Comedy and satire can be just about anything they want to be, but The Road to Wellville, even while impressing us with its recreation of a bygone age, and showing us that health fad hoaxes and quackery are nothing new, doesn't focus itself enough to establish what it's supposed to be about. The crazy cures of Dr. Kellogg sometimes take on the dimensions of a Frankenstein film, and Kellogg himself (Hopkins with a wonderful accent and a looney set of false teeth) is a complex combo of self-made millionaire, inspirational guru, and repressed maniac. He's obsessed with the digestive tract, and constantly compares his patients with vile sewers. He preaches against eating meat, and holds lectures with a ridiculous microscope 'analysis' that equates a porterhouse steak with horse dung. Believing that sex is fundamentally unhealthy, he separates couples as a matter of course. Besides the exercise regimen, his so-called treatments (daily anal washes) are traumatic hokum. What he really is selling is the promise of bodily redemption through faith in the Good Doctor, and as the Cornflake King, he's an incredible salesman absolutely convinced of the rightness of everything he does.

Parker's satirical viewpoint underlines the excesses of Wellville, but the exaggeration keeps us from understanding his overall point. The idle rich are suckers. People will follow the teachings of any crazy nut, if encouraged by their peers. Everybody is a sexual hysteric, and Kellogg has simply channeled his personal derangement into a moneymaking formula. William's personal plight as a Wellville guinea pig starts with him already having sexual hallucinations, and when he thinks his wife has deserted, he ends up trying out weird electrical garments as a sex substitue. Straight-laced, closed-minded Eleanor is so focused on the value of every insane fad she hears about, that she can't tell a therapist's attentions from rape.

A black comedy may be heartless and cruel, like The Loved One, but that show never lost sight of its cynical message. The Road to Wellville is a mass of eyebrow-raising excess, with as many flatulence and excretion jokes as an Austin Powers movie. Poor William's rump is packed with soapsuds more often than an automatic dishwasher. None of this is in itself very funny - except maybe for William's attraction to his nurse, which begins to say that the reason these rich idiots are so health-crazy is that they're in denial of their sexual urges. There aren't any normal people in the story to provide a baseline of sanity.

There is one normal person actually, the John Cusack character. He's a sane man who has to watch as his cereal 'expert' turns out batch after batch of indigestible corn garbage in a 'factory' overrun with hogs and chickens. By the time he tells off the fools following Dr. Kellogg's warped ideas, he's already lost his credibility - he's packing Kellogg's Cornflakes into new boxes and selling them as his own product.

The Road to Wellville is well-played and engaging to watch, if not always funny. Hopkins is perhaps a little too nutty, sort of like the relative in Arsenic and Old Lace who thinks he's Teddy Rosevelt. Fonda and Broderick almost make their characters work, but like everyone else in the show, they spend most of their time reacting to the weird goings-on at the Wellville clinic. John Cusack and Michael Lerner are a great team, but their part of the story is mostly a sidebar, and every appearance of Dana Carvey's leering, filthy bum of a prodigal son is an unfunny interruption. John Neville hasn't much to do as a fellow Wellville resident who thinks the clinic can do no wrong, even when a worker is electrocuted by a risky-looking invention. Traci Lind is a sexual fantasy in a nurse's uniform, and Lara Flynn Boyle disappears from the film just as our concern for her grows.

For an Alan Parker film, The Road to Wellville is not half bad, but there's still the nagging feeling that we're watching an elaborate production with communication problems, made by an Englishman who previously made embarassingly confused movies about the Civil Rights murders and the Japanese-American internment camps. The idea alluded to at the end, that America is and always was a nation of nitwits who'll make a soft drink laced with cocaine their national beverage, plays like more smug 'stick it to the Yankees' humor.

Columbia TriStar's DVD of The Road to Wellville is bright, colorful and nicely transferred in Hi-Def, but it's another one of those irritating 'reformatted for your tv' pan & scan jobs. Things look crowded left and right, with loose space in the middle, and the effect is as visually uncomfortable as one of Dr. Kellogg's colonics. The 'special features' list on the package-back doesn't have any - unless you count advertising Bonus Trailers, or Scene Selections as Special. Next they'll be listing the plastic case (Columbia still uses the reliable Amaray cases) as a special feature.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Road to Wellville rates:
Movie: Good -
Video: Fair, on account of formatting to fit somebody else's teevee
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: none
Packaging: Amaray case
Reviewed: November 11, 2002