Film

Rip It Up, Issue 235, 1 March 1997, Page 38

Film

Reviews by William Dart

JERRY MAGUIRE Director: Cameron Crowe

Cameron Crowe’s latest film is not a short one; but it wears its 138-minute running time well. The opening scenes have the energy and thrust of the sports field, itself as we’re introduced to Tom Cruise’s cocky agent. As Maguire’s career flounders, the pace becomes more relaxed and, significantly, Cruise’s character finally starts to register as a human being. Two plots run side by side. One concerns Maguire’s relationship with young single mother Dorothy Boyd (the radiant Renee Zellwegger), which occasions some great scenes such as a nervous front porch seduction to Paul McCartney’s ‘Singalong Junk’. There’s some sharp scripting here and nowhere is it more so than with Dorothy’s quick-quip sister, Laurel (whose wisecracks deserve an Eve Arden Award, should anyone ever instigate one). The Divorced Women’s Collective who meet in Laurel’s lounge, offers the most delicious sorority satire since the mirror-gazing circle in Fried Green Tomatoes. The other strand of the plot concerns Rod

Tidwell, a second tier footballer determined to make it into the big time. Cuba Gooding Jr is outrageously sassy as Tidwell, whether laying down ground rules to Cruise in business class, caterwauling his way through ‘What’s Going On’ with a mariachi band, or ‘recovering’ from a feigned brain injury on the football field. The man is irrepressible. There’s the odd piece of corn, such as Cruise’s public protestation of love in front of the divorced ladies, or young Jonathan Lipnicki’s effortless underarm bowl in the closing moments of the film, but Jerry Maguire is honed and toned by a professional hand.

THE ISLAND Of DR MOREAU Director: John Frankenheimer

They still remember Dr Moreau in Cairns, as it was filmed just down the road, and friends tell me some locals still haven’t recovered from the experience. The truth is, the movie was an ill-fated project from the start, and veteran director Frankenheimer hasn’t really succeeded in bringing it together. The finished film starts well, with a stunning credits sequence showing cells squirming under the microscope, and then seems unable to follow the leads HG Wells’ original story offers it. Grim, fantastical, satiric and prophetic by turns, Wells’ tale was done most justice in the 1932 Island of Lost Souls, with Charles Laughton as the evil, leering medic. This time around it’s Marlon Brando who plays the good doctor, “striving to create some measure of human refinement” with his bizarre, if unexplained, experiments. He makes a ceremonial entrance dressed like a figure out of Noh drama, plays Chopin Polonaises with the Spanish dwarf actor Nelson de la Rosa and, in one wonderful scene, treats a gathering of monsters to a lecture on the comparative merits of Schoenberg and Gershwin, flamboyantly illustrated at the keyboard. These few minutes are the best in a movie which labours with a terminally bland hero in David Thewlis and an attitudinal villain in Vai Kilmer (who can’t hide behind his Batman cape this time around). The monsters have their moments though, and our own Temuera Morrison is quite a fetching half-breed of dog and man. Woof!

RIDICULE Director: Patrice Leconte

Comparisons with Dangerous Liaisons are inevitable, but Patrice Leconte’s film offers, perhaps, a more telling glimpse of the intellectual decadence of eighteenth-century France. A young nobleman, Ponceludon de Malavoy (Charles Berling), worried about disease spreading through his peasants, goes to Versailles to convince the King that the Dombes marshes are in need of draining. Bad move. He is soon enticed into the malicious rituals of the court.

This earnest young man makes a rather dull hero, but no matter, there’s much diversion to be had from the bantering of the Comtesse de Blayac (the divine Fanny Ardant) and the Abbe de Vilecourt (a suitably slimy Bernard Giraudeau). Yet for all the icy elegance of their witticisms and ironies, there are still moments which touch the heart, as when the deaf and dumb pupils of a kinder Abbe are brought in to ‘perform’ before the assembled courtiers.

MARS ATTACKS! Director: Tim Burton

Has the spirit of Ed Wood taken over the mind of Tim Burton? The rambling shenanigans of Burton’s latest opus, based on kiddies’ trading cards of the late 50s, would suggest so, as the film has much in common with Ed’s classic modus operandi. Burton admits a script was created from the random throwing down of trading cards, and this may well account for the sprawling nature of the film, in both script and location. Washington, Kansas, Las Vegas and New York — they’re all just backdrop to a revue of sorts, a show which is only as effective as its best cameos. These include Sarah Jessica Parker’s bimbo talk-show hostess, Glenn Close’s wide-eyed First Lady, Lisa Marie as a catatonic Martian temptress, and welcome turns from Rod Steiger, Jim Brown and Tom Jones, who has a ball updating ‘lt’s Not Unusual’ in a Vegas lounge. The choicest moments in what is essentially a screwball take on Independence Day come from the redneck family in Kansas, with Joe Don Baker as the gun-happy pater familias. And it’s grandmother Sylvia Sidney (still my favourite turn in Beetlejuice) who saves the world with the music of Rudolf Friml and the voice of Slim Whitman. I must admit, I felt a little sad when those wee green men started reeling over to Slim’s deadly

yodel, as they provided the most consistently fascinating thing in the film. Perhaps Burton might be girding his loins for Nightmare Before Christmas 2. Pray for it.

EMMA Director: Douglas McGrath

The third Jane Austen adaptation to come our way is the most resolutely mainstream yet. Douglas McGrath has pared the novel down to show an eighteenth-century Dolly Levi gently working her wiles in the sleepy English town of Highbury. Emma bubbles merrily along, although it’s cinematically pretty unremarkable — McGrath doesn’t quite manage the social claustrophobia that Ang Lee brought to Sense and Sensibility. Gwyneth Paltrow has a quiet charm as Emma, but my favourite Austen heroine remains Amanda Root in Persuasion. Paltrow’s approach is certainly preferable to the fussy mannerisms of Toni Collette’s Harriet Smith, who seems to be in search of another film — Harriet’s Wedding, perhaps. As one might expect, there are some moments etched in acid. One is an excruciating scene in which the heartless Emma humiliates the rather silly Miss Bates and the poor woman, in one unflinching take, is reduced to a blathering mess (a marvellous performance from Sophie Thompson). The other: Juliet Stevenson’s snobbish Mrs Elton, who is an endless front of tart observations.

MAN OF THE YEAR Director: Dirk Shafer

Here at last is the ‘inside story’ on Dirk Shafer, the gay man who managed to be chosen as Playgirfs Man of the Year in 1992. Shafer, himself a film-maker, tells his own tale, mostly by recreating events and interviewing actors who play the actual characters. Indeed, the clips from TV talk shows (including Donahue’s Best Buns competi-

tion), a recurring interview with the delightfully wacko Vivien Paxton, and some witless comment from Fabio are among the few genuine articles This is a clever enough approach, but it’s let down by uneven performances (the confrontation between Shafer and his boyfriend, filmed from outside the room, through shutters, is embarrassingly shrill). The sequence involving the Win-a-Date girl just grinds on, well past its bear-by date. And Rhonda Dotson may have some of the best lines as the neurotic fan, Lady la Flamme, but it all ends unpleasantly when she finds out she has been duped.

Another thread of the plot which deals with the death of Shafer’s friend from AIDS is less convincingly presented. But without it we may not have had the best scene in the film, in which Shafer’s mother (played by Claudette Sutherland) talks of dealing with the boy’s homophobe father. An extraordinary moment.

LONE STAR Director: John Sayles

Lone Star is a welcome return to form after the whimsy of Sayles’ last film, The Secret of Roan Inish. This is classic Sayles, a portrait of the social melting pot of a small Texas border town, a little pit of corruption and racism, especially in the bad old days of Charlie Wades, the “bribes and bullets sheriff”.

The narrative effortlessly spans over 134 minutes and, in this respect, Sayles could well teach the team behind The English Patient a lesson or three. Flashbacks are smoothly handled with a pan of Stuart Dryburgh’s camera (the first with the memorable line, “It started over a basket of tortillas...”), and these introduce the villainous Charlie (Kris Kristofferson in iconic thug mode). Although Sayles is tackling big issues here (as he was his earlier City of Hope) he deals with them through the lives of the characters, which invests the film with its power. Each character weaves in and out of the plot, even those of a black father and son (one an Army man, the other a nightclub owner) whose conflict and dialogue put into words the issues that Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) can’t raise with his own dead father.

Finally there is a resolution, and a startling one at that. “Forget the Alamo,” Pilar (Elizabeth Pena) tells Cooper, “We start from scratch. Everything that went before, all that stuff, that history... the hell with it, right?” It’s a neat irony that, for just over two hours, Sayles has shown us how history cannot be so easily passed over.