At the
Movies When youre talking dialogue, its hard to top the
Bard
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN
Pity the poor movie-reviewer at
holiday time! While the rest of you were drinking eggnogs and unwrapping
presents, I was rushing desperately from one theater to the next as producers
kept opening new pictures in time to qualify for Academy Awards.
First came Youve Got Mail (Warner), which makes you
want to move to Manhattans upper West Side, where everything is in bloom
and there are street fairs everyday. Unfortunately, though Meg Ryan has
charming mannerisms and Tom Hanks makes even his business tycoon character
attractive, director Nora Ephron (who also wrote the screenplay with her sister
Delia) has little feel for romantic comedy. (For the record, I also thought
Sleepless in Seattle, written by Nora Ephron and starring Ryan and
Hanks, overrated.)
The premise, as the title suggests, is that people can now get a
love affair going via E-mail, and the movie spends a lot of time reading the
exchanges between Joe Fox (Hanks), who is opening a mega-bookstore, and
Kathleen Kelly (Ryan), who owns a small childrens bookstore in the same
neighborhood. They instinctively dislike each other in their casual contacts
but dont know who theyre corresponding with. The trouble is
its hard to believe their letters would make them want to meet each
other.
Though Kathleen complains about high-tech bookselling, the movie
doesnt really pursue the storys widespread socioeconomic
implications. Her store folds, but not to worry -- she gets both Joe and a job
as a childrens book editor.
You can learn how romantic comedy has gone downhill by going to
your video store and renting Shop Around the Corner (1940), the
Ernst Lubitsch film on which Youve Got Mail is based. The
lovers in that classic -- Margaret Sullivan and James Stewart -- work and
bicker in the same Budapest, Hungary, shop and write letters that express their
deep loneliness and awkward longings. One is both amused and deeply satisfied
that after an hour of misunderstandings they finally discover to whom
theyve been writing.
The movies notion of up-to-date wit is for Tom to present
the little kids hes taking out for the day, his fathers son and his
grandfathers daughter, by saying, Were ... an American
family. Fortunately, theres a feel-good soundtrack, including some
fine songs by Harry Nilsson.
Shakespeare in Love (Miramax)
will offend purists but is far more entertaining. Director John Madden keeps
things moving at such speed youll probably go along with its silly
premise that Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) was suffering a severe case of
writers block until he met (and bedded) Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth
Paltrow).
After accepting advance to write a potboiler, Romeo and
Ethel, the Pirates Daughter, he cant write a line and rushes
to confession to a Renaissance psychic -- which offers a
pseudo-psychoanalytic pretext for sexual wordplay. After Shakespeare catches a
glimpse of the beautiful Viola, however, he is able to write again.
Though a marriage with the foppish Lord Wessex (Colin Firth) has
already been arranged, Viola desperately wants to be an actress, an ambition
forbidden in Elizabethan England. She pastes on a little mustache and auditions
for the mostly unwritten play. Shakespeare, impressed by her talent, follows
the boy home -- and is delighted to learn he was mistaken. A mad
passion ensues, with nude lovers seeming to speak in iambic pentameter. Though
textbooks list more pedestrian French and Italian sources for Romeo and
Juliet, the movie wants you to believe that what youre seeing is
the real story behind the play.
All this can be accepted as a harmless joke, filled out with plot
twists and surprises, the rowdy background of 1590s London theater and a good
deal of Shakespearean language, with the opening of R&J as
climax. But Shakespeare in Love wants it both ways, pretending to
the high seriousness of Shakespeares first major tragedy. Though Fiennes
and Paltrow read their lines adequately, rushing into a brief affair
doesnt make them star-crossed adolescent idealists, ready to die for
love.
The screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard has many amusingly
deliberate anachronisms, with Stoppard probably responsible for the in-group
wit regarding the theater of the time. (Christopher Marlowe throws Shakespeare
some help in his plotting; John Webster is presented as a 13-year-old who hangs
around the theater because he likes violence.) Judi Dench is superb as a
take-charge Queen Elizabeth. Her declaration that true love can never be
convincingly presented on the stage shapes the films outcome.
Madden rises to the challenge of making the first performance of
Romeo and Juliet a rousing play-within-a-movie. The actor assigned
to speak the prologue gets stage-fright, the crowd is delighted by the
swordplay and Elizabeth is in tears at Juliets death. By the end you
realize that, even in romantic comedy, there are advantages in drawing on
Shakespeare for dialogue rather than Ephron.
A Civil Action (Touchstone)
has all the necessary ingredients for successful courtroom drama: a fast-moving
story keyed to a topical issue (polluted water), big stars (John Travolta and
Robert Duvall), and a praiseworthy sense of the complexities of both justice
and human character.
Directed by Steven Zaillian -- who also wrote a deft screenplay
based on Jonathan Harrs book -- the movie gets audiences involved with
the real-life case of Woburn, Mass., whose children had developed leukemia from
the areas poisoned water. Travolta is Jan Schlichtmann, a ruthless,
personal-injury lawyer interested in fat settlements from wealthy defendants.
A Civil Action is about his gradual transformation, ending up with
his complete identification with Woburns case.
Whats good about the movie is that it makes the complexities
of the civil court system both real and exciting; it is neither an
exposé nor saccharine praise for the way the law works. It shows the
same complexity in Schlichtmann, whose hotheadedness leads him to make mistakes
in court and whose later convictions grow out of stubborn pride as much as
idealism.
If I found the movie too slick and Travoltas development
somewhat artificial, I enjoyed the courtroom battles and respected the decision
not to make the ending much more upbeat than it was in real life.
Though the audience is easily led to root against polluters like
W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods, especially since Schlichtmanns small firm
has to go deeply in debt to carry on the legal fight, the most interesting
character in A Civil Action is corporate lawyer Jerome Facher.
Robert Duvall rates another Academy nomination for his portrayal of a shrewdly
humorous Harvard law professor whose passion is the Boston Red Sox. One comes
to realize that this eccentric individualist is both dedicated to the law and
deeply aware of its inevitable limitations.
Sam Raimi, previously known for
horror movies, has directed a bloody yet solid melodrama, A Simple Plan
(Paramount), that spells out the horrific effects of greed. Since the theater
was sold out the first two times I tried to see it, I probably expected too
much. No, its not nearly as good as The Treasure of Sierra
Madre.
The main reason is that its central character, Hank Mitchell (Bill
Paxton), changes from reliable worker at a feed and grain mill to manipulative
murderer without going through a real process of change. The college-educated
Hank, his sweet, unemployable brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and
Jakes friend Lou (Brent Briscoe), a 40-year-old, hard-drinking failure,
wander through the snow and discover a small smashed-up plane carrying $4.4
million.
Lous instinct is to keep it. Jake is prepared to go along,
but Hank, after first saying they have to inform the police, concocts a
simple plan: Hell keep the money and hide it, waiting to see
if it will be claimed. Though the mens temptation is understandable, the
subsequent pattern of bad luck and increasing violence seems too predictable.
Hanks wife, Sarah (Bridget Fonda), who is about to have a baby, first
says that the money should be returned but ends up a determined schemer. Her
character change is hard to believe because shes in so few scenes.
A morality tale, A Simple Plan certainly doesnt
make its killings attractive, but many will find its rising level of violence
disturbing. Most effective is Raimis suggestive use of the snowy, Midwest
background at the opening, where a fox is about to pounce on the chickens and
crows are a threatening presence. The acting is fine, especially the scenes
between the brothers, which build to a harrowing climax. Billy Bob Thornton
deserves an Academy nomination as supporting actor; his final act of
self-sacrifice gives this crime does not pay movie a moment of
greatness.
Rushmore (scheduled to open
in February after playing for a week in New York to qualify for Academy Awards)
exhibits a fresh sense of humor by making its central character, Max Fischer
(Jason Schwartzman), a nerdish but brilliant 15-year-old at the private school
for which the movie is named.
Max, who wears thick glasses, a blazer and beret, spends so much
time directing the extracurricular clubs at the school that he is about to be
expelled. And he has fallen hopelessly in love with the schools lovely
first-grade teacher, Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), a young widow. So has his
older friend, rich, unhappily married Mr. Blume (played by Bill Murray, who has
his best part since Groundhog Day).
Max has more to do in the movie than Blume: He gets the school to
reinstate Latin because Miss Cross says its important, insults her
boyfriend at dinner, fakes an injury and enters her room through the window,
and is constantly at war with his conformist, middle-class schoolmates. As the
permanently defeated Blume, Murray works in wonderful tandem with the resilient
Max. Blume is as much excited by Max as he is depressed by his own two sons,
who also attend Rushmore.
Blume seems an unlikely steel tycoon and doesnt have much
more idea of how to court Miss Williams than Max does, but she responds to his
vulnerability and basic decency. Although it offers no message,
Rushmore is illuminating on class: Theres a lovely bit late
in the movie when Max, who has pretended that his father (Seymour Cassel) is a
neurosurgeon, introduces Blume to his sweetly puzzled parent -- who contentedly
runs a barber shop.
Director Wes Anderson -- who wrote the screenplay with Owen Wilson
-- deserves credit for getting his contrasting lead characters to work so well
together. The movie eventually assigns Max an admiring Asian girlfriend his own
age, which seems contrived. Fortunately there is a satisfyingly explosive
ending with Max putting on his play about Vietnam, using real dynamite.
Although you may be as confused and disbelieving as Blume at all this,
youll probably have a good time.
Joseph Cunneen, NCRs regular movie reviewer and
husband of writer Sally Cunneen, can be contacted at
scunn24219@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, January 22,
1999
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