Lethal Weapon 4

The very definition of mainstream entertainment, Lethal Weapon 4 bends over backwards to deliver its family values message, including in the final reel not one but two gooey baby close-ups designed to set the whole theater murmuring with pleasure. “We’re family,” the cast actually shouts, in unison, at one Kodak moment. It’s a little disorienting to see this kind of lightheaded pleasantness butt up against the requisite stunts and squibs; maybe director Richard Donner considers it a countervailing force against such mayhem.
More than anything, the movie’s pro-family, pro-immigrant (and anti-NRA!) stance testifies to the evolution of the series from grim cop movie to an inoffensive, uneventful franchise that just wants to be liked. Remember that moment in the first Lethal Weapon where Mel Gibson plays a deranged cop who’s ready to swallow his service revolver out of inconsolable grief over his wife’s death? There will be none of that here, thank you very much. Having progressed far beyond any consideration of Riggs’ darker side, this flick’s just another buddy movie about a pair of cops trying to get the bad guys so they can go home and relax with their loved ones. Continue reading

Henry Fool

“Centuries ago, it had an E at the end,” offers the brazen, self-conscious title character from Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool, proffering an explanation where none was requested. As played by Thomas Jay Ryan, Henry Fool(e) is a brash, flatulent anachronism, a 19th century character puffed up on willful arrogance that may stem from a terrible insecurity. Ryan, a stage actor with no previous film credits, probably plays him too brash, but you get the feeling that’s the proscenium-style effect Hartley is looking for.
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Marie Baie des Anges

Sitting in the dark, staring blankly at Marie Baie des Anges, I kept myself awake by wondering at the state of French film in America. Movies like L’eau Froide (Cold Water) and Les Amants du Pont Neuf can’t get screens, while crap like this plays at the prestige venues, under the Sony Classics impramatur. Of course it’s said that it all comes down to money, the decision of which films live or die in the U.S. And it’s true that Marie Baie features a pretty 15-year-old who can be featured prominently in the advertising while copywriters gush about her smoldering sexuality and invoke the blessed name Bardot. If that screams “money,” than what of Pont Neuf‘s ravishing Juliette Binoche or Cold Water‘s young Virginie Ledoyen?

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Marie Baie des Anges

Sitting in the dark, staring blankly at Marie Baie des Anges, I kept myself awake by wondering at the state of French film in America. Movies like L’eau Froide (Cold Water) and Les Amants du Pont Neuf can’t get screens, while crap like this plays at the prestige venues under the Sony Classics imprimatur. Of course it’s said that it all comes down to money, the decision of which films live or die in the U.S. And it’s true that Marie Baie features a pretty 15-year-old who can be featured prominently in the advertising while copywriters gush about her smoldering sexuality and invoke the blessed name Bardot. If that screams “money,” than what of Pont Neuf‘s ravishing Juliette Binoche or Cold Water‘s young Virginie Ledoyen? Continue reading

Six Days, Seven Nights

Harrison Ford is Quinn, a handyman pilot who makes a living schlepping cargo and passengers from island to island in the South Pacific. Anne Heche is Robin, the vacationing magazine editor who needs a lift in stormy weather. In midflight, lightning knocks out the plane’s radio and distress beacon, and the storm forces Quinn to down the plane on the beach of an unknown, uninhabited island. As they struggle to survive life in the wilderness, Quinn and Robin grow closer. Meanwhile, Robin’s newly betrothed Frank (David Schwimmer) fears she’s dead and starts taking an interest in a busty local named Angelica (Jacqueline Obradors). Continue reading

High Art

The most unfortunate aspect of High Art may be its clunky title, a double entendre that raises an eyebrow at the drug-soaked habits of its bohemian characters. At the same time, it promises a criticism of the commercial art world that never quite gels, no matter how hard director Lisa Cholodenko struggles to bring it together. At best, High Art is romantic, tragic, and scrupulously well performed. And at worst, it just strings together all those hoary cliches about creative types for whom intensity, drugs, and self-destruction come hand in hand without really exploring why or how they became intense, addicted, and destroyed.

The story takes a few sour jabs at chic Manhattan, first making fun of the self-absorbed drones who run a photography magazine called Frame. Earnest protagonist Syd (Radha Mitchell) has been promoted to assistant editor, but quickly finds that her job description involves fetching coffee and playing lapdog to her superiors rather than taking any hand in the magazine’s editorial direction.

Of course, Syd has a sharper eye for talent than her boss — when she visits upstairs neighbor Lucy (Ally Sheedy) to investigate a leak, she recognizes the photos hung all over the walls as the work of some kind of genius. As mad coincidence would have it, this isn’t just any Lucy, but rather Lucy Berliner, a celebrated photographer who vanished from the New York art scene nearly a decade ago. These days, Lucy spends her time taking snapshots of her wastrel friends and snorting lines of heroin with lover Greta (Patricia Clarkson), a faded beauty and ex-actress who keeps murmuring about Fassbinder in a nearly impenetrable accent.

Syd takes a professional and personal interest in Lucy, persuading her to come out of retirement to shoot a cover feature for Frame. Lucy agrees, but insists that Syd be her editor on the project. Before long, the two of them have traveled somewhere upstate, where Lucy seduces the not-unwilling Syd in what are easily the movie’s best and truest scenes. Forget the art world — High Art‘s best feature is its naturalistic look at sex and intimacy.

HIGH ART, Ally Sheedy, Radha Mitchell, 1998.
HIGH ART, Ally Sheedy, Radha Mitchell, 1998.

This is the heralded indie comeback of Sheedy, a member of the young Hollywood of a decade ago (she was the sullen loner in The Breakfast Club) who unwisely squandered herself on cute stuff like Short Circuit and Maid to Order. She brings an almost frightening gauntness and a slow burn to this role — exactly what’s called for. Better still is the un-selfconscious Mitchell as an guileless youngster struggling to orient herself in a subculture that’s more repellent than fascinating.

There’s the problem. There’s little to indicate just what’s attractive about the world of Lucy Berliner and her circle of friends, talented though she may be. Cholodenko shoots Lucy’s apartment as a forbidding, shadowy enclave full of smack but bereft of humor or warmth. It all points toward the inevitable conclusion, which manages to be both vaguely moving and unforgivably maudlin. Cholodenko has a remarkable and admirable empathy for her characters (even the whining Greta), but the prefab New York art scene feels too beat for High Art to have any lasting impact.

 

The Truman Show

Anointed as the movie of the year, the last five years, or of the decade, depending on which critical blurb you trust, The Truman Show is a great idea for a movie. The picture chugs right along, too, with a sweetly naïve incarnation of Jim Carrey, the ultimate media superstar, slowly discovering that his life is, in fact, a television show.

Truman Burbank, we learn, lives inside the world’s largest movie studio, under a huge dome constructed in Hollywood. An unwanted child adopted by the OmniCam corporation at birth, Truman has never known any life outside of the stylized, fully populated, completely fabricated world of The Truman Show. Worse, he never suspects that this clockwork environment is a phony. The program is a hit in the real world — millions of viewers thrill to Truman’s rather ordinary workaday exploits on a 24/7 basis.

The concept, obviously, is twofold. One, our society’s fascination with celebrities has developed to the point where we’re willing to watch an anointed personality do just about anything on television. (The casting of a Carrey-level superstar was imperative, since the commentary wouldn’t gel with anything less than a media icon in the lead role.) And two, our society itself has been transformed to such an extent that we’re all on-stage, all the time, with cameras watching, products placed, and spectacle manufactured for our benefit.

Truman taps a contemporary sociological phenomenon — anyone who doubts that somebody’s day-to-day life could be the subject of pop culture entertainment would do well to have a look at the various “cam” sites on the Internet that chronicle the lives of their owners in little still-frame slices of life, updated every minute or so. Granted, sex appeal plays a role in the most popular specimens, but much of the time those cameras just sit there snapping pictures of their subjects programming, picking their noses, or napping.

Meanwhile, there’s a subtext, barely explored, having to do with the candy-colored pastel tones of TV land functioning as an escape hatch from the unpredictable hostilities of our real world. Christof, The Truman Show‘s cooly intellectual orchestrator, woos an unsettled Truman at one point by claiming that he’d be crazy to leave a perfectly designed world for the harsh realities that wait outside his studio. There’s a father/son relationship working here, too, as though Truman is the gawky adolescent finally ready to break free of the suffocating (but reassuring) strictures of home life for an uncertain future.

Truman, of course, can hardly be content to stay inside, and who can blame him? Free will, choosing one’s own destiny, all that. But I started to wonder, halfway through the movie, what would wait for him on the outside. He’d be mobbed by paparazzi snapping his picture, fans seeking his autograph, and agents offering him his own late night talk show. His most loyal viewers might become stalkers. Surely, for Truman, the real media-induced nightmare is outside of the bubble, not inside.

If Truman’s world jibes with the preternaturally sunny disposition of all those bygone TV programs that now haunt prime time all over again, so much the better. It defines our apparent yearning for a world that mirrors the one we see on the most agreeable TV programs, a world devoid of change, struggle, and bitterness. It’s the Brady Bunch, Dick Van Dyke world that we now see dredged up from the vaults, put back in prime time on cable TV, and marketed as nostalgia. Sharp, brilliant stuff — The Truman Show may long be remembered for articulating a certain nostalgia and acknowledging our deeply buried pain, a feeling that we’ve been forever burned by a reality that was never what was promised.

So why don’t I think it’s the movie of the year, the decade, or the millenium? Simply, the narrative falters. The first half of the movie includes scenes that could rank among my favorite movie moments — Truman realizing that he can stop the local traffic just by stepping onto the pavement and raising his arms, or being thwarted at his attempts to leave Seahaven by a suddenly blossoming traffic jam. I was particularly struck by the love-at-first-sight encounter where a lovely walk-on actress in Truman’s life lures him to an unscheduled deserted-beach rendezvous by insisting, “If we don’t go now, it won’t happen.” That’s the moment where the movie draws its most convincing parallel between Truman’s manufactured destiny and the tightly scripted plots of our own lives. “Break free, Truman,” is the message, and it resonates within us.

The second part of the film, particularly the final third, falls comparatively flat. Truman’s world turns out to be not as diabolically clever as we might have expected, and Christof winds up playing God with rain and some wind machines. By the time Truman makes his break for freedom, the movie has run out of ideas and unwinds in connect-the-dots melodrama. It’s curiously uninvolving considering the far-reaching implications of the movie’s concept. (Screenwriter Andrew Niccol’s impressively mounted Gattaca gave me the same feeling of prodigious ideas going to waste.) Contrast it to last year’s similarly themed The Game, for example, which would be winded by The Truman Show‘s satirical calisthenics but rivals it easily in terms of aesthetics and moviemaking technique, with a giddy, cathartic denouement.

Finally, I think The Truman Show is just a little too pleased with its own abrupt resolution to be completely satisfying. After all this, I wondered, what was I to make of a happy ending in a movie that had already made me suspicious of happy endings?

The Disenchanted

1990’s The Disenchanted (La Désenchantée), just released in the U.S., offers further evidence that Benoît Jacquot is incapable of making an uninteresting film. His sometimes inscrutable movies, which include A Single Girl (1995) and Marianne (1994, rel. 1997), are so lovely that you never want to look away from the screen; it hurts to walk out of the theater into ordinary daylight.

Like those two later films, The Disenchanted focuses on a young female protagonist struggling toward self-actualization. In this one, a boyfriend makes an offhand morning-after comment that Beth (Judith Godreche, who showed up stateside in The Man in the Iron Mask) could prove her love for him by having sex with the ugliest man she can find. If you find that puzzling, never mind — for reasons that are never completely clear, Beth takes his challenge to heart. Before we’re sure what she’s thinking, she’s trolling a local disco and going home with the gawkiest dancer she can find, who seems barely to register his good fortune. His loss; bored and revolted, Beth splits after his first awkward advance.

From there, The Disenchanted could be characterized as something of a cinematic doodle, not so much a character study as a sketch. Beth has a strange encounter with an older writer who breaks up a fight with her unnamed boyfriend, she reports on Rimbaud to her high school classmates, she has an awkward chat with her little brother about the proper size of a cartoon penis. Most disturbingly, her invalid mother encourages her to give herself to the portly “uncle” who’s been helping her family with the bills.

What the hell does it all mean? Ah, who knows? This meandering film could make Kieslowski seem literal-minded. But films like this are small treasures because they trade in ambiguity, rather than specificity. Like life itself, they may lack explicit meaning, but they’re rich with implication.


Written and Directed by Benoît Jacquot
Cinematography by Caroline Champetier
Edited by Dominique Auvray
Starring Judith Godrèche
France, 1990
Theatrical aspect ratio: 1.85:1 (should be 1.66:1?)

"Since 1994"