Films Seen - April 2000

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

THE HURRICANE (27) (dir., Norman Jewison) Denzel Washington, John Hannah, Deborah Kara Unger, Liev Schreiber ["Three times life, that's what I got. And for what? For murders I didn't commit," explains our hero (to himself!) during the opening credits. "You've been after me my whole life," he informs the racist cop a little later. "I'm gonna take your black ass down," replies the racist cop, laying his racist-cop credentials on the line. ("He's a nigger with a knife - I don't care about his age," he adds in a flashback, being a racist cop as I may already have mentioned.). "You've been convicted by a jury of your peers," intones the judge at Rubin's trial - and the film instantly cuts to a shot of said jury, all of them glowering at the defendant disapprovingly, making it clear (get this!) they're an all-white jury! Ever seen one of those movies where everything's so crude and cliché-ridden, thuds to earth so miserably, that after a while even the little things start to get on your nerves? An innocuous line like "Lesra, get up - breakfast is ready" made me want to throw things at the screen (but it's such a lazy, honey-I'm-home type of line ; and it typifies the stolidity and lack of imagination). Time for Jewison to leave off making blunt instruments and start boring the grandkids with heroic Tales Of The 60s ; time for Washington to start reading scripts - everything good about the film is down to his immense natural dignity, but it's yet another dud in an increasingly wayward career. Michael Mann-like theme of self-sufficiency (survival tool or emotional short-circuit?) is intriguing, and I quite liked the three-Denzels-in-a-cell set-up ; everything else hackneyed and perfunctory, with risible detail. Pasting cardboard squares labelled "LIAR" over unreliable witnesses on the defence team's bulletin board is dumb enough ; making sure each square is meticulously stencilled is just hilarious.]

GIRL, INTERRUPTED (53) (dir., James Mangold) Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg [Liked this more while watching it than thinking about it - partly, I think, because Ryder's translucent face projects beguiling shades of sensitivity without ever quite suggesting suicidal despair or emotional disturbance (she looks upset more than anything ; you want to give her a hug and make her a cup of hot chocolate). Also because the film (which she executive- produced) never allows her character to become unsympathetic, though it does suggest her problems may be partly of her own making : there's a scene about halfway through where her boyfriend begs her to leave the hospital and run away to Canada with him, but she refuses to abandon her friends - and the whole scene's played as an affirmation of Sisterhood, barely hinting at the fact that her time in the hospital's made her docile and inert, sapping her will to flee ("They're breaking you," he says - and he's right). The whole film's a bit like that, unable or unwilling to make the tough decisions or call things for what they are : impossible to say if Jolie's manic energy is a spur to sanity for her friend or an obstacle to be overcome (the actress's showy performance doesn't help), hard to know how far the film agrees with shrink Redgrave's assertion that sanity and insanity are "courses of action" for the individual to decide between (why all the flashbacks to Winona's oppressive life if she's supposed to be driving herself crazy?). The various parts don't really connect - talking on the couch finally proves therapeutic, but what about our heroine's earlier, withering comment that therapy basically consists of telling a shrink your secrets, following which you can be pronounced "cured" (was she wrong? or has something changed?)? No surprise that it finally opts for chick-flick bonding ("They were not perfect, but they were my friends," sez the voice-over as the women's ward gather to say goodbye), very much an easy way out ; works okay nonetheless, taken scene for scene. Individual-versus-System an irresistible theme, Ryder endlessly watchable, Clea Duvall's apprehensive freshness (think startled farm-girl) very winning in a minor role ; also delighted to hear one of my favourite Wilco songs, though it does rather screw up the period soundtrack...]

BOYS DON'T CRY (65) (dir., Kimberly Peirce) Hilary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard [Whither director Peirce's sub-PRIVATE IDAHO stylings? Not entirely sure (trying to escape a TV-movie tag, perhaps?), but they make a welcome-if-unnecessary bonus to a haunting, deceptively simple indie. Sexual politics exemplary, special pleading at a minimum, alive to the ambiguities and essential meaninglessness of gender roles - making it clear, for instance, that the guys' macho acceptance of Brandon is fraught with homoerotic overtones (that they still call 'him' "little dude" even after they've raped her is one of those details so bizarre it can only be true). Hero / heroine's motives equally ambiguous, though the key moment is undoubtedly his / her look of sheer exhilaration at the wheel of a car being pursued by the cops - an overgrown tomboy doing 'boy things', bluffing her way into a man's world. Fine performances, strong sense of place, occasional otherworldly image (the blue light of the factory where Lana works, seen at night from outside the window, looking like an antiseptic setting from a dystopian sci-fi movie) ; why is it so difficult for actresses to convince as men, though (much trickier than the opposite, though maybe I'm just more alert to the details of my own gender)? Swank works hard, but those fluttery mannerisms and impossibly high-pitched voice leave the character no more than androgynous. But maybe that's the point...]

TOY STORY 2 (72) (dir., John Lasseter) With the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack [The original TOY STORY made cartoons truly three-dimensional ; this sequel adds a fourth dimension - Time - giving the toys a past and a future, which is why it's unexpectedly poignant as well as ingenious ; trouble is, the poignancy overshoots the ingeniousness. Woody's Dilemma - what's more important, security or the transient pleasures (and attendant pain) of being loved? - makes the problem-solving, set-'em-up-knock-'em-down nature of the rest of it seem a little sterile : it sometimes feels like it was written by puzzle-buffs or (perish the thought) computer programmers, constantly giving the toys impossible challenges and coming up with creative solutions. Witty, touching, intricate, endlessly clever nonetheless ; seems a little churlish to complain really. Been-there-done-that factor coming into it, perhaps...]

THE ETERNAL (62) (dir., Michael Almereyda) Alison Elliott, Jared Harris, Christopher Walken, Lois Smith [How did this slip under everybody's radar? Doing for OLD DARK HOUSE / Edgar Allan Poe territory roughly what NADJA did for the vampire movie, it's less New York-boho, more a conventional horror film with an Other to be vanquished, but still dreamlike and visually potent, alternating between suitably elemental images of fire and water - damp-blue Irish landscapes followed by candlelight-orange interiors, flat contours of sea and sky followed by ornate rooms and winding corridors : the abiding impression is of twisted, evil things in the midst of a haunted, airy vastness. Almereyda's sketchy way with a narrative actually helps, adding to the ethereal, half-comprehended mood, but he still comes across as something of a dilettante : I'm still not sure if the emphasis on whisky and cigarettes has thematic relevance (little vices as indicators of humanity?), or if it's just there because it looks kinda cool. Best lines (coming apropos of nothing) : "Have you seen any big vulture-like birds flying around?" ; "No, but then I am certifiably blind five years now."]

MAN ON THE MOON (63) (dir., Milos Forman) Jim Carrey, Danny De Vito, Courtney Love, Paul Giamatti ["The world is an illusion, and we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously," says Carrey / Kaufman by way of explaining his philosophy - but the flipside is perhaps that you need to take the world of illusion (a.k.a. showbiz) very seriously indeed to find his formalist pranks and inversion of audience expectations anything more than trivial Art-about-Art (making the film, I suppose, Art-about-Art-about-Art). No surprise that his fearless spirit has been an inspiration to other artists, even greater ones (nothing in the film quite matches R.E.M.'s titular tribute), but ordinary schmoes may be fascinated less by the act than the psychological profile behind it, a man unable to relate emotionally to other people - entertaining himself rather than the audience, as the film notes - using his onstage persona to play complicated power-games ; his brand of comedy, orchestrating audiences' emotional response, is in fact as manipulative as the "loveable goofy mechanic" he so despises, and this might be a more impressive film if it acknowledged that : there's a layer of hagiography, not to mention self-congratulation (shades of LARRY FLYNT) about the depiction of the various squares who don't 'get' Kaufman - though it does make the point that he belongs to a pre-irony age, paving the way for our own age of reflexive post-modernism (we're harder to shock nowadays - because we're constantly on our guard against taking anything seriously in the first place). Banal showbiz biography in many ways, not always convincing, even on a basic level (not too clear why promoters - who, we're supposed to believe, are as baffled by Kaufman as audiences are - connive in his effects by, e.g., introducing Tony Clifton as "Mr. Entertainment"), but Carrey holds it together : uncanny imitation is one thing but he also captures the remoteness, the sense of a man living so completely in his own mind he's become a shell, practically body-snatched. Hard to pull off (Oscar-winning Dustin couldn't manage it in RAIN MAN), caught so completely you have to wonder if it's even acting. Strange and absorbing, almost despite itself.]

THE RED VIOLIN (62) (dir., Francois Girard) Samuel L. Jackson, Colm Feore, Greta Scacchi [Is there a common thread to the five stories making up the red violin's adventures? I can do three out of five - Man's attempts to harness / control aesthetic beauty, whether through structure (the Vienna episode), hubristic craftsmanship (Italy) or political repression (China) - but the modern-day section seems more of a framing device, and the England-set episode escapes me entirely (as it seems to have escaped the film-makers, for it's really quite silly). Solid and satisfying in a handsome, slightly predictable mini-series way - faint praise, admittedly, but it does all work intelligently enough. The violin music helps, natch.]

HOLY SMOKE (61) (dir., Jane Campion) Kate Winslet, Harvey Keitel, Pam Grier, Julie Hamilton [So near and yet so far ... An often exhilarating film - opening credits, final vision-in-the-desert, Neil Diamond on the soundtrack as Keitel sorts out tangled airport trolleys with the air of Jesus handing out loaves and fishes - that basically falls apart, though the descent into chaos is largely deliberate, immediately following / resulting from the success of Keitel's "deprogramming". He "destroys my love", says the heroine, bursting the bubble of her spirituality (he is indeed a Devil, as she claims - and Campion backs it up with a sly shot of flames dancing in his eyes), not realising the dangers of doing so : a religious cult is another system of control, just like his own rigorous system - in destroying it he ushers in the pleasures of the flesh, instantly reducing himself to a dirty old man with a fragile male ego. Campion's worldview is liberationist-feminist - her heroines (in THE PIANO or ANGEL AT MY TABLE) find fulfilment by refusing to ally themselves, realising that love can also be a trap (whether it's the "absolute Love" of the cult leader or Ruth's family building a cage with their hands while insisting that "we love you"), specifically a trap to control female sensuality : the film's chaotic final section is the blossoming of that sensuality, and feels like it's turning the tables, especially in feminising Keitel, mocking his patriarchal controlling-ness of the first half (the cultural-imperialist control of America over Australia also comes into it, I suspect). What makes the film an honourable failure is that none of this really fits together - it might work if Ruth were a fool or a stooge in the early stages, but the relationship feels from the first like a battle of equals, so the third-act power-shifts and transformations don't connect to anything (and become tedious) ; what makes it a semi-success is the satirical detail and rich, headlong imagery, plus the constant sense of fragile support-systems trying to make sense of Life. And of course I'm delighted by any suggestion that "Do you have a website?" can now be a prelude - and, why not, even a prerequisite - to oral pleasure...]

TUMBLEWEEDS (45) (dir., Gavin O'Connor) Janet McTeer, Kimberly J. Young, Jay O. Sanders, Gavin O'Connor [I don't like these little-bit-of-everything movies. The heroine's kid says things like "You're in denial" (she's precocious) but also has asthma (vulnerable). Heroine herself picks flowers when they're stranded in the middle of the desert (irresponsible) but comforts her daughter when she can't sleep at night (caring), veers between spirited and long-suffering, carefree and concerned ; rounded characters maybe - fine performances, certainly - but a bland, blurry film. Michael J. Pollard is a small pleasure (no offence), mother and daughter singing "Que Sera Sera" in the car and sensitive Mr. Right teaching the girl about iambic pentameter ("Shakespeare wrote to the beat of the human heart") probably the low points. Quite ironic, by the way, that this of all films should polarise so completely between said Sensitive Type (good) and the macho guy who wants her to be "normal" and thinks the kid could use a little discipline (bad) : the heroine's guy (being a construct, unimportant in himself) is the only character who could have been a little bit of everything. Didn't anyone see ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE?]

THE LIMEY (66) (dir., Steven Soderbergh) Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzman [Is this the year of incredible surfaces or what? Add this stylish item to the likes of THREE KINGS, FIGHT CLUB, THE INSIDER et al. ("a golden age of film technique", to quote Andrew O'Hehir), and add Soderbergh - if you haven't already - to the shortlist of directors who can make the medium sit up and beg. Clearly the cleverness is more than just an editing exercise - cutting a dialogue scene so it's spread out over two different settings, for example (playing alternate lines in alternate settings, though it all sounds seamless), isn't just ingenious but also dissolves space and time, reinforcing the theme of the past impinging on the present ; yet the impression persists of film-makers dancing around the core of their story, unwilling to get their hands dirty. It has roughly the emotional heft of a spaghetti Western, combining an impassive tough-guy attitude to Death (e.g. the offscreen shoot-out) with a generalised poignancy (the clips of young Stamp in POOR COW taking the place of Charles Bronson's harmonica or the musical watch in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE ; and isn't Luis Guzman the perfect late-90s Eli Wallach?) - which is nothing against spaghetti Westerns, as long as Soderbergh eventually graduates to his ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA ; his emotional reserve may look like dignity here, but I suspect it's boredom. Annoyingly arch dialogue doesn't help ("In the past I have been known to redistribute wealth"), though it can be memorable : "You're not specific enough to be a person ; you're more like a vibe" should be inscribed on Peter Fonda's forehead. Shouldn't this have won the Best Sound Oscar, by the way? Or am I thinking sound design?...]

CRAZY IN ALABAMA (36) (dir., Antonio Banderas) Melanie Griffith, Lucas Black, David Morse, Rod Steiger [Opening voice-over : "In the summer of 1965, when I was 13, I thought I knew everything about Life and Death ... Then one day Aunt Lucille blew into town, and nothing was ever the same" (you are now entering Cliché Corner). Closing voice-over : "Life and Death are only temporary - but Freedom goes on forever" (come again?). In between it's (fortunately) all over the place, mixing the inevitable redneck sheriff and racial-awareness lesson ("It jest don' seem fair," observes our hero ; "They're jest people like us") with a talking head, an episode of "Bewitched" and the jewel in the crown of Bizarre Rod Steiger Performances (hard to describe, but think of it as Rod doing Jim Carrey doing Will Rogers ; or something). Mrs. Banderas is at least lively, and young Black has the folksy tang (not to mention twang) of Truth ; cute opening credits, too.]

JOURNEY TO THE SUN (53) (dir., Yesim Ustaoglu) Newroz Baz, Nazmi Oirix, Mizgin Kapazan [Flimsy narrative goes nowhere much, and it's hard to spot the line between politics and propaganda (the film makes it seem like being a Kurd in Turkey is tantamount to being seen as a terrorist - but there are in fact plenty of assimilated Kurds, even at government level) ; a certain worthiness hovers dangerously - it's the kind of film where our hero symbolically dyes his hair blond (because Kurds are darker and he wants to distance himself), and you just know he'll symbolically dye it black again before the film is over. Baz's pensive El Greco mug (junior Enrico Lo Verso, for LAMERICA fans) smoulders nicely, though, and Ms. Ustaoglu - or her Polish-sounding DP - has a real eye for landscape : magnificent views of Turkey in general and Istanbul in particular, flavoured with vivid local colour and baklava-sweet tale of puppy-love (holding hands, feeding each other bits of cake, buying chewing-gum so her father won't smell the beer on her breath). Movie-In-A-Nutshell Scene : two Kiarostami kids turn up, typical Third-World-picturesque with their artless questions and close-to-the-scalp haircuts - and are immediately chased by the police as suspected terrorists.]

THE STORY OF US (29) (dir., Rob Reiner) Bruce Willis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rob Reiner, Rita Wilson [Works within its limits, I suppose, but really - what were they thinking? Imagine one of those sub-Neil Simon, Broadway-based two-handers from 20 years ago (SAME TIME NEXT YEAR, say), making fortysomething angst palatable for tired theatregoers, only filtered even more through Reiner's sitcom sensibility : it's jaw-dropping, then mildly offensive, to see glib, plastic laugh-lines straight out of "Home Improvement" (goofy Dad vs. orderly Mom) alternating with unhappy silences and violent arguments, all the ugly detail of a marriage in crisis - as if these stereotypes had any more to do with real people than the instant-wit, just-add-water men-vs.-women zingers ("A man can mend a fight with sex ; a woman can't have sex till they've mended the fight!") have to do with the real relationship between the sexes. Therapy-as-showbiz (or vice versa) set to 'mellow' guitar noodlings by Eric Clapton, plus a snippet of "Wonderful Tonight" adding insult to injury ; so irredeemably fake it makes the occasional well-observed moment seem presumptuous. Sample line : "Marriage is the Jack Kevorkian of romance". Whatever that means...]

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (77) (dir., Anthony Minghella) Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett [Can't really talk about this without reference to its source (one of my favourite novels) ; apologies if you're coming to it cold. It is, strange to say, both a betrayal of the book and a supremely effective adaptation, basically upending its point while superbly evoking its suspense mechanisms and central mainspring, a man desperately trying to conceal his inner life. Ripley in the book is closer to the Dennis Hopper version in AMERICAN FRIEND - a nihilist-in-training, stuck in a conventionally glossy 50s world (the book dates from 1955) that he knows would destroy him if he showed his true face : a misfit but a powerful figure, capable of holding his own in the world. "No matter how drunk I get, I can always tell when a waiter's cheating me on a bill," he says breezily. "I can forge a signature, fly a helicopter, handle dice, impersonate practically anybody, cook - and do a one-man show in a nightclub in case the regular entertainer's sick. Shall I go on?". The film curtails him, limiting his talents to "forging signatures, telling lies and impersonating practically anybody", turning him into a geeky Zelig figure, a nobody with a touch of the chameleon : he's gauche, gawky, slouching forward instead of lounging back, clumping around a beach in heavy shoes, his pasty white frame painfully conspicuous. It's a simplification, turning it into a more prestigious version of the high-school nerd trying to make it with the 'popular' crowd - yet it works, because what Minghella's done (perhaps unwittingly) is connect the book to a late-90s outlook : Highsmith's Ripley is amoral, but we're no longer shocked by amorality ; what's more frightening (and gripping) is the presence of old-fashioned morality in a cool, jazzy world. The book ends with Ripley triumphant (the nihilist come-of-age), but Minghella's ending suggests he's become a monster, just as he changes the murder scene so that Ripley kills in a moment of weakness (in the book, it's his own cold-blooded decision) : he turns it into a story about guilt, reinforced by making explicit the book's gay subtext - Damon's fearless performance conjures up all the things we try to hide about ourselves (guilty secrets, feelings of inferiority, the desperate desire to be accepted), so that watching him try to escape detection is immensely creepy (made even creepier by the 'Miramax values' - tasteful soundtrack, calendar-art settings - pointing up his perversity) : like the book it's about alienation, but closer to the helpless, miserable alienation of a Kurt Cobain than the guilt-free, hipper-than-thou alienation of beatnik days. It helps that the film, like its source, is magnificently plotted (the best bit of all - an ingenious scheme involving two meetings at the same café - being, I believe, Minghella's own invention), but what really makes it "Hitchcockian" are the twisted emotions and all-too-recognisable longings, underlaid with a punitive moralism. "Middlebrow" it may be, conservative certainly ; but it's also - along with THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, and for much the same psychologically-draining reasons - the film I was most in need of a stiff drink after seeing this year.]

OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE (26) (dir., Michael Corrente) Shawn Hatosy, Amy Smart, Alec Baldwin, George Wendt [Autobiography, presumably, except that - unlike, say, JOE THE KING - it drowns quirky-hence-probably-real detail in standard stoner humour and gratuitous masturbation gags, not to mention a thunderingly obvious 70s soundtrack that plays "Band On The Run" when our hero goes AWOL and "Venus" when he espies the girl of his dreams ("Free Bird" over a funeral is also pretty groanworthy : "If I leave here tomorrow / Won't you please remember me..."). Working-class harshness / political incorrectness is the oddest thing about it, Baldwin as the pro-Nixon, queer-bashing Dad - except his Neanderthal mien conceals an enlightened outlook ("Making sex is like a Chinese dinner : it ain't over till you both get your cookies"), nor is his gay poker buddy banished from the table once outed. Family dysfunction turns sentimental, while the blond, patrician-looking pal turns out to be a rat ; might be intriguing if it weren't all so tedious.]