There’s something about class conflicts that lend themselves well to comedy. The snobs vs. slobs dynamic has been a venerable strain of humor on the silver screen, especially in the eighties, and Trading Places aims to take advantage of that. It presents Dan Aykroyd as a snooty stuffed shirt named Louis Winthorpe and Eddie Murphy as a street-wise hustler named Billy Ray Valentine. As I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, Having the otherwise disparate worlds of these two men collide is a sound, time-tested recipe to wring some laughs out of the contrast between the well-heeled and the worn-heeled.
Trading Places 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.” The pair want to settle the old debate over whether nature or nurture makes the man. Randall theorizes that if they somehow manage to flip the positions of their erstwhile guinea pigs, the con artist would became an upstanding man of business and the young heir apparent would turn to a life of crime. Mortimer, on the other hand, suggests it’s the men’s genes that tell the tale. So the two aristocrats place a bet, resolving to pluck Valentine from obscurity and set him up with a fancy home and cushy job, while at the same time conspiring to ruin Winthorpe’s life at every turn.
The results are reasonably fun and even a little incisive. The movie suggests that all it takes a little nudge, a small taste of luxury and privilege, for Valentine to turn into the thing he was railing against moments ago. Suddenly, Murphy’s character is eschewing his former cohort as a pack of freeloaders who might destroy his nice new home, and he’s championing tough love for criminals and thieves. At the same time, the films presents Winthorpe’s position as unexpectedly precarious, where the safety net, social connections, and golden parachute he expected to save him from any trouble crumble with hardly a prick. Trading Places even has the gumption to take Winthorpe to some pretty dark places in his defeated 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. There’s a potential scoundrel hiding beneath the guy in the pressed suit, and a potential captain of industry beneath the ragged clothes of the man the police might hassle in a public park. The reversal and transformation that Valentine and Winthorpe experience is cutting commentary in and of itself, regardless of the gaps in logic and convenience of the film’s dramatization of it.
You could pretty much mix and match these guys as the villains in most 1980s comedies.
The problem is that the film doesn’t really devote enough time to those transformations to make them meaningful, or even especially funny. The best parts of Trading Places are in 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 in just showing the similarities and differences in the lives of Winthorpe and Valentine, and the unlikely places where their lives intersect, than in the film’s presto change-o shifts in circumstances.
The humor in the film’s opening chapter is light, but all the more potent because of that. Sure, letting Eddie be Eddie means you’re always going to get something a little extra, but in the film’s early going at least, Trading Places eschews the setup-punchline-joke routine for more atmospheric comedy. Those opening segments are impeccably shot, finding the humor in the differences between Winthorpe’s babied shuffle to work and stop off at the social club versus Valentine’s fast-talking panhandling on the streets of Philadelphia, through imagery alone. And even the way the pair’s brief confrontation spirals out into fish tales on both sides of the equation has a low key but hilariously knowing quality to it.
The problem is that, by the second act, Valentine turns on a dime, switching to a tailored-suit upper crust attitude and resolving to focus on business in the span of just a few scenes. Winthorpe’s decline is slightly more gradual and believable as he suffers humiliation after humiliation. 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 a modern viewer out of whatever commendable and comedic point a movie may wish to make. Trading Places features: blackface, cultural stereotypes, slurs against black and gay people, harassment of women on the street, and jokes about sexual assault in prison and, of all things, gorilla rape. Comedy in particular is fraught territory to revisit after decades have passed, as cultural norms shift so quickly that what used to be acceptable soon becomes taboo. Some allowances have to be made for the times in which something is made. But this film is almost unwatchable at times due to this sort of material. You know things have taken a turn when the prominence of the World Trade Center is only one reason this movie might feel very different today than when it debuted.
Don't worry. It gets worse.
And that’s before you get into the movie’s treatment of women. This being an eighties comedy, the women in the film basically only exist 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. Ophelia shows that regardless of her station, she’s a kinder person than either Winthorpe or Valentine, and despite (or perhaps because of) her profession, she also has more financial sense than the two of them put together. But then she quickly falls in love with Winthorpe (because reasons), and is just as rapidly reduced to nannying him, cheering him on, and of course, taking her clothes off around him for no apparent reason. She’s a promising character who, like every other woman in Trading Places, eventually finds herself flattened down 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. That elaborate flim flam involves a convoluted effort to hoodwink Randolph and Mortimer’s hatchet man, involving a pack of additional SNL alumni shoehorned into the flick. The movie 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 that standard triumph, there’s no capstone placed 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 eighties 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 Aykroyd 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 full of missed potential, where the possibility of comedy and commentary was well-enough realized at first but eventually tossed aside into a sea of all-too-rapid transformations, uncomfortable gags, and wacky misadventures. Perhaps now, thirty-five years later, a remake is called for to capitalize on that potential, so that in 2053, some guy on the internet can deem it well-intentioned but quaint. Sunrise, sunset.
