On The Road to Wellville

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Virginia (Camryn Manheim): The fresh air, the exercise and the pleasure of a leather saddle between one's thighs.

Eleanor (Bridget Fonda): Why, Virginia, what do you mean?

Virginia: Bicycle smile, I believe they call it.

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"The Road to Wellville," which premiered 20 years ago today, reminded everyone that every generation must deal with issues of bowel regularity. It is a normal biological function that no one seems to have fully mastered.

It was also a reminder that, while every generation may think it discovered sex, that is also a normal biological function that, in all of human history, no one seems to have fully mastered.

Consequently, there are always people whose mission in life it is to help those who struggle with such normal biological functions.

Such a person was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who ran a sanatorium in Battle Creek, Mich., preaching the benefits of diet, nutrition, exercise and enemas. He also advocated sexual abstinence.

If Battle Creek sounds familiar, it should. It has been the world headquarters of the Kellogg Company (founded by Dr. Kellogg's brother) for more than a century. Dr. Kellogg and his brother had a falling out over cereal recipes.

While it was based in fact, it is important to remember that "The Road to Wellville" was a fictional account of both Kellogg and his facility.

Dr. Kellogg was portrayed in "The Road to Wellville" by one of my favorite contemporary actors, Anthony Hopkins. He gave his usual stellar performance — but it just wasn't my favorite Hopkins role.

The character was a little too over the top for me, I guess. Maybe that's how Kellogg really was. Maybe it wasn't merely an artistic decision that Hopkins made.

If it wasn't an exaggeration, though, I have a strong feeling that Dr. Kellogg and I wouldn't have agreed on much.

Bridget Fonda and Matthew Broderick played a young married couple (with the delicious surname Lightbody) who came to Kellogg's sanatorium for help. They had been struggling with health issues since the death of their child.

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The movie followed them — and several others like them — in their journey to pure thoughts and clean living.

All Broderick really needed was some intimacy with his wife, and he knew it, but Kellogg's facility separated husbands and wives. He had a hard time coping with that. His wife, meanwhile, was becoming a devoted disciple of Kellogg's teachings, especially his stance against killing animals for food.

Broderick was forced to give his lustful attention to more accessible targets — a nurse (Traci Lind) and a fellow patient (Lara Flynn Boyle) — both of whom he imagined minus their layers of 19th–century clothes.

He did more than imagine with Boyle. That was against Kellogg's policy. In addition to being a vegetarian, Kellogg was opposed to sex other than for procreational purposes, and he forbade masturbation.

Dr. Kellogg obviously had some unorthodox ideas about good health — but, just as obviously, there must have been something to them if he followed his own advice. He lived to be nearly 92.

Of course, he may just have been a quack who got lucky and lived a longer life than most in spite of himself.

I didn't particularly care for "The Road to Wellville." It wasn't the people who were in it. As I say, I like Hopkins. I like all of the Fondas. I like Broderick. I haven't seen much of Lind or Boyle, but they were pleasant enough.

I guess it was the nature of the humor. Scatalogical humor is great when you're 7, but no 7–year–olds were allowed to see this movie without an adult when it ran at the theaters.

And that may go a long way toward explaining the indifferent response the movie received at the box office. It cost $25 million to make. It made $6.5 million in the theaters.

Playing WarGames

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"WarGames" had a lot more impact when it was released 30 years ago today than it has now.

After all, the Cold War mentality was still strong in 1983. The Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, and the Reagan administration had made winning the Cold War its top foreign policy priority.

Thus, in the late spring and early summer of 1983, movie audiences were understandably unnerved by the story "WarGames" had to tell.

Even though the Cold War ended within 10 years, "WarGames" offered a glimpse into a future that, in hindsight and for several reasons, may be even more troubling. Matthew Broderick, the lead character, had an obsession with computers and video games that was rare in the early 1980s but might be regarded as mainstream today.

About six months ago, when the shootings in the Connecticut elementary school occurred, there was general angst about the fact that the shooter had devoted much of his spare time to violent video games, a trait that is not uncommon with many young men of his age group.

In "WarGames," Broderick played a similar young man, but the havoc he wreaked in the fictional story went far beyond a single classroom or school. He had a home computer at a time when that was still a rarity in most homes, and he used it to tap into his school's computer to do things like alter academic records for himself and his love interest (played by Ally Sheedy).

He also used his computer to play the most challenging video games of that time. In pursuit of that form of pleasure, he unknowingly hacked into the Pentagon's computer system and activated a nuclear war simulation, thinking that it was merely a very realistic computer game.

Which it was — so realistic that the computer didn't know it wasn't real.

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In hindsight, I suppose, "WarGames" was a bit of a gamble as far as the cast was concerned. Broderick has been in some successful films in his career, but "WarGames" was the very beginning of that career.

Sheedy, it often seems, grew up in front of the movie camera. And, in fact, she did. She has been involved in acting, in one form or another, since she was a teenager.

But "WarGames" was practically her first big–screen movie. Practically. It almost certainly was her most extensive role to date. More extensive screen time came with later films, like "The Breakfast Club" and "St. Elmo's Fire," but, for many moviegoers, this was their first real look at the young actress.

And there was a lot to like. Admittedly pleasing to the eye with her chestnut hair and athletic build, Sheedy, it turned out, was a pretty good actress, too — and that certainly contributed to the quality of the story.

But the real attraction to "WarGames" was the public's uneasiness with computers. Audiences in 1983 weren't as sophisticated as they are in 2013. The public's mindset probably was unchanged since the 1950s — when people heard the word computer in 1983, they still thought of some massive mechanical monstrosity (presumably like the one that virtually filled a room in 1957's "Desk Set") that was beyond their comprehension.

The public's general ignorance about computers made the story of an accidental nuclear war more plausible than anything that had been made in 20 years. In many ways, it was a more innocent time, a time when cable TV was still in its infancy and the commercial internet was still in the future.

Because of the amazing advances we have witnessed in the last 30 years, I doubt that the story in "WarGames" would be taken seriously today. A whole generation of Americans has grown up playing computer games and using tech–savvy lingo, and most of those folks would probably be unimpressed by a computer that took so long to learn the simple lesson of Tic–Tac–Toe.

But there is little doubt that it was highly effective in 1983.