Mr. Bean is England’s comic crown jewel and an international sensation, a star in more than 90 countries via television and home video. Bean has some of the poignant little-man qualities of Chaplin and Keaton, but he’s ruder and more dangerous. He picks his way through the mundane world as if everything he touches were a hand grenade; he’s always at the brink of pulling the pin. His gawky, bug-eyed innocence–he surveys himself in the mirror as if his body were an alien apparition–has a streak of the bad seed in it, and children love his meticulous, ingenious attempts to blow up the rules. He knows he shouldn’t sneeze and snooze at church, but he can’t help himself. The fact that his comedy is wordless and purely physical helps it cross borders. One British newspaper described Burmese rebels crawling up to an outpost of government troops, only to find them roaring helplessly at a Mr. Bean video. There are T shirts, toy cars, several books, Web sites, constant screenings on transoceanic airline flights–all from what were only 13 original episodes produced for ITV in the early ’90s.
Haven’t heard of him? Well, we already said ““self-absorbed.’’ You may have seen Rowan Atkinson, 42, who plays him, as the sweaty vicar who butchered the marriage ceremony in ““Four Weddings and a Funeral.’’ A loyal subculture in the United States watches Mr. Bean on public TV. But Bean is not a mass phenomenon here, a situation his handlers aim to change when the film ““Bean’’ opens Nov. 7.
Back in Britain, the movie broke box- office records last month for an opening by a domestic film. But the picture, though made by Britons, is clearly aimed at Americans, and critics there are in a major snit. A Sunday Times writer called Bean ““hideous’’ and ““diseased’’–then, in contemptuous reference to his popularity in Germany, dubbed him ““Herr Bean.''
In a way, you can’t blame them. The movie is ““broadened,’’ as Atkinson says. Faced with having to spin sketches into a story line, the moviemakers decided to parachute Bean into a clumsily realized Los Angeles, where the pace is sped up and the locals won’t shut up. ““The environment, the American side of it, was as much a creative decision as a marketing decision,’’ Atkinson says, perhaps betraying more than he intends. ““There’s not much point in making a movie that only appeals to the same people who’ve seen him on television.''
Atkinson, Britain’s highest-paid comedian, is a shy, retiring Oxford graduate who was part of the next-generation band of heirs to the Monty Python satirical tradition. He starred in ““Black Adder,’’ a parody of the material from A-level history exams that is imprinted on the brain of every middle-class Brit. Some portions of the British intelligentsia consider the transition to Bean a sellout. ““Few of my friends would stay in and watch Mr. Bean,’’ Atkinson confesses. ““It’s terribly accessible. People who don’t read and write like it.’’ But with all the faults of the movie, which keeps telegraphing how ““wacky’’ Bean is instead of letting things unfold, Mr. Bean still gets to perform some of his marvelously mute set pieces, demonstrating an almost-lost art. There are, in Mr. Bean’s world, no space aliens, no machine-gun fire, no quick-cutting MTV sequences. Instead, Bean is likely to be shaving. Or cooking a turkey. Or making havoc on a crowded airplane. In one of his TV sketches, he puts his bathing suit on over his trousers, then removes his trousers (really). His famous sitting-in-church sequence takes nine minutes, seven of which are a single camera shot. He brings it off.
That’s partly because he’s no precious clown-mime. He’s saved by a dollop of Benny Hill vulgarity, except that his leer isn’t about chasing bikini-clad lasses; it’s the malevolent joy of an overgrown child seeing what he can get away with. There are British aspects to the humor: Bean works best when he’s acting up under the appalled gaze of a bystander. And some of it is infantile. He was accused of ““toilet humor’’ when he bombed on Broadway in 1986.
Atkinson’s return to America is likely to be more successful this time. When he visited New York this summer, a small mob chanting ““Bean’’ thronged around him on lower Broadway. But still, someone who was there said a lot of them were tourists from other countries. Mr. Bean isn’t, fortunately, a Yank just yet.
