Review of Rubin & Ed movie

Review of Rubin and Ed (1991)

Rubin and Ed is a road trip comedy featuring a mismatched pair of oddballs on a strange odyssey to bury a cat and attend a pyramid selling seminar. It’s an unusual but alluring tale with many hilarious mishaps along the way.

Rubin Farr is a youngish recluse, devoted to Simon his recently deceased cat, and “encouraged” by a domineering mother to go out and meet people. An eccentric wardrobe and hairstyle complete his “El Weirdo” image. Ed Tuttle is a washed-up salesman under pressure to recruit new members into a cultish pyramid real estate scheme. But his desperation, sloganising and oversized toupe repel prospective clients. Their worlds collide when Rubin reluctantly agrees to attend Ed’s seminar and combine it with a mission to find a burial site for Simon the cat. So far, so unlikely!

What follows is a surreal desert adventure filled with comical arguments, existential musings and disasterous navigation. Lost in the barren Utah landscape, they endure heat, drought and the fallout from their clashing, quirky personalities. Rubin’s mission  remains – a fitting funeral for his cat, while Ed stays fixated on getting Rubin to the seminar and grabbing a slice of the American Dream. Along the way, they bicker, hallucinate and forge a surprising friendship. Their conversations, peculiar and at times surprisingly profound, reflect eccentric personalities that have been damaged by an unsympathetic world.

The movie is engaging, amusing and weirdly wonderful. The hallucinatory, otherwordly desert landscape, the offbeat interactions of the two obsessive principal characters and the bizarre humour make the movie delightfully unforgetable. Ultimately it’s a redemptive tale proposing that sometimes the most unlikely friendships can arise and endure.