Trading Places 1983

[6.5/10] There’s something about class issues that lend themselves to comedy. Slobs vs. snobs is a venerable strain of humor on the silver screen, especially in the eighties, and Trading Places tries to take advantage of that. Giving us Dan Aykroyd as fastidious stuffed shirt Louis Winthorpe and Eddie Murphy as the street-raised hustler Billy Ray Valentine, and having their otherwise distinct worlds collide, is a solid, time-tested recipe to wring some laughs out of the contrast between the well-heeled and the worn-heeled.

The film even has the ring of social commentary to it. The instigating event of the film sees a pair of well-to-do brothers, Randall and Mortimer Duke, using Winthorpe and Valentine as pawns in a “scientific experiment” to try to settle the old debate over whether it’s nature or nurture that makes the man. Randall proposes that if they flipped the two young men’s positions, the con artist would became an upstanding man of business and the young heir apparent would turn to a life of crime, while Mortimer suggests its the men’s genes that tell the tale. So they place a bet and resolve to pluck Valentine from security and set him up with a fancy home and cushy job, and conspire to ruin Winthorpe’s life at every turn.

The results are reasonably fun and minorly incisive. The movie suggests that all it takes a little nudge, a small taste of luxury and stuffiness, for Valentine to turn into the thing he was railing at moments ago, eschewing his former cohort as a pack of freeloaders destroying his nice new house and champion tough love for criminals and thieves. At the same time, it casts Winthorpe’s position as unexpectedly precarious, where the safety net, social connections, and golden parachutes he expected to save him from any trouble crumble with hardly a push, eventually going pretty dark with where it leaves the character in his squalor.

It’s a hopelessly simplistic and frankly naive take on class and culture, but one that probably passes muster for the intellectual weight of an eighties romp. There’s juice to the idea, however unrealistically it’s realized here, that our circumstances can be corrupting in either direction, that there’s a potential scoundrel hiding beneath the guy in the pressed suit, and potential captain of industry beneath the guy the police are hassling in the public park. The flip and transformation that Valentine and Winthorpe experience is cutting commentary, regardless of the gaps in logic and convenience of the film’s dramatization of it.

The problem is that the film doesn't really devote enough time to those transformations to make them meaningful or all that funny. The best part of Trading Places is its first act, where the movie spends almost all of its time comparing and contrasting its two main characters. There’s more believable if exaggerated commentary to just showing the differences and similarities of the lives of Winthorpe and Valentine, and the unlikely places where their lives intersect, than to their presto change-o shifts in circumstances.

One of the best things about the film’s opening chapter is that the humor is light but all the more potent because of it. Sure, letting Eddie be Eddie means you’re always going to get something a little extra, but in its early going at least, Trading Places eschews the setup-punchline-joke routine for more atmospheric comedy. The opening segments are impeccably shot, finding the humor in the contrasts of Withorp’s babied shuffle to work and the club and Valentine’s fast-talking panhandling on the streets of Philadelphia through imagery alone. And even the way the two’s brief confrontation spirals out into fish tales on both sides of the equation has a low key but hilarious knowing quality to it.

The problem is that Valentine turns on a dime, switching to a tailored-suit upper cruster attitude who’s focused on business in the span of just a few scenes. Winthorpe’s decline is slightly more gradual and believable, and he suffers humiliation after humiliation until he’s beside himself. But the point the movie wants to make, the laudable “not so different, you and I” comparison between these two men it wants to draw, falls apart when their transformations and shifts in perspective happen almost by fiat. Eddie Murphy is always going to be worth a chuckle playing off a pair of suits, and Dan Aykroyd is very funny as a proto-Frasier Crane brought down to pavement-level, but even that can only get you so far.

Then, you have those very 1983 things that take you out of whatever commendable and comedic point the movie seems to want to make. Trading Places features: blackface, cultural stereotypes, slurs against black people and gay people, harassment of women on the street, and jokes about prison rape and, of all things, gorilla rape. Comedy in particular is fraught territory to revisit, as cultural norms shift so quickly that what used to be acceptable slowly becomes taboo, and some allowances have to be made for the times in which something was made. But this film is almost unwatchable at times due to this type of material. You know things have taken a turn when the prominence of the World Trade Center towers feels like the mildest reason the movie might feel differently today than when it debuted.

And that’s before the movie’s treatment of women. This being an eighties movie comedy, the women in the picture basically exist only to fawn over the men and, every once in a while, take their clothes off. The one exception to this is Ophelia, the sex worker who takes in Winthorpe and, for a brief gleaming moment, gets to be female and a person. She offers the only (brief) rejoinder to the film’s “environment is everything” thesis, proving that regardless of her station, she’s a kinder person than either Winthorpe or Valentine, and despite (or perhaps because of) her profession, she has more financial sense than the two of them either. But then she soon falls in love with Winthorpe because reasons, and is quickly reduced to nannying him, cheering him on, and of course, taking her clothes off around him. She’s a promising character who, like every other woman in Trading Space eventually finds herself flattened to one-dimensional set dressing.

Even the film’s solid-if-flawed social commentary goes by the wayside in a disastrous third act that jettisons any pretense of class satire in favor of a bargain basement zany scheme. It involves a convoluted effort to hoodwink Randolph and Mortimer’s hatchetman, involving a pack of more SNL alumni shoehorned into the flick, and nearly grinds the film to a halt with its overstuffed, unfunny parade of racist Looney Tunes escapades. The closing scenes on the trading floor, where Valentine and Winthorpe team up to best their belittling tormentors, is rousing enough, but beyond the standard triumph, there’s no capstone put on what the film seemed to be trying to stay. Instead, the good guys win; the bad guys lose, and we haven’t learned much beyond the fact that crusty old billionaires in movie comedies suck -- hardly a revelation.

Still, Trading Places is not without its charms. Despite some retrograde jokes and a limited perspective, the comic talents of Akroyd and Murphy rise to the top, and the wild, class-conscious, vaguely Job-like premise carries a lot of the weight. But it also feels like a movie of missed potential, where the possibility of comedy and commentary was well-enough realized but tossed aside into a sea of all-too-rapid transformation, uncomfortable gags, and wacky misadventures. Perhaps now, thirty-five years later, a remake is in order to capitalize on that potential, so that in 2053, some guy on the internet can deem it well-intentioned but quaint. Sunrise, sunset.

Even as a child of the 80s, I somehow missed "Trading Places," probably because my parents didn't even have a VCR until 1990-ish, and so this movie, which came out in 1983, had passed me by. But I caught up with it a couple days ago. One commentator seemed puzzled by the racism that ran throughout the movie. I was puzzled by the puzzlement because the whole movie was a social commentary on race and class, showing that, if given the same opportunities, a black man plucked off the streets could fare as well or even better than a white counterpart. Now, is it racist to even suggest that that - wasn't - the case? Sure, but before we castigate a film for bringing up the topic at all, perhaps clumsily, might we remember that nearly all major league sports franchises are dominated by white millionaires and billionaires, and as of 2021, only 6 percent of chief executives in the United States were black, compared with 86 percent white, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so apparently we have a ways to go and racism in society and in business is far from in our rearview mirror, so I can appreciate a movie like this for having something to say in a decade so replete with vapid film fodder.

"Trading Places" had a few funny moments, but it seemed to me that comedy was almost beside the point here. Two old white brothers, on a wager and to explore their longstanding debate over nature vs. nurture, decided to destroy the life of one of their young white employees (Dan Aykroyd), relegating him to life on the streets, meanwhile elevating a black man of said streets (Eddie Murphy). The former fared terribly in his new digs, while the latter proved to be more adept in the stock game than Aykroyd's character. The film also punctuated the fact that, as ever - largely remaining unchanged 40 years hence - old rich, white men are really pulling the strings of society. It has all the flaws one might expect from a not-so-terribly-funny buddy comedy from the early 80s, but it's probably not fair to judge it by today's standards, although if only more comedies today actually had some meat to their message, or any message for that matter. "Trading Places" at least has that advantage over nearly every 90-minute pile of stupid that Hollywood churns out year after year.