In Christina Applegate’s new memoir You with the Sad Eyes, she writes, “I guess I've faked it until I made it my whole life... I've been through the kinds of things I've been through, you have to get good at hiding behind a persona.” Applegate’s childhood was a war zone, abused and abandoned until she rocketed to stardom on Married with Children. Still a teenager, Applegate had a string of bad boyfriends and an eating disorder that dominated much of her adult life. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2022—after Selma Blair recognized some of her own MS symptoms in her Sweetest Thing co-star—Applegate writes with bracing honesty about the damage the disease has done and will continue to do to her body. She made headlines a couple of years ago when she said “I don’t enjoy living” on MeSsy, the podcast she hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler. You with the Sad Eyes is written with the same candor, and, without ever feeling like a pity party, Applegate talks about degenerative disease with the kind of detail that rarely appears in the celebrity memoir.
She talks about her film and television work for most of the book, from her start in soap operas through Kelly Bundy to Anchorman, one of many enduring American films of 2004. But, as expected, a couple of curios get nothing: Across the Moon (1994) and Just Visiting (2001). I bought both in a lot on eBay last month. Across the Moon is the real discovery, with a ferocious performance by the late Elizabeth Peña, and it’s thoroughly abrasive and often confounding—a gem if you’ve seen thousands of movies and feel like you’ve run out of surprises, but not a universal unqualified recommendation. On the other hand, people of all ages and intellect can find something to enjoy in Just Visiting, a goofy American comedy that’s distinctly French in its farce.
No surprises: directed by Jean-Marie Poiré from a script he co-wrote with Christian Clavier and John Hughes of all people, Just Visiting follows medieval knight Thibault and his servant Andre as they’re transported by a witch from 12th-century England to Chicago in the year 2000. They wake up in a museum curated by Julia Malefète (Applegate), a descendent of Thibault’s bride-to-be Princess Rosalind, also played by Applegate in the opening. Most of the movie’s 88 minutes is spent on the misadventures of Thibault and Andre baffled by the present while simultaneously wreaking havoc on it. Andre, played by Clavier, eats off the floor, eats dog food and urinal cakes, belches freely, and eventually marries Tara Reid, the gardener next door to Julia who no one seems to notice (it struck me, watching this immediately after Sunday’s Euphoria, that Reid is Sydney Sweeney’s most obvious Hollywood precedent). Thibault wins Julia’s heart over her scuzzy cheating husband (Matthew Ross) because he’s charming beyond his years, his generation. “I am 30 generations removed from my love,” he opines in a police office, just before meeting Julia. They instantly connect, cursed but fated.
Ross, best known as one of Patrick Bateman’s friends in American Psycho (the one who thinks Bateman’s coming onto him in the bathroom), has a much more substantial part than usual, and he makes the most of it. His mistress, Bunny, crawls on his marble desk as he talks to Julia and reassures her that Thibault couldn’t possibly be her presumed drowned French cousin whose estate they both inherited. Ross only humors the medievals because he thinks they’re thieves looking to steal his claim; Julia, however, is charmed from the beginning, more invested than most people in her royal lineage, her family coat of arms, and their motto, “Courage is our creed.” Despite destroying much of her house and embarrassing her at every turn, Julia is drawn to her knight 30 generations removed just as her slimy husband slinks closer and closer to the abyss. His fate is much worse than most comedy villains.
Just Visiting was the last movie that John Hughes was credited on as a writer, and he used pseudonyms for the last eight years of his life. Perhaps the brutal critical reception of Just Visiting had something to do with it, but this wasn’t a notorious bomb, just a movie that came and went, a financial failure that still made $16 million.
Kelsey Grammer narrates, while Malcolm McDowell appears in one of his many “and MALCOLM MCDOWELL” supporting roles, a glorified walk-on that has him as a wizard looking a thousand years old. Unlike Thibault and Andre, he’s unfazed by the present when he travels to Chicago to save them: he embraces boomboxes, hip-hop, and dollar store chic, going on a ghetto shopping spree before casting spells that send Thibault and Andre back to their time. McDowell, who’s looked old for most of his career, is refreshingly funny, for once enjoying a part that he’d normally phone in. Clavier is grating as the animal-like peasant Andre, but Just Visiting consistently surprises because it breaks so many assumed conventions of American film comedy.
Poiré’s film, which he hates, is a remake of a popular French trilogy, and the French sensibility is retained here. This kind of broad farce, slightly sillier and less bound to reality than American comedy, has rarely succeeded here—the most notable exception is Amélie, and other than that, there’s little else that’s made it across the Atlantic. We’re not going to be seeing the Bécassine movie any time soon, unfortunately. Just Visiting is another rare example of French-American relations, but it’s not surprising that Applegate had nothing to say about it in her book. But it’s the kind of broad comedy she excels at, and while not as well-made in any way as Anchorman, it’s in the same register, along with the superlative sex comedy The Sweetest Thing—all worth seeing for any fans of the actress.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM