The logline has the sort of \u201cprint the legend\u201d quality that American stories excel at: one night in 1967, a good-natured fuckup named Melvin Dummar (played by Paul Le Mat) pulls over on a desolate stretch of highway to piss and notices a disheveled man lying on the side of U.S. Route 95. He doesn\u2019t look like a billionaire, with hair like Einstein stuck his finger in an electrical socket and blood coming out of his left ear, but that\u2019s exactly what he\u2019ll claim to be. After the man refuses medical attention, Melvin agrees to drive him to Las Vegas, wearing down his belligerent exterior until he\u2019s goaded the old man into singing along to his original yuletide composition \u201cSanta\u2019s Souped-Up Sleigh.\u201d Nine years and three marriages to two wives later, Melvin finds himself named a beneficiary to the Howard Hughes estate. It\u2019s all billed as being \u201cpossibly true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s most remarkable about Melvin and Howard<\/em> is what it isn\u2019t: a film about Hughes. Once Melvin drops Hughes off (and gives him a quarter when he asks for money), he disappears entirely from the film, which opts instead to follow the slings and arrows of Melvin\u2019s (mis)fortunes through the sort of seedy strip clubs, trailer parks, and factory floors that are far from any milieu Hughes would recognize. Nor is Demme especially interested in interrogating the truth of Melvin\u2019s story once the so-called \u201cMorman Will,\u201d which deeded him $156 million of the Hughes fortune, surfaces. Instead it takes Melvin at his word, just as he does when Hughes reveals his identity to him on that fateful night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Viewers in 1980 must have been slightly mystified by this sideways approach to such a vaunted figure of recent American history. Hughes was one of our first great billionaire eccentrics, years before Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg made that a more dubious proposition. He was also a mercurial and difficult person, becoming a recluse in his later years as he struggled with mental illness and deteriorating physical health. Both Martin Scorsese and Warren Beatty spent decades developing projects on Hughes\u2019s life, eventually realizing them to varying degrees of success. But what Demme in his film and Robards in his performance intuitively understand is that \u201cHoward Hughes\u201d, much like the country that made him, was an entity created by committee, whose story changes depending on who\u2019s telling it. Whatever true self he possessed was inaccessible by design. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Robards had plenty of experience playing famous Americans during the span of his fifty-two years on stage and screen, including three presidents, Mark Twain, and, in the one-two punch that won him successive Best Supporting Actor Oscars, Washington Post<\/em> executive editor Ben Bradlee in 1976\u2019s All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> and Dashiell Hammett in 1977\u2019s Julia<\/em>. He wasn\u2019t exactly in his twilight years when he played Hughes, but he effectively embodies the crusty carapace of a man whose best times are behind him, if they ever truly existed in the first place. Demme gets plenty of comedic mileage out of simply holding the camera on Robards\u2019s face as he makes minute adjustments to Hughes\u2019s thousand yard stare, at once amused and appalled by his unlikely savior, sometimes crafty and sometimes cruel as he tests Melvin\u2019s boundaries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hughes was a man who only truly seemed comfortable with himself when in motion, and Robards conveys this as well. The most touching scene in the film comes at the end, when Melvin has given up any pretense of actually getting the money and is driving back down the same road he did a decade before. He remembers a moment not depicted earlier, when Hughes badgered Melvin into letting him drive his truck. Extending Hughes the same goodwill that he\u2019s accepted from him, Melvin drifts to sleep while Hughes is at the wheel, a look of pure unfettered joy in the old man\u2019s eyes. The end credits roll as Robards warbles his way through \u201cBye Bye Blackbird.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s surely this simultaneous capacity for prickliness and humanity that Paul Thomas Anderson had in mind when he created Earl Partridge, who has amassed a Hughes-like wealth but been rendered immobile by his illness. Robards\u2019s second act-ending monologue probably contains more lines than the entirety of his role in Melvin and Howard<\/em>, but the counsel Partridge offers could have been as easily directed at Melvin as the aide at his bedside: \u201cUse that regret for anything, any way you want\u2026 Life ain\u2019t short, it\u2019s long.\u201d Soon after, Robards will join the rest of Magnolia<\/em>\u2019s cast in a rendition of Aimee Mann\u2019s \u201cWise Up.\u201d To be able to tie up a career in such a neat bow is a mixed blessing, in some ways. He probably knew the end was coming. But as both Earl and Howard demonstrate, if given the chance, it\u2019s best to go out singing. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/melvin2.jpg\")
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