Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at Swept Away, winner of five Razzie Awards including worst picture, the first movie ever to win both Worst Picture and Worst Remake or sequel, and the laser-guided assassin of yet another pop star’s film career.
Before we consider Swept Away, let us pause briefly to welcome Andrew Dominik’s feel-bad Marilyn Monroe biopic extravaganza Blonde to the coveted ranks of Razzie Worst Picture winners. As the sun rises in the east and the tides go in and out, so does the Great Truth of the Razzies hold fast: there is nothing the Razzies hate more than a star vehicle for a pretty actress. It doesn’t matter what else comes crawling up from the movie sewers that year; if there’s a maligned star vehicle for a pretty actress, it’s going to clean up at the Razzies.
So it was with Swept Away. Once upon a time, man-who-fancies-himself-a-film-director Guy Ritchie shot for the moon and the stars and got married to pop superstar and sex symbol Madonna (to whom he always referred, rather off-puttingly, as “the wife” or “the missus” in the press). If this were a different sort of column, we might have more time to spend on the strangeness of this romantic match: Ritchie was the Testosterone Tornado of gangsters, heists, and judo, while Madonna was a gay-boy icon who usually preferred to surround herself with dancers, drag queens, and other artistes. As it is, we shall focus on the moment they decided to try their hand at being the Dereks. Or, as Ritchie himself put it in a People retrospective that I can’t link to, “The idea was that the wife and I would make some sassy little art movie, but we got the shit kicked out of us.”
He even signed it, John Derek style!
The “sassy little art movie” they had in mind was to be based on a 1974 Italian black comedy by arthouse director Lina Wertmüller called Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny on the Blue Sea of August). Wertmüller’s film – a class satire about a pampered, snobby bourgeois princess and a Communist sailor who wash up together on a desert island and begin a violent passionate sexual relationship – was splashy and controversial upon its release, but it had its ardent fans, among them Roger Ebert and noted cinephile Madonna.
When Madonna and Ritchie decided to make a movie together, she suggested remaking Swept Away. Ritchie wanted to try making something other than a comedy-caper, and he jumped at the idea, quickly – very quickly – writing a script so they could get started. They easily got Wertmüller to grant Ritchie the rights, as she wanted to make a sequel and hoped to use renewed interest in her film as a springboard. By most accounts, the making of the film was pleasant and uneventful, nothing like the collapsing Jenga towers that account for the production of so many of the films considered the worst ever.
*insert lame “Madonna of the Rocks” joke here*
Then the movie hit theaters, and that’s where the problems started. Budget? $10 million. Box office? Around $600,000. Wertmüller, upon seeing the finished product, disavowed it and demanded to know why Ritchie and Madonna had treated her film this way. Nobody had expected a masterpiece, and entertainment reporters already poorly inclined towards Madonna were all too happy to bash the film around like boxing champions clobbering an overconfident amateur challenger. Word spread quickly that Swept Away was comically artless and had nothing to recommend it. The Razzies, smelling blood in that blue Mediterranean water, dutifully responded with a boatload of nominations for the failed Ritchie/Madonna passion project. No one, including its creators, has anything nice to say about it; the closest I could find was Paste Magazine’s Sydney Urbanek suggesting that the critical drubbing might have been a tad overblown and more than a tad misogynistic. So…shall I be the first?
THE STORY
I’m going to try. It’s not going to be easy, because it’s quite an inept little movie. But for reasons I cannot fully explain, I am determined to cut it some slack.
I’ll start by saying this for Swept Away: unlike certain other Razzie winners we could name, its plot is blessedly straightforward. Big Pharma kingpin Tony Leighton (Bruce Greenwood) arranges a private yacht cruise from Italy to Greece with his wife Amber (Madonna) and their friends Todd (Michael Beattie), Michael (David Thornton), Marina (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and Debi (Elizabeth Banks). “Rich bitch” does not even begin to cover what a ghastly viper of a woman the script requires Amber to be. She does not say a single nice word or do a single pleasant thing for the first hour of this hour-and-a-half movie. Every time she opens her mouth, it’s to spew venom at the nearest target. Lady Tremaine and Prince John are both more subtle, nuanced characters than Amber.
This is her face for three-quarters of the movie.
Amber’s favorite target is Giuseppe (Adriano Giannini, son of Giancarlo Giannini, who played the corresponding role in the original film), a deckhand and fisherman who is clearly not used to having to eat quite this much excrement while he caters to rich people. “Pepe” – or as Amber calls him in a desperately unfunny running bit, “Peepee” – does his not-very-good best to keep up a pleasant demeanor with Amber and her companions, only really letting loose on them when he gets below deck, where his crewmates (Yorgo Voyargis, Ricardo Perna, and George Yiasoumi) laugh and tell him to man up. Amber says something horrible, Pepe complains about it, everyone else on the boat shrugs and goes about their day: some version of this interaction, repeated twenty-seven thousand times, makes up all of the film’s first act.
One day, Amber’s husband and friends grow tired of her nonsense (or so it is implied) and ditch her while she’s napping to go swimming in a grotto. When she wakes up, she demands that Pepe take her to meet them. Pepe doesn’t want to; the weather looks shaky. She won’t hear no for an answer. So far, so .much the original, minus the obvious mockery of both main characters that makes the boat-bound half of Wertmüller’s film tolerable. Seriously, so many problems would be solved if Ritchie, Madonna, and Giannini would simply acknowledge that these people are over-the-top caricature embodiments of social class and not, like, real people acting like real people do.
Or getting sunburned like real people do.
So Pepe takes Amber out on a dinghy. The motor breaks down. An astonishingly stupid fight over a flare gun occurs, and they end up beached on an uninhabited island. Suddenly the tables are turned! Pepe, with all his survival skills, has the upper hand, and he takes advantage of Amber’s needing him to stay alive to become the dominant, aggressive figure in their relationship. He forces her into the role of a slave, demanding that Amber call him “master,” kiss his feet, and even dance for him. And whaddaya know, Amber discovers that she kind of likes being a submissive. Love – or some other drug – is in the air!
THE BAD
It will be neither interesting nor constructive to go through all the ways in which Swept Away is an embarrassing butchery of the 1974 film that inspired it. Suffice to say that the film is at its very worst when it most closely tries to replicate Wertmüller’s film, and achieves something approaching success where it deviates most, which unfortunately is not very often.
The biggest and snarliest problem is, of course, Madonna, or rather Madonna’s character. In Wertmüller’s film, the Amber character, Raffaela, is bratty and conceited and oblivious, but she’s not vicious the way Amber is. The most generous reading of Ritchie’s conception of the character is that he means her to be deeply unhappy and unfulfilled in her life as a socialite, and her desperate need to feel real feelings manifests in her cruelty. Which, fine, but she’s so awful. You’re going to have to work way harder than Swept Away does to make me care about the complex romantic yearnings of a woman who says things like “You can’t reason with a hairy black midget!” every couple of lines.
Madge herself – it’s not really her fault. She’s used to being a star, the star, not one cog in a machine of many, and you can tell that any time she’s not talking, she’s not so much listening to the person who is as she as anticipating her next line. It was her husband-director Guy Ritchie’s job to notice that and coach her out of it, or help her channel that tendency into the character. Maybe he tried. Maybe he thought he succeeded. I regret to inform them both that he did not.
Madonna, like the rest of us, unsure what is happening in front of her.
But the problems don’t stop with Madonna! If Amber is too bitchy to root for, her nemesis-turned-lover Pepe is too big of an idiot. For the first half of the movie, Pepe is whiny and pathetic. On the island, he turns on a dime into a sadistic monster, only to flip back to whiny and pathetic by the end once he’s head over heels in love with Amber. Both Madonna and Giannini are at their most compelling when they’re playing the more traditional romance of the third act, but they’re fighting losing battles, because there’s no way we can believe these two people are in love. Not when Swept Away spends twice as much screen time and three times as much dialogue on Pepe threatening to rape Amber as it does on the months-long development of their romance.
The writing and plotting are yet more liabilities. Worse than either of the two leads by themselves are the things Ritchie’s godawful script forces them to say, especially when he tries to transfer Wertmüller’s very Italian class politics over to his very American film. At one point poor Madonna has to deliver a wretched monologue about the virtues of capitalism as conceived by someone who has only heard of “capitalism” from watching telecasts of the Republican National Convention. Madonna is not up to the task, but neither would have been Bette Davis.
I wish I could say that the filmcraft offers some saving grace – Ritchie was an acclaimed director in the late ‘90s, after all – but it ranges from unremarkable to actively bad. Particular dishonorable mention goes to the “Mediterranean”-inflected score by Michel Colombier, which plods along arduously like a gondolier rowing his boat through a tar pit. As far as the visuals go, Ritchie and cinematographer Alex Barber have succeeded at making a gorgeous natural landscape look gorgeous. Way to meet those bare minimum standards every so often, gents.
They could not, however, always keep their camera reflections out of the shot.
THE GOOD
Now comes the part where I praise Swept Away, and where I praise it for committing all its supposed worst sins. Because, you see, the best thing Swept Away could have possibly been was a treacly romantic comedy, so if it was going to exist at all, it should have gone all in on the sentiment, and the hell with Wertmüller and her sequel plans.
In fact, I can save this movie with a single casting change: make it about Elizabeth Banks’s character.
Though we’d lose this lunatic scene where Pepe hallucinates Madonna-Amber dancing to “Come On-a My House,” and that would be a crying shame.
A question inevitably hangs in the air with all remakes: what is the point of this? Why, in this case, did the world need another Swept Away when it already had a very good Swept Away?
The non-Amber non-Pepe characters are mostly non-entities, with one exception. Baby Elizabeth Banks takes her pitiful little nothing of a role and makes it the highlight of every scene she’s in. She’s clearly the odd-one-out in the dynamic on the yacht, only here because she’s with one of the guys and not because anyone thinks she is one of the guys, but also she doesn’t know that so it’s awkward for everyone. If you want to talk about someone who would benefit from down-and-dirty carnal knowledge, she’s lurking in the background for the first half-hour and I miss her very much after she’s gone.
Since you’re already cutting all meaningful socio-political commentary from Wertmüller’s film, go all the way. Make it about a perky-but-unfulfilled clueless trophy wife instead of a repulsive harpy; make the fisherman’s frustrations rooted in her youth and silliness rather than her reprehensible treatment of him. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of Giannini’s sleepy-eyed shaggy sexiness in a more traditional trashy romance anyway. And the much-decried ending, in which the besotted Pepe and Amber are forcefully separated by the machinations of Amber’s husband, might have a chance at working, especially in the hands of an actress with Banks’s comedy chops. At worst, it’ll be forgettably okay. At best, it’ll be a solid date night movie and make way more than one-twentieth its budget back.
Then again, change something like that and we might never get Cocaine Bear.
Whether you think this is actually a good idea likely depends on your desire to see more trashy junk-food rom-coms in the world. As a shameless sentimentalist, I could always use more aching sincerity in my movies, and Swept Away isn’t a good enough bad movie for me to feel any guilt over depriving the world of it.
So I suppose I didn’t so much praise the movie as my own headcanon version of it. But the fact that I enjoyed turning it over in my head enough to dream up fan fiction about it has to count for something, right?
As things are, with the movie we actually got, no one who has seen more than about fifty films could reasonably call Swept Away one of the worst movies of all time. Indeed, no one who has seen The Adventures of Pluto Nash or could reasonably call it the worst movie of 2002. It suffered from deep-seated cultural resentment of Madonna and her perpetual-tabloid-cover relationship with Ritchie. (Indeed, it was probably the closest thing Ritchie got to a taste of what being “the missus” was really like.) It’s a fascinating failure of self-absorption, the kind where everyone involved is deeply and seriously committed to his or her own part of the process, but not to the whole. If any of those committed parts were actually good, Swept Away could have risen to enjoyably bad. As is, it’s incoherent slop notable mainly for how unnecessary it is. A film by Guy Ritchie indeed.
Hey, at least we got this out of it!
Quality of Movie: 1 / 5. The third act is saccharine, but watchable; the rest of the film is a very tough sit.
Quality of Experience: 2.5 / 5. At the very least, it’s fun to speculate about how much better it could have been if it were more like a Kevin Costner vanity project and less like a Guy Ritchie one.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.