A New Jersey scumbag with a song in his heart, Vic DeSalvo (Danny DeVito) is living his dream of working in Hollywood.
Given an ultimatum by his brother to sell a show or go back home, Vic finds a home at MBC, a failing TV network.
Greenlit by a vengeful executive who has been sacked by the network, Vic’s dream is coming true…
Before transitioning into a feature film director, Danny DeVito practised his craft on a series of short films.
The Ratings Game was his first attempt at a feature-length story, albeit on TV.
As with The Selling of Vince D'Angelo, The Ratings Game builds off of DeVito’s established star persona from his role on Taxi as the duplicitous Louis DePalma.
As with that short mockumentary, The Ratings Game takes aim at a familiar institution in contemporary society - television.
More than a specific sense of style, what defines DeVito’s work as a filmmaker is perspective.
One of the joys of DeVito onscreen is the sense that he is in on the joke - the character may be a cheat and liar, but there is always something knowing in the performance. It often feels like DeVito is winking at the audience, showing an example of humanity who is not that smart, not that good, not as put together as he thinks he is.
DeVito’s onscreen personality is the inverse of a typical star - whereas a lot of stars’ personae are built on some kind of decency, some inherent moral foundation, DeVito revels in showing how little backbone his characters have.
He also seems unafraid to show these characters being embarrassing: in a key example from this film, Vic is forced to take over as the lead actor during the shooting of his pilot.
It is a disaster: Vic reads his lines off cue cards in a stilted manner, constantly playing to his friends in the audience.
DeVito the actor has no qualms about showing off how ignorant and oblivious Vic is, and he takes no prisoners as a filmmaker either.
That sense of cynicism about human nature is the basis of his favoured themes - greed, the role of media and materialism in everyday life.
As with the disgraced politician from DeVito’s previous short film, Vic’s rise is enabled by the greed of others. When an executive promotes his mistress to head her department, Vic’s girlfriend Francine (Rhea Perlman) steals information on the families who the ratings company track for ratings to help Vic’s ratings.
While the premise fits the filmmaker, the material as written feels a little underwritten.
Maybe this is the result of my greater familiarity with DeVito’s later work, but The Ratings Game is a little toothless.
There are some great moments: In one scene, Vic assembles truckers from around the country in a parody of a Bond villain meeting (complete with a slideshow and John Barry-esque musical score).
In a forerunning of Death to Smoochy, the film includes Captain Andy, a deranged version of a children’s TV host who seems to be under the spell of his ventriloquist dummy (a parrot).
During a cruise, passengers try to talk to each other but can only speak about the TV shows they watch.
Unlike the amoral powerbroker of Vince D'Angelo, The Ratings Game tries to present Vic as more of a three-dimensional being, by putting him in a fish-out-of-water romance with another Jersey transplant, Perlman’s Francine.
The real-life couple have great chemistry, and Francine is never treated as an add-on. She does not exist solely to make the lead character look better, and her role as a hardworking woman (who ultimately initiates the scheme) is probably more pointed in its critique of Hollywood power structures than Vic’s struggles to break in.
As with Vince D'Angelo, DeVito ends the movie with the same message that money and fame will win out: despite his arrest for fraud, Vic’s success means he remains a celebrity and gets to live the high life in prison.
Appropriately dark and cynical, despite the sincerity of the romance, The Ratings Game is amusing rather than truly funny.
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