Table for Five

Laughter really is the best medicine

You know those commercials for an antidepressant that say “Depression Hurts”? Well, it’s true. It’s not just physical hurt either, it’s an increased emotional sensitivity that, for me at least, makes every negative thing seem three times worse than it really is.

Confession-For the last three days, I have been doing the absolute bare minimum. I didn’t shower, most days I didn’t even change out of my pajamas until right before the kids got home from school, and I didn’t do squat around the house. I did, however, watch a lot of DVDs. DVDs have become my new comfort food, and so many great movies have come out lately.

Two days ago I watched “Mr. Bean’s Holiday”. Now, if you aren’t familiar with Rowan Atkinson’s character Mr. Bean, I’m not sure how to describe him to you. Atkinson is a British actor, a physical comedian with a style all his own. The Mr. Bean TV show was fourteen half-hour episodes that ran from 1990 to 1995, and it was an international sensation. Mr. Bean was what Atkinson described as “a child in a man’s body”, who solved everyday problems with a clever naivety, yet rarely spoke. It was all about the physical comedy, and that has carried over into the feature films.

In “Mr. Bean’s Holiday”, Bean wins a church raffle prize of a camcorder and a trip to the beaches of Southern France. Hand a kid a camcorder and what to they do? They start recording every thing they see, right? Bean’s constant recording ends up getting a young boy, the son of a Cannes Film Festival judge, separated from his father. Mr. Bean might be oblivious to the world around him, but he knows he is responsible for what has happened to this boy, and he is determined to reunite father and son.

Hilarity ensues, as Bean and his young companion encounter one mishap after another. Eventually they get separated as well, and there is a scene that you just have to see to believe, in which Bean goes to a fancy French seafood restaurant and eats both raw oysters and a whole giant shrimp still in the shell. I was howling with laughter during that scene!

Along the way, Mr. Bean also encounters a stereotypical American director played by Willem Dafoe, and meets a beautiful French woman who happens to be heading to Cannes for the film festival. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that you will want to see how these two characters impact Mr. Bean in a way he couldn’t have expected.

Another scene that is itself worth the price of the DVD is when Bean and Stepan (the young boy) find themselves stranded with no money at an open-air market. Bean notices buskers (street musicians, people toss money into their instrument cases) in the market, as well as a CD vendor playing clips from the CDs for people to hear. So he “borrows” the CD vendor’s stereo speaker, walks into an open space, and begins “performing” whatever song is playing. He ends up performing an opera scene that just has to be seen to be believed.

Atkinson has said that “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” is the last Mr. Bean film, so if you are a fan, you will want to get the DVD. It’s funny, it’s sweet, and it was just the movie I needed to cheer me up out of my doldrums. You can purchase Mr. Bean’s Holiday (Widescreen Edition) from Amazon.com, it also comes in HD-DVD. I hope watching this movie cheers someone else up the way it did for me!

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