The story finds Pee-wee living near a mean-minded small town where everybody is grumpy and selfish all day. Pee-wee’s farm is out on the edge of town, where he has trained his horses and cows to sleep under the covers at night, and make their beds in the morning. And he has gone into partnership with Vance, the talking pig, to develop several new species of plants, including a giant cantaloupe and a tree that grows hot dogs.
One day a giant storm comes along and blows a circus into town - a circus led by ringmaster Kris Kristofferson and his miniature wife (Susan Tyrrell, photographed to look 2 inches high). The circus has spirit but not much luck, and engagements are so hard to come by that Kristofferson decides to settle his people on Pee-wee’s farm while he searches for a new idea.
As the movie opens, Pee-wee is engaged to the local schoolmarm (Penelope Ann Miller), even though she always makes egg salad sandwiches for his lunch. But it’s love at first sight after he sees Gina (Valeria Golino), the beautiful Italian acrobat, and that leads to the big romantic scene with the waterfall and the elephant.
Pee-wee Herman, created by Paul Reubens, is a character who deserves comparison with the great movie clowns of the past, from Chaplin’s Tramp to Tati’s Mr. Hulot. But I imagine that sometimes the character must seem confining to Reubens, who, after all, cannot be expected to chortle and flap his hands in the air for the rest of his career. “Big Top Pee-wee” perhaps represents an attempt to broaden Pee-wee’s image, to make him seem marginally more human, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea.
In “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and on the Pee-wee Herman television program, we can find a zany weirdness, a goofy, fantastical world in which clocks and chairs have minds of their own. With every step that Pee-wee takes out of that world and into the real one, he loses some of the wonder of his original inspiration. And although it is true that “Big Top Pee-wee” has the flimsiest and silliest of plots, even that much realism may be too much.
If Pee-wee has problems with realism in this film, his co-stars have even more. Kristofferson, Miller, Golino and the others play “normal” characters, and none of them seem quite sure how to relate to whom, or what, Pee Pee has become. Kristofferson does the best job, with his matter-of-fact directness.
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