The Problematics: ‘Overboard’, A Romantic Comedy In Which Kidnapping is…No Big Deal?

Consider this premise: An unmarried man, burning with resentment, kidnaps an amnesiac woman from a mental hospital and holds her captive in his home, where he and his four accomplices compel the woman to do their bidding. 

Sounds maybe a bit like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but no, it’s actually the foundational premise of a romantic comedy. Overboard, a 1987 movie directed by Garry Marshall from a script by Leslie Dixon, is not just a romantic comedy — but a bit of a family romantic comedy. The male in question, a carpenter and all-around handyman named Dean and played with Disney-era charm and ebullience by Kurt Russell, is a widower and single dad with four young boys, who are the aforementioned accomplices.

And speaking of Disney-era, the kidnapped woman is played by Goldie Hawn, the neo-screwball queen of the late ’70s and most of the ’80s. Not someone you generally associate with Disney except that her first film appearance was in the studio’s 1968 The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, in a bit part. Said film also featured…Kurt Russell, as one of the Family Band members. The two did not reconnect, and connect romantically, until 1984’s Swing Shift, a romantic drama on which Hawn, a producer, clashed with director Jonathan Demme. 

The decision to make their next film together a full-on comedy proved a smart one. Even with that premise. Let’s backpedal a bit. 

The movie opens in distinctly unpromising fashion, with bouncy Alan Silvestri music and a goofy title font. Watching it I thought, “No wonder people turned to cocaine in the 1980s.” The location is a seaport in Oregon, and Marshall, or the second unit, present shots of simple working fishermen. There’s one doffing a red baseball cap! My God! Does it say, “Make America Great Again?” It does not. (Phew.) It says, “Damn Seagulls.” Because this movie was made when America was still great, damn it. (Reagan’s second term, yes?)

Hawn plays Joanna, an impossibly imperious rich woman terrorizing the crew of her cartoonish yacht and cramping the style of her cartoonish snob husband (Edward Herrmann). While stopping in Oregon, she hires Dean to make a new shoe closet on the boat. He contrives a clever space-saving scheme but she burns him on the deal because he used oak rather than cedar. She then throws him off the boat, literally, along with his toolbox and tool belt. 

Home he goes with his tail between his legs, confiding to his beer buddy Billy (Mike Hagerty) and trying to rein in his four boys. (They are introduced in the credits with a single “And Introducing” card, but this proved overly optimistic; as of this writing, the child actors’ careers have all stalled, the most active one only extending to the year 2000.) In the meanwhile, Joanna herself falls off her yacht and washes up in Dean’s town, bereft of memory. Herrmann’s husband checks in on her and promptly checks out, sailing to L.A. to spend his money and time on booze, broads and bingo (okay, no bingo).

Seeing her story on the local TV news, Dean exclaims to Billy, “That’s her?” “Who?” Billy asks. “The bitch,” Dean yells, grinning widely. Eye-opening! However: Dean continues, “There is a God and he loves me!” To which Billy answers, “You’re not gonna shave your head, are you?” The movie has more of these chortlesome zingers than you might think it has a right to. 

So now we get to the meat of things: Dean goes to the hospital and claims her. He calculates the amount of housework he can get out of her in order to make up for his loss at her hands. Like this is supposed to actually make sense to the viewer.

But here’s the thing. This is another neo-screwball comedy, and the premise has a deliberate amount of extra voltage attached. One recalls 1936’s My Man Godfrey in which William Powell’s “forgotten man” becomes a butler to Carole Lombard’s initially insensitive swell. Yes it’s the better movie — for one thing, the title font is classic — but we can’t pretend that Overboard doesn’t partake in its tradition despite the special pleading it has to do to make its more distasteful high concept more palatable.

Between Dixon’s script (she went on to pen Mrs. Doubtfire, another doozy of an idea) and Marshall’s direction, the special pleading is done with some deftness. Gaslighting Joanna into believing she’s his wife, Dean starts her on cleaning house and looking after the raucous tow-headed boys while he works multiple jobs. For some reason (given that they have no actual relationship), he lies about his night gigs, telling her he’s going bowling or drinking or something. He figures being a lout will make her suffer more. 

And what of the conjugal bed? He manages to kick her out of it on the first night, making up some stuff about their past together, terrorizing her with the prospect of sex, and installing her on the simulation of a sofa. “I’m a short, fat slut,” Joanna says as the ceiling leaks on her that rainy night. Anyway, this establishes that for Dean, kidnapping is one thing, but rape is another. (I guess that’s commendable of him?) His action has the salutary effect of putting sex in a drawer for much of the rest of the movie. This gives Hawn the opportunity to shoe her stuff as a physical comedian, and Russell to really work his what-me-worry everyman charm. The movie comes down with the cutes and improves accordingly. 

Joanna, who Dean now refers to as Anna, and Dean become something like an actual couple, only chaste. She chastises him for not disciplining the boys properly. She teaches the youngest one to read. She helps Billy and Dean realize their miniature-golf-course dream.

She essentially becomes a completely different person than the one she was on the yacht — a useful one. This conceit, too, has its roots in classical Hollywood — see 1942’s Random Harvest, which plays the “memory loss also changes your personality” card for melodrama rather than comedy. 

And their bond is strengthened when she discovers him moonlighting. She watches him as he hauls fertilizer to a pickup, showing the grim determination of one of the workers loading a pod truck in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. HE’S A GOOD MAN! Despite being a kidnapper. 

And so she falls in love with him, and he with her, and they have the sex. “Was it always like this?” she asks, mighty satisfied. “Every time with you is like the first time,” he says, sheepishly. Wow. Gimme an Andrew Dice Clay “OH!” over here. 

We all know where this is going: the “third act” twist, in which Goldie’s memory is restored, finds a newly nice Joanna doing tequila shots with the yacht crew, with whom she is now in solidarity. And, of course, the return to where she truly belongs, and to where, it is implied, she will be bringing her money. Maybe make that miniature golf concern a chain. One of the great things about romantic comedies of this ilk is that traumas that normally require years of treatment to untangle are forgiven and forgotten before the end titles roll. To paraphrase Danny De Vito in Heist: That’s why they’re called movies.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.