who exist somewhere between the Platonic poles of “lady” and “gentleman”: it’s not that bad. It’s not that bad!

God help me, I might even think it’s pretty good. A sentiment apparently shared by some eminent company: two voters in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll for the greatest movie of all time.

I would not go that far, but this tale of two deadbeat, goofball singer-songwriters who get caught up in international intrigue involving everyone from Gaddafi and the CIA to Shia militants and Communist guerillas effects tow simultaneous virtues: deeply unserious goofiness and mimetic condemnation of contemporary reality.

On the first count, Beatty and Hoffman play a pair of down-on-their-luck singers who think they’ve got what it takes. They meet when Hoffman, who is playing piano in a restaurant, combining old hits like “That’s Amore” with personally written anniversary songs about impending death, gets a note from a failed ice cream man and gas station attendant who keeps getting fired for drafting songs on the job (at one point we see Hoffman thinking through the melody to a song as children chase his ice cream truck, bell ringing all along). In a moment reminiscent of many a Will Ferrell buddy comedy, they embrace (intellectually anyway) and realize they’re stronger together.

Initial reviews are mixed (between grimaces and boos). Don’t worry though. Per Hoffman, they sound even better than Simon and Garfunkel. So what if they’ve lost their partners, their pride, and any semblance of an income? There’s no business like show business, and a two-bit manager who’ll sign anyone with a pulse gives them two options: a hotel gig in Nicaragua or a night-club gig in Morocco. They pick the Maghreb.

Ishtar’s middle section gets unduly serious. It drags some. Viewers primed for more japes instead receive a hefty dose of 1980s international pettifoggery. Adjani, who both fall in love with and initially mistake for a boy, represents an underground Communist group bent on using an ancient map to convince the local Shia population to rise up and overthrow the American-backed emir. Smooth-talking but deeply depressed Hoffman agrees to work for the CIA to defend the American way of life (though also to make some extra cash—he’s strapped). Meanwhile, Beatty falls for Adjani and begins working for the Communists.

Now that I write that out, Ishtar stays goofy, even when it’s dealing with serious issues. Trekking through the desert ready for death, the pair thinks the CIA is going to save them. They’re Americans after all. The CIA instead wants to kill them on the orders of the emir. As a result, we get some truly glorious scenes of Hoffman, Beatty, Adjani, and a local street urchin firing stinger missiles and assault rifles at heavily armed US choppers. A bullet harmlessly grazes the CIA helicopter. “We’ve been hit,” the agent screeches. “The mission is over. I repeat: the mission is over. Get back here,” responds his commander. How many other big-budget, Reagan-era films portray US malfeasance abroad? How many show our penchant for combining cowardice with technological superiority (one is really the consequence of the other)? How many have Isabelle Adjani firing missiles over her shoulder?

That’s the rub, really. Ishtar suffered, I suspect, because it combined two seemingly contradictory impulses. May puts well-known, serious actors in ridiculous situations, has the sexy star of Shampoo (1975) and Carl Bernstein himself play a couple of lonely bozos. At the same time, she takes aim at perhaps the most serious topic imaginable: the shadowy world of parapolitics.

Ishtar ultimately fails to fully marry these difficult bedfellows (perhaps only Kubrick has ever really succeeded in that nearly impossible endeavor). But it’s funny and honest. What’s wrong with that?