Harvey or Why the Bunny isn't Funny

Harvey
or
Why the Bunny isn’t Funny

Recently I was strong armed into watching Harvey, the rabbit movie with Jimmy Stewart. As a rule I generally avoid old movies. I think that a lot of old movies, like a lot of old music, are over-hyped; whatever technical or narrative device that revolutionized the way that we see movies (see Citizen Kane) has usually been so thoroughly incorporated into the films that I cut my teeth on that it’s impossible for me to understand its revolutionary aspects. The one exception to that rule may be The Wizard of Oz whose revolution is embedded in the film, and whose effect still blows me away.

Old movies require me to construct a context that I’m generally too lazy to develop unless I have a personal investment in the movie. That personal investment rarely extends past the late 1950s, which is when I believe the roots of contemporary movie-making vocabulary solidified. I find movies from before that era either redundant, mystifying or both.

Hitchcock’s 39 Steps is a good example: there is an extended flashback scene reciting a good portion of the murder that takes place at the beginning of the scene that seemed overly long to me. Hithcock’s not a bad filmmaker, so I have to believe that the flashback is so long is because the movie is so old that flashbacks hadn’t yet become an accepted trope in film yet, and was still new and novel. On the other hand, I often had a hard time understanding what the actors were saying because they spoke so quickly, which is something I can only chalk up to people talking faster back then.

You can see why I was reluctant to watch Harvey. I didn’t know anything about the movie other than its premise, its lead actor and that it was old. Despite all of that, I watched it, and what I saw was a great play trapped inside a mediocre movie. Harvey just screamed “theatrical production” to me. Its characters’ archetypes, the pace of the action and the staging all would have, if performed crisply, been an excellent study in what makes theatre tick.

But the play didn’t translate well to film. The shots were claustrophobic, especially inside the Dowd house, and really limited the tragic-comic aspects of Elwood P. Dowd’s sister and niece reactions to his “affliction.” The real strength of film as medium of expression over theatre is its ability to capitalize on nuance and detail. The theatre must be gross in its approach to conveying anything because its proportion is, for the most part, one to one; the people that I see on stage are exactly the proportion they would be if I was seeing them from the same distance outside the theatre. The movies know no such limitations, and can make a face 30 feet tall, making it much easier to translate the subtle gradations of emotions moving across a face. How this explains the popularity of Adam Sandler movies, I don’t know, but it does go a long way in explaining why zany stage productions in the vein of Harvey often flounder on screen: because the energy of the play has an incredibly difficult time being translated to the screen, where precision, not enthusiasm, is more important.

That being said, I think the movie could have been better, and there are two reasons for that: the rabbit and the man. As to the first, I haven’t seen or read the play, so I can’t say how it’s staged, but since the playwright was also the screen scribe, my suspicion is it was written the way she wanted it. In the movie there is no doubt as to the reality of the pooka Harvey. He opens doors and gates. For me, making the rabbit real and not leaving the decision up to the audience robs the entire story of its mystery and its conflict, and makes it impossible for the audience to empathize with Dowd. If the rabbit is assuredly real, then the character of Dowd is much less compelling, because we know that the story is no longer the study of a man affected by tragedy, but the comic mishaps of a man and his magic rabbit. It becomes a fantasy rather than a drama, and I think that Dowd’s character is much more compelling in the ambiguity of sanity.

Secondly, I feel the character of Dowd lacks dimension, and I blame either Jimmy Stewart or the director Henry Koster for that. The character of Elwood P. Dowd is certainly disturbed in one way or another. It’s more than hinted at throughout the movie that some great change was wrought in Elwood when his mother, to whom he was devoted, died. Elwood attributes the change to the appearance of a six foot three tall white rabbit named Harvey, while his family attributes it to his mother’s death. In either case, Elwood is no longer the man he once was and people treat him differently because of it, he drinks because of it and his family is embarrassed because of it.

What I found uninteresting about Stewart’s portrayal was the lack of regret in Elwood for the man he used to be, the lack of longing to be a part of something again. Stewart makes it apparent that the pooka, Harvey, brings something beautiful into life in the form of helping people who come into the bar unburden their sadness, but we never see Dowd acknowledge the conflict it seemed he suffered from, the conflict between who he is and who he was.

There is a scene near the end of the film when Dowd is in the alley behind the bar dancing alone, and when he is joined by the doctor and the nurse who have been chasing him all over town Dowd tells them about all the dances he used to know, and for a moment the audience is treated to a rare glimpse of the original Elwood P. Dowd, good looking, gregarious popular, and we see that Dowd misses that life as well, but also that he is incredibly lost and has no way of knowing how to return to it. Unfortunately for the film, that the moment was brushed past in order to get to the “more important” scene where Dowd recounts the beauty that came with Harvey, and the magical moments that they share over drinks when people, upon finally being able to see Harvey, suddenly realize that their problems aren’t so large after all. That for me is the flaw in the way that Stewart plays Dowd; there is too much “gee golly, sure” and not enough doubt in a man whose character is largely shaped by loss.

I think the textual evidence for Dowd’s conflict is his alcoholism. While it may be argued that it’s necessary for Harvey and Elwood to meet sad people they have to hang out in bars, I think the locale of the bar is convenient for Elwood’s alcoholism. You can find, sit and talk with sad people anywhere, the park, the zoo, the bus. And Dowd doesn’t just use the bar for his mission of beauty with the pooka. He suggests the bar for any occasion at all. The fact that Dowd is constantly drinking seems glossed over in the film, outshined by Dowd’s niceness and genuine care for the people around him. Dowd’s dark side is written into the script, but never admitted to by the film, and I think the film has less impact because of it. The beauty that Dowd sees in the world is never contrasted with the pain he feels, because we the audience are never allowed to experience it with him. It is symbolized in the bar, but never spoken of, and the film misses a chance to describe the beauty of Elwood P. Dowd’s tragedy, and that in itself is a shame.