MOVIE REVIEW : A Few Big Laughs From Little ‘Clifford’

Is it bad form for a film critic to send readers to a lousy movie just because it has a few screamingly funny moments? On the other hand, who doesn’t want to laugh out loud at the movies?

“Clifford,” starring Martin Short as a precociously nasty 10-year-old, is not a good movie. It’s not even good/bad. But Short has a few of those laugh-out-loud moments, like the scene where his uncle Martin (Charles Grodin) asks him if he could at least try to look normal and Clifford, making his best effort, scrunches his face into the look of a demented kiwi.

Short, at 42, is the ideal actor to play a 10-year-old because, at his best, he always seems to carry around inside him the animus of a wacked-out imp. Therapists who extol getting in touch with the child within should take a long hard look at Martin Short and reconsider.

Short never gets gooey in “Clifford.” From his first scene as a boy, when, on a plane trip with his parents en route to Hawaii, he forces a landing in Los Angeles so he can visit Dinosaurworld, Short keeps Clifford intensely, almost passionately weird. There have been a lot of movies about adults as children, or vice versa, but Short is beholden to none of them. He’s bopping to his own syncopation here--he’s a peewee pain with an unaccountably lewd undercurrent. (It’s the lewdness that lifts his impersonation out of the kiddie comic category.)

Most of the movie is taken up with Clifford’s sojourn with his bachelor uncle and his girlfriend, Sarah (Mary Steenburgen). Ditched by his parents and longing for a day at the Jurassic Park-like Dinosaurworld, Clifford at first comes on all adorable--and Short playing adorable is not a pretty sight. When Uncle Marty reneges on his plans to take the tyke to the theme park, Clifford turns Bad Seed. The funniest moments in the movie are the goony duets between Short and Grodin. Their comic styles couldn’t be further apart: Short’s nattery verve is a universe apart from Grodin’s down tempo spaciness. If their scenes were better written (by Jay Dee Rock and Bobby Von Hayes) and directed (by Paul Flaherty), these two actors might have come up with some classic bits together. They come close a few times anyway, particularly when Uncle Martin grows homicidal toward his little charge and Clifford responds by tootling on his flute like a Pan gone crackers.

The filmmakers pull off the illusion of making Short seem convincingly, well, short. Cinematographer John Alonzo, production designer Russell Christian and costume designer Robert DeMora conspire to make Short the low center of gravity in his scenes. But the success of the illusion is often more inventive than anything going on inside it.

Still, you could do worse than to check out a movie where a foreshortened Short frugs on the dance floor beneath a forest of towering co-eds. Or a movie where Short impales Grodin with a bagel. If the producers of “Clifford” are smart, they’ll release it on video as a trailer of its best scenes. If they were smarter, they would have released it into the theaters the same way.

* MPAA rating: PG. Times guidelines: It includes sequences in a dinosaur theme park that may be scary for very small children, and some mild sexual references.

‘Clifford’

Martin Short: Clifford

Charles Grodin: Martin Daniels

Dabney Coleman: Gerald Ellis

Mary Steenburgen: Sarah Davis

An Orion Pictures release. A Morra, Brezner, Steinberg & Tenenbaum Entertainment Inc. Production. Director Paul Flaherty. Producers Larry Brezner, Pieter Jan Brugge. Screenplay by Jay Dee Rock and Bobby Von Hayes. Cinematographer John A. Alonzo. Editors Pembroke Herring, Timothy Board. Costumes Robert De Mora. Music Richard Gibbs. Production design Russell Christian. Set decorator Catherine Mann. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.