CINEMA: Justin Pearce
THE Brady Bunch Movie plays in with a tracking shot down a street of shops offering body-piercing, cappucino, cellphones, smokelessness — all those fads which define the Nineties, if we are to believe Nineties lifestyle magazines. And in the midst of the film’s self-conscious check-list of all that is truly Nineties, we find the Brady Family, living just as they did in the Seventies sitcom in a house with an astroturf lawn, one bathroom for nine people, and (as one neighbour remarks with bemused fascination) no sign of a toilet anywhere.
Pa Brady maintains control by dispensing goofy snippets of folk wisdom, to which the wide-eyed children reply “gee Dad! I never thought of it that way!” Family dysfunctions are left to the next-door neighbours: a property-shark father, an alcoholic mother, and a Kurt Cobain-wannabe son.
The cultural distinctions are lined up as neatly as the boys and the girls in the family square-dance: Seattle rock versus sub-Carpenters pop, grunge versus pastels, cellphones versus CB radio, jaded experience versus wide-eyed innocence. A would-be boyfriend describes the virginal Marcia Brady as “harder to get into than a Pearl Jam concert”.
The incongruity of the Brady values may be obvious — what the film is trying to do with them is less clear, which makes the movie into something more fascinating than an attempt to make a few bucks out of a familiar
At times it hints towards nostalgia for a lost age of innocence. Yet the world of the Bradys is sent up more than celebrated, its unreality emphasised by the fuzzy video picture-quality of the household sequences. And the film is extremely funny when it hints that the Bradys aren’t as sheltered from the real world as they like to believe. (Imagine a Brady Bunch episode with a lesbian sub-plot.)
On another level, the film is an over-the-top style- guide to a decade that has already been reappropriated by popular culture — it glories in details like polyester shirts of a kind that now sell out fast in second-hand stores, and there’s even a lava light in there somewhere. Marcia is dismissed by a schoolmate as a “retro wannabe” — she may seem weird, but at least there’s a word for her in an era when retro is just another — to coin a pop-psych cliche — lifestyle
Marcia herself, like the rest of her family, is happily oblivious of matters of style. The Bradys have no magazines that tell them what constitutes authentic Seventies behaviour. Lifestyle magazines are, after all, a Nineties fad in themselves, reflecting the most important Nineties fad of them all: the need for self- definition. Hence The Brady Bunch Movie, which happily flirts with a prepackaged version of the Seventies in a desperate attempt to pin down the Nineties. This makes it a quintessentially Nineties movie. QED.