Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/032392/0323420.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 4KB | 79 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 65

Lots of Skin, but No Heart


By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BASIC INSTINCT
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Written by Joe Eszterhas


    Some movies are so ferociously prejudged -- sometimes
because of costs that seem scandalous, sometimes because of
controversies with pressure groups or the ratings board -- that
it becomes difficult to evaluate them fairly when they appear.
One looks so chic (and so inside) airily dismissing something
like Ishtar or Hudson Hawk. What fun for critics and show-biz
reporters. And so easy too.

    Basic Instinct is the latest candidate for admission to
this inner circle of the cinema's damned. Its script was bought
for a record $3 million, and people immediately started saying
nothing could be that good. Then location shooting was disrupted
by gay activists claiming the film promoted a cruel stereotype
-- that lesbians are literally man killers. Finally, when the
picture was finished, it was slapped with an NC-17 rating.
After a few cuts (less than a minute's worth) and many hot
words, that was changed to an R, but such wrangles usually do
irreparable box-office harm.

    There's no need to make a cosmic case against Basic
Instinct. It's just another entertainment that went more wrong
than right. Maybe its script isn't worth $3 million, but its
basic premise is not a bad one. It proposes an untrammeled San
Francisco woman named Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) who
writes murder mysteries that have a nasty way of predicting
actual crimes. They also provide, of course, a perfect alibi.
No one in her right mind would create fictions that make their
author a prime suspect.

    That does leave a nice question: Is Catherine in her right
mind? Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) doesn't care. He's a
hot-tempered, danger-loving cop who learns, as he investigates
a murder in which she is indeed the likeliest suspect, and falls
in lust with her, that she intends to use him as the subject of
her next book. But, hey, when the sex is this good, why should
he pause to count its potential costs?

    For that matter, why should we? In recent years the
tameness and sameness of movie sex have become a bore, which is
not a word anyone is going to apply to this film's skin scenes.
They may be offensive to some, but they will be a turn-on for
others. And, by the way, Basic Instinct cannot fairly be termed
antigay. Catherine is certainly bisexual, but it is just another
aspect of her cultivated air of differentness, her love of
high-risk games and shock effects, which Stone plays very well.

    The real problems with the film lie elsewhere: in the
chilly, self-conscious sleekness of its production design, in
the heartless and relentless thrill seeking of Paul Verhoeven's
direction, in the too intricate, not entirely persuasive
plotting required to create an alternate suspect, a police
psychiatrist (Jeanne Tripplehorn) who truly loves Douglas.
Finally, the film breaks faith with the most inviolable
convention of the whodunit -- refusing to state firmly which of
the two women dunit (notwithstanding gay activists' confident
naming of one of them, in a publicity campaign aimed at
undermining the movie). This reflects its fundamental flaw of
arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed,
smartness and luxe to wow the yokels. It is its attitude, not
its morality, that ultimately undoes Basic Instinct.