By Jonathan Frey
I will spare you the fanfare for this inaugural installment of THE TIPPY TOP, a recurring and possibly regular Top [insert number here] feature here at LameMovies.net, suffice it to say that, had not Fred Savage grown into a reasonably attractive man in recent years, I would still be operating under the circa 1989 assumption that he’s just a petite, card-carrying Mensa member and fought in Vietnam. Dude’s precocious.
Alright, someone’s going to hurt thems-selves if I don’t let this sweaty beast of a list out toot sweet.
This will be a Top One list.
Uh-uh, no way, Fred Savage did NOT leave his bike in the driveway, “DAD“! He put it RIGHT over there!!
Ten minutes into Little Monsters one might have been lulled into a false sense that Savage’s 11-year-old Brian Stevenson has the intellect of a child. He’s just a little dude who rubs his eyes open in the dead of the night, makes peanut butter and onion sandwiches and (innocently?) watches what appears to be a pornography maker’s forum on cable access. Right?
Wrong. But before the big show we are first teased with a lengthy scene of mounting tension at the breakfast table in which Savage, cocksure and drunk with irreverence, repeatedly shrugs off his very slow-witted father’s sapless attempts at grounding him for staying up past his bedtime as if they were the bras and panties of some of the more skanky Wonder Years groupies. Dad then opens up a kitchen cabinet and lets a pint of melty ice cream fall to the counter. Shell-shocked and alone in the world upon the realization that, at some point during its short fall, the mystery ice cream traveled two horizontal feet and covered his entire chest and abdomen in a large rectangular shape, he turns wide-eyed to Savage in a frightened search for meaning and chokes out a desperate “You’re dead, Mister.” Savage fails to be menaced. I don’t even think Savage gets why his dad said that, but he certainly seems to hold a lot of contempt for his old man.
At this point Fred’s hyper developed, ghoulish cruelty is apparent enough to raise a few body hairs. But in order for his terrifying psyche to reach complete palpability he will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he SO believes — with every ounce of his 56” body — he is in mature middle age that, for all intents and purposes, it is true. Establishing an equal playing field and bitching around adults at least 3 or 4 times his temporal age is a need so basic for him it comes straight from the id, yet so intellectually satisfying when carried out that he’s like a tiny corrupt psychiatrist. So our boy needs his fix, and after that earlier scene in the kitchen it doesn’t take a Savage-like genius to realize Fred’s dullard father is our mark. Breakfast is over, pops is heading to work, and Savage hears a metal crunch from the driveway. It’s go time. As if beckoned by a dinner bell the pre-teen springs into action and runs to the potluck.
He opens with something puerile and non-threatening enough. “My bike! You ran over it!”
As dad begins to counter with some uncalculated cornball standby, “and whose fault would that be?” or some jazz like that, Savage cuts in with “NUH-UH, no way, I put it RIGHT there!! RIGHT over there!!” and he punches his words with all the hard-earned authority and implicit wisdom of a fortysomething stripper responding to the news that McDonald’s stopped serving Sausage McMuffins with Egg about forty minutes ago and her daughter has been bitching about wanting one since 5 AM. Not a Helen Hunt, Pay it Forward single mother. The real kind.
Bending his inflection to befit the attitude of a used up, street-smart lady of the night is exactly the kind of crushing emotionality that Savage brings to all of his performances, but this scene is both vintage Kevin Arnold and truly a beau ideal. Check out these mannerisms, governor:
The mano a mano results in Savage being grounded for a couple weeks or something but no matter, this outcome is merely an acceptable by-product of the traditional father-son dynamic that Savage maintains as a front so as to draw attention away from his pulsating cerebellum. Besides, dad is visibly shaken from the whole ordeal and it seems from the look in his eyes that that his son’s tongue lashings have changed him forever.
By the by, that father is played by none other then Daniel Stern, the voice of Savage’s older self in The Wonder Years, earning enough meta points to shoot this Fred Savage Demonstrates Superiority Over Adults on Film moment right to the top of the list.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Wizard, Vice-versa, The Princess Bride, crying in front of the mirror and not being freaked out enough to stop, the 1997-’99 sitcom Working (for some latter-day Savage)
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