The Jerk (R)
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 1979, when I was just 4 years old. I'm pretty sure I first saw it on TV at a friend's house, must have been in the early 90s. By the time I re-watched it in 2024, I didn't remember much of anything about it. I remembered kind of not really liking it. I remembered that it starred Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. I remembered Peters being hot. And I kind of remembered that Martin's character had been raised by a poor Black family and he didn't know he himself wasn't Black until early in the movie, when his mother finally told him he had been left on their doorstep. (Presumably as a baby, but that wasn't specified, and I honestly wouldn't be shocked if he'd been a young boy at the time and just didn't remember anything prior to being left with them. But probably he was a baby.) Anyway, despite not having liked it originally, I've long wanted to re-watch it and write a review, because despite not remembering much about it, I find it vaguely nostalgic, in theory, I guess. I may have liked it the second time around a bit better than the first time, but I certainly didn't like it a lot. I should say it's a comedy, but I decided to put my review under "weird movies", while using a yellow background (the color I use in my "comedy" section) instead of the grey that I use in my "weird" section. Because I find it more weird than comical, but I do still recognize the comedic aspects. And some of them I may actually have found mildly amusing, but most of them I just kind of didn't. Some people think of this as one of the best comedies ever, but I can't help but find it mostly dumb. I think it's supposed to seem dumb on the surface but actually be clever, but... well, sometimes I can see a bit of cleverness in it, but mostly I don't feel like the material really rises far above the surface.

Martin plays Navin R. Johnson, who at the start of the movie we see as a homeless person. He addresses the audience, saying he's not a bum, but rather a jerk, which I don't really understand. I am not familiar with his usage of the word "jerk", because the character isn't a jerk in the usual sense of the word. He's basically an idiot (and I hate using ableist language, but being stupid is basically the whole point of the character). But I don't think that's what was meant by "jerk", either. I could be wrong, but I think it means something... that I cannot pin down at all. Anyway, Navin proceeds to tell his story to the audience. It starts out on his birthday (I have no idea how old he was supposed to be, but obviously an adult), celebrating with his family. He gets sad because he feels like he doesn't fit in with them, and so his mother finally tells him the truth, as I mentioned before. That night, he hears some music on the radio, the likes of which he's never heard before, and it reaches him in a way that his family's music never did. So he decides to head out into the world to find out what else there might be for him.

I don't want to say too much about the things he does, but for awhile he works (and lives) at a gas station. One day, he meets a man named Stan Fox, whose glasses are constantly falling off, and Navin fixes them for him by adding a little handle that sits on the bridge of the nose. The man decided to start manufacturing and selling such glasses, and promised to share the profits with Navin. Meanwhile, Navin eventually leaves the gas station and ends up working in a carnival. There, he meets a woman named Marie Kimble (Peters), who had brought a kid she was babysitting to the carnival. Despite already being involved with a domineering daredevil, Navin makes a date with Marie. But she soon leaves him, as her mother wants her to find a wealthy man to marry. Later, a private detective finds Navin, having been hired by Fox, who makes good on his promise to share his profits with Navin. So now, Navin becomes rich and starts living a lavish lifestyle, and Marie's mother reads about him in the paper and calls him up to tell him where to find Marie, whom he soon marries.

Well, I've left out lots of details already, and I don't want to say too much more. But we do learn how Navin loses Marie and all his money and winds up as a bum, which brings us full circle to the start of the story. But that's not the end of the story. I'm not going to say how it all ends, though. Anyway, it's not a bad story. And as dumb as it is, it's not even a bad comedy. This particular brand of comedy just doesn't appeal to me much. And I feel like some things about the movie skirted the edge of being racially offensive. Maybe it's not quite offensive, maybe I'm being too sensitive, but it made me uncomfortable, anyway. Mostly, though I don't like the core concept of mining stupidity for comedy, even if Navin was basically a good guy, and not really a jerk. (Although there was one scene where he tried to kiss Marie on a date and she pushed him away, but he kept trying, and that felt to me more like attempted sexual assault than anything that should be considered funny. Once he finally stopped, she said she did want to kiss him, but... had her reasons for not doing so. But he couldn't have known that while he was trying, so it doesn't really change anything.) And... yeah, I don't know what else to say. I'm not even going to say I wish I could have liked the movie more than I did, because I'm fairly comfortable with only sort of liking it a little bit. Not even enough to rate it one smiley ("kinda liked"), but not so little that I'd rate it as low as "meh and three quarters", which is the next step down from one smiley in my rating system. Honestly... I have no idea how I feel about the movie overall. Because there were parts I did find funny, and I don't exactly dislike it. No, I like it in some weird way that defies rating.