Retrospective: Ishtar (Patreon)

Elaine May's previous films had largely been character-driven relationship comedies starring character actors as put-upon smucks [sic] in extremely stressful life-altering situations. Ishtar is not much of a departure for May in this regard, but its scale certainly is. While her previous movies were largely set in American cities, Ishtar is May's great international epic. Its protagonists start off as extremely bad lounge singers and wind up as pawns in a U.S.-Middle East espionage war. This kind of batshit silliness is different for May, whose previous movies aimed for absurdity rather than high-concept madness.

The biggest change here though, and one for which Hollywood has never forgiven May, is that Ishtar's leads are played by aging movie stars. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty simply did not play roles like this. Stars their age were not supposed to make big dumb movies like Ishtar. They were supposed to age with dignity or fall out of the spotlight altogether. To see Hoffman and Beatty go for broke and embrace all-out silliness post-Kramer and Reds was — well, to paraphrase Neil Young, people their age don't do the things they do.

Ishtar isn't as good as its apologists make out. It's rife with Orientalist tropes, as guilty as tokenizing and smearing the Middle East as Raiders of the Lost Ark (which, with the map that serves as the MacGuffin shows, is probably the model for this movie's plot). The sheer creation of Ishtar is yet another example of the West creating an image of the Middle East and North Africa for it to project itself onto. Isabelle Adjani's casting as a Middle Eastern insurgent is a fairly disastrous choice. And the scene where Dustin Hoffman pretends to be a Berber is perhaps the only moment where the film is as bad as its detractors say.

At the same time, Ishtar is tied with Burn After Reading for the title of Most Accurate Movie About the CIA. The plot of two washed up lounge musicians getting drawn into a C.I.A. operation involving a Middle Eastern kingdom and an insurgent cell wouldn't be out of place in the pages of Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes. The movie lampoons American foreign adventurism only a year after the release of Top Gun. It's as unflattering a picture of America's foreign policy as Eighties cinema would show. The fact this got released is something of a miracle. Ishtar is also consistently funny — Hoffman and Beatty are a hilarious double act, and their musical numbers are wonderful anti-classics. In an era of Back to the Futures and Breakfast Clubs, where Americans triumph in the free marketplace thanks to the intervention of Reaganomics, it's nice to see a Hollywood comedy where Americans are a bunch of losers.