And odd movie, but interesting

The term “medical” is doing a lot in Alan Parker’s “Road to Wellville”, a farce centered around the Sanitarium of John Harvey Kellogg. Here’s a movie with a screwball spirit that kinda resembles a Coen Brothers film. It’s loaded with bizarre contraptions and procedures, cures, ablutions, and even a strict mandatory 5 enemas a day policy. It’s clearly meant to make fun of medical fads, some seemingly rooted in sexual kink.

Set in 1907, the film takes places at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan run by Kellogg (Anthony Hopkins). It’s a place where people run around in carefree ways, improving their mood and health by participating in things like forced, hearty laughter. Kellogg supports an all-vegetarian diet and rails against everything from meat, casual sex and masturbation. “An erection is a flagpole on your grave” is one of his popular sayings.

He has numerous patrons coming through his facility, like Eleanor and Will Lightbody (Bridget Fonda, Mathew Broderick). She is there for some R&R but Will has an unidentified illness which sees him needing to be separated from his wife. Is it serious? Not so much that it stops Will from fantasizing about his nurse (Taci Lind) in various stages of undress or getting aroused when he’s in a more delicate position.

Other patients include Miss Muntz (Lara Flynn Boyle), a pale-faced woman who is slowly turning green, a Russian (Alexander Slanksnis) with a terrible gas problem, and Virginia Cranehill (Camryn Manheim), who seems to get a sense of sexual satisfaction by the facility’s bicycle seat that she cannot from her husband.

Balancing yet even more characters, John Cusack is also in the film, playing a businessman named Charles Ossining. He has arrived in Battle Creek in order to challenge the Kellogg cornflake industry, of which John Harvey has also had a hand in creating, only to discover his business partner (Michael Lerner), a dishonest man, has blown the funds. No matter. They decide to bring on John Harvey’s willful adoptive son George (Dana Carvey), a vagrant who hates his father, as partner in order to present as a Kellogg knock-off.

The insinuation is that there isn’t much difference between businessmen looking to earn a buck with shoddy products and Kellogg making one off ridiculous cures. Still, it’s a storyline too far and I didn’t really think it needed it. Kellogg’s treatments- ranging from hydro-electrical testicle stimulation, spraying patients with a hose, whacking, beating, massaging, and forcing disgusting, healthy crud down their throats speak for itself.

It’s not a great comedy by any means but it’s a loony little medical time capsule film of the time period. The contraptions are a hoot- especially a vibrating cod-piece, and some of the doctors are able to hide just how odd and perverted they are behind a guise of medicine. The German sex therapist (Norbert Weisser) and Dr. Badger (Colm Meany) are awfully creepy (and kinda funny) in their "landmark" attentions to womb health.

There isn’t a person in this movie who isn’t hamming it up to the hilt, and this includes Hopkins, who seems to be having fun in a rare comedy. He sports a ridiculous goatee, soul patch, and overbite, and plays this preachy and severe man as pompously as he can. I suppose the only one we’re supposed to like here is Broderick, but he’s less a character and more a goof having all this crazy stuff happen to him.

This is all based on a novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, which was more about Battle Creek being a health haven for many years. I get the feeling many were disappointed by what writer-director Alan Parker did with it. And yeah, it’s long, extra goofy, sometimes too infatuated with poop and bowel jokes, and so loaded with different characters that a real plot or point never materializes.

But the extremity of these contraptions and the people promoting and accepting them as cures can be very funny, and like I said, kinda work as a fascinating, kinky time capsule. Parker doesn’t shy away from how creepy-sexual some of them really are, nor does in tone down the ridiculously awkward nudity. In the end, we feel a little dirty, more than vindicated in our knowledge that in some ways, the medical community is taking advantage of us.