Eversmile, New Jersey

Daniel Day-Lewis had yet to win his Oscar for My Left Foot, also released in 1989, when he got involved in this, to say the least, unusual film. He plays an ever-smiling Irish dentist with anger issues travelling through Patagonia on a kind of Holy War against tooth decay for The Dubois Foundation for Dental Consciousness, based in Eversmile, New Jersey. Accompanying him on his peripatetic adventures is Estella, a garage owner’s daughter who he meets early in the piece and becomes his assistant.

Apparently after the director's first cut, the producers took over the film and re-edited it, changing the entire soundtrack (including sound and music score). God knows what the original version was intended to be about but this one seems to be a kind of satire of missionary work replacing all references to religion with references to dentistry.

There is nothing overtly parodic or even comedic about the film with the humour, for those who see it, deriving from a kind of dead-pan absurdity. Intriguing or perhaps better, perplexing as the concept is not developed enough to really sustain the running time making it a bemusing, rather than amusing, film but as an odd-ball effort it is worth considering, particularly as the Spanish dialogue has been dubbed in English, giving it a strangely retro low budget feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis’s name is probably what will attract most potential audiences to it, but his performance, with its intermittent outbursts of pent-up, near pathological anger, whilst effective enough, is not one of his more memorable.

Available from: Umbrella Entertainment

 

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