The Money Pit (1986)

The Money Pit arrives from 1986, a year when a Hollywood comedy could still concern itself entirely with a staircase collapsing. Tom Hanks and Shelley Long buy a Long Island mansion for $200,000, watch it disintegrate around them, and bicker about fidelity while contractors assure them the work will take two weeks. Richard Benjamin directs with the brisk indifference of a man who knows the house is the real star. The film is a loose remake of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and it inherits that picture's concerns without alteration: property, money, and the quiet humiliation of the middle class.

On the question of social consciousness, the cupboard is bare. The cast is white to a man, with Wendell Pierce surfacing as a paramedic for a single scene and Yakov Smirnoff present as a Russian caricature. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no racial subject, no environmental concern, no body politics, no neurodivergent character. Shelley Long plays a classical musician, which is a job, not a thesis. The film's anger lands on contractors, realtors, and con artists, which reads as a complaint about renovation costs, not a critique of capital. The swindlers flee to Brazil. That is the full extent of the economic analysis.

The film preaches nothing to anyone, which in 1986 was simply called comedy. Ebert dismissed it as one monotonous sight gag after another, and he was not wrong, though the sustained Rube Goldberg sequence earns its grudging respect. The result is a document of a vanished mode: a studio comedy that wanted only to make an audience laugh at a bathtub falling through a floor. We classify it, we file it, we move on.