EDITOR’S NOTE: Modern Problems was on the CBS Late Movie on November 28, 1986.
I keep watching these 1980s Chevy Chase movies and wondering why I loved them as a kid but hate them now. It’s probably because Chevy Chase became the person the characters he played fought against.
Director and co-writer Ken Shapiro also directed Chase in The Groove Tube. In fact, the opening scene of the film has the Koko the Klown Show sketch playing on TV. You can also see a framed poster for Channel One Underground TV in the bathroom. This group is where the aforementioned The Groove Tube came from.
Chase plays Max Fiedler, an air traffic controller whose life is out of control. He was living with Darcy (Patti D’Arbanville), who had just left him because of his jealousy and constant nihilism. He’s convinced every guy is after her, but her best male friend Barry (Mitch Kreindel) and author Mark Winslow (Dabney Coleman) definitely are. And even Max’s shoulder to cry on, friend-with-benefits and ex-wife Lorraine (Mary Kay Place), has moved on, hooking up with Max’s childhood friend Brian (Brian Doyle-Murray).
Then, Max gets hit with nuclear waste, gets mental powers and uses them on his enemies. I’d like to think of it as wish fulfillment and charming, but a lot of the ways he uses his power are wrong and quite nearly sexual assault, a fact he realizes when it’s the powers that get off Darcy, not his body.
Coleman is good, as is Nell Carter, but this movie feels like a mess. It was written on a bus on a European vacation, and all that cocaine in the one scene feels like what the filming was possibly like. It’s just hard to like Max, as he really is a jerk who thinks the world revolves around him. He never truly learns anything, and Darcy finally just decides that she loves him. Why?
