TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122490/1224420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.5 KB | 230 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 76

Schemes and Dreams for Christmas


On Santa's list: a Mafia don, a Master of the Universe and a De
Niro Oscar?

By Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel


    Christmas films come in two basic shapes: books and toys.
The toys -- doll babies like Home Alone and cuddly creatures
like Edward Scissorhands -- may mop up at the box office. But
prestige is a Hollywood product too; it can be cashed in for
Oscars if enough critics and Motion Picture Academy voters are
impressed by what they see. So lauded literary properties like
Hamlet and The Sheltering Sky become ambitious films. Herewith,
three bookish films hoping for a shelf life that extends past
New Year's:


    THE GODFATHER PART III

    They were like the Kennedys of Massachusetts, an immigrant
clan that reaped power and pain in almost equal measure. They
were like the Ewings of Dallas, with a brilliant, scheming son
wrapping his dirty deals in a whisper and a smile. They were
like every family, the Corleones of Mario Puzo's imagination,
except they wrote their quarrels in blood. They killed their
rivals, and when they felt betrayed from within, they killed
each other.

    How titillating the Corleones seemed in 1972 and '74, when
Francis Ford Coppola turned Puzo's best seller into two
Oscar-winning Godfather films. Here was a family of murderers
viewed with cool compassion; they did their lurid business with
style. Coppola's own style, which set the tone for '70s movies,
was called operatic -- meaning that the characters moved
slowly, died grandly and emoted at the top of their lungs. The
book was a fast, brutal read; the movie saga was an extended,
ravishing look.

    And now, at long last, a long look back in The Godfather
Part III, a meandering but finally quite affecting climax to
the saga. It is 1979, and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the
sleek, ruthless don, has become a legitimate billionaire. His
sister Connie (Talia Shire) has dredged herself out of a sullen
stupor to become his feisty adviser. His ex-wife Kay (Diane
Keaton) has remarried. His son Anthony (Franc D'Ambrosio) has
eyes to become an opera singer. His daughter Mary (Sofia
Coppola) is itching to grow up and fall in love.

    At first Michael is pleased to have his crimson career
behind him. When Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), the bastard son
of Michael's brother Sonny, shows up ready to bite the ear off
any idle Mafioso, Michael tells him, "I don't need tough guys.
I need more lawyers." But in his negotiations with a crafty
padrone (Eli Wallach), with a gaudy capo (Joe Mantegna), even
with some slippery Vatican officials over a European real
estate deal, Michael decides he needs tough guys. The question
is: Can he still be tough enough to lead them?

    That's not a tough question. The Godfather Part III, is a
gangster picture, after all, and Michael is the antihero with
whom the series lives and dies. The true perplexer is whether
filmgoers will care to see, or care about, an aging
entrepreneur haunted by specters from films nearly two decades
old. Because this is a movie about loss, Pacino must relinquish
the steely calm of his youthful Michael; now he is Lear without
the grandeur. Nor can G3 find suave new twists and characters
to propel the plot and lure the teens. Garcia, an electric
actor, swaggers so handsomely that he makes one wish for
another sequel. But he is helpless to strike sparks with Sofia
Coppola (the director's daughter), whose gosling gracelessness
comes close to wrecking the movie.

    The first Godfather films sketched a history of the Mafia
as a cracked-mirror reflection of American industry. One hoped
G3 might pit the Corleones against the bad boys of the drug
trade: the old Italians vs. blacks and Hispanics, rustic
chivalry vs. cutthroat capitalism. Instead, Coppola, who wrote
the screenplay with Puzo, sends Michael on a side trip to Rome
and Sicily.

    There is some colorful conniving: who'd have guessed that
an international cartel fatally poisoned Pope John Paul I? But
G3 never persuades one of the urgency of its maxim that
"finance is a gun, and politics is knowing when to pull the
trigger." With all its boardroom bickering, the plot is a gun
that shoots mostly blanks. G3 is too faithful to the deliberate
pacing of the first two films: the slow walking into a dark
room, the silence surrounding the threats. For two hours the
movie labors up the winding path of its story, wheezing like an
old man who won't admit his age.

    But fidelity has its rewards. Remember how, in the other
Godfathers, nearly every religious ceremony (baptism, festival,
funeral) is accompanied by a murder? As in the first film, G3
has a spectacular payoff: accounts of honor settled with
elaborate vengefulness. As in the second film, a fearful price
is paid for power, and Michael is left alone to consider the
cost.

    It is here, in the ruined face of such a man, that The
Godfather Part III locates an emotional gravity rare in
American movies. The film is a slow fuse with a big bang -- one
that echoes through every family whose own tragedy is an aching
for things past and loved ones lost.

By Richard Corliss.


    THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

    Aaah, aaaahh, aaaaaah, aaaaahhhh. And also, possibly -- why
not? -- aaaaahhhhhhhh. These are the onomatopoetics of anguish
(and perverse  exhilaration) as rendered by Tom Wolfe toward the
end of The Bonfire of the Vanities. They are the sounds made
by his protagonist, Sherman McCoy, as he at last acknowledges
that he is an all too human animal: capable of rage and deceit
and all the other low emotions that people educated at Yale,
working on Wall Street and living on Park Avenue usually never
discover within themselves, let alone admit in public. They are
also the sounds of a man abandoning the last defense of
privilege: clever, distancing and self-deluding articulateness.
And they are entirely absent from this adaptation of Wolfe's
novel.

    The omission is both fatal and curious, for in some respects
the film conscientiously compressed its source. Its plot has
been faithfully rendered by screenwriter Michael Cristofer, and
director Brian De Palma has succeeded in the more difficult
task of finding a cinematic equivalent for the novelist's
singular style. Using unconventional angles, lenses and light,
he accomplishes on the screen what Wolfe achieved on the page
through deliciously exaggerated dialogue and deadpan parody.
De Palma lifts us out of banal realism but stops short of
forcing surrealism's affectations upon us.

    As most of the civilized world probably knows, this story
finds Sherman (well played by Tom Hanks despite miscasting),
self-styled Master of the Universe, falling off the edge of
that portion of the cosmos known to him. That is to say, he
takes a wrong turn into the South Bronx while driving his
mistress Maria (Melanie Griffith) home. Seemingly threatened
by two black youths in this forbidding landscape, they
accidentally injure one of the kids. Since Sherman and Maria
dare not make their relationship public, they flee the scene
without reporting the incident.

    When the victim falls into a coma, his case is taken up by
a rabble-rousing ghetto preacher and amplified by a
sensation-seeking tabloid journalist (whose relatively small
role in the book has been awkwardly expanded to make a star
role for Bruce Willis). In turn, the whole affair is
relentlessly pressed by prosecutors who are far more interested
in playing class and racial politics than in pursuing justice.

    But if Sherman is technically innocent of the charges
against him, he is guilty of moral blindness. The junk bonds
he has so profitably sold are of a piece with the junk
politics, junk journalism and junk culture that conspire first
to convert him from man into media symbol, then to divest him
of all his possessions, including self-possession. When he
finally recognizes that awful congruity between what he has
been and what the modern world has become, he sets aside the
last of his gentlemanly compunctions and turns against his
tormentors, fists flailing, strangled cries gurgling in his
throat. It is the point of this complex enterprise, the vivid
moral of what is really a fable successfully disguising itself
as a novel.

    Yet the movie elides this moment, and Sherman eludes full
confrontation with self and world. His escape from false
conviction and imprisonment is played for smug comedy. The
movie has no moral or dramatic weight, and that is a flaw that
its makers seem to recognize. They have Sherman's judge (the
estimable Morgan Freeman) step down from the bench and deliver
to the camera a homily full of liberal-humanist piety. It is
a dreadful ending, which manages to travesty all the
tough-minded things Wolfe tried to say, and everything a movie
unafraid of its own subject matter should have said.

By Richard Schickel.


    AWAKENINGS

    For its first hour or so, this upscale heart tugger motors
along familiar trails. A brilliant, humane neurologist (Robin
Williams) bends the rules and manages to reach the neglected
patients at a Bronx hospital. Dead souls spring to life. Minds
dormant for decades must now adjust to sentience, and to the
world that has grown 30 years older in an eyewink.

    So far, so ennobling -- and predictable -- in director Penny
Marshall's fidgety rendering of a case study by Oliver Sacks.
But then the door of awareness starts to close on one patient
(Robert De Niro). Worse,  he can chart his gradual loss, as he
never could earlier, when all was lost. He is now his own
historian, recording the last sunset on the only world he
knows. These scenes of decline mark a beautiful passage in an
otherwise ordinary disease-of-the-week TV-style drama.

    Count on Awakenings, written by Steve Zaillian, to mop up
at Oscar-nominations time. Any movie about mental disturbance
(One Flew over the Cuckoo's  Nest, Rain Man) is likely to touch
Academy members, not so much because it treats a serious issue
as because it parades the performer's craft. To watch De Niro
shrink into the shadow of catatonia is to be made aware of his
great gifts of body control, of withdrawing into character, of
seeming to be. It's an awesome show that reveals more about De
Niro than about the man he is playing. Like the Master
Thespian on Saturday Night Live, he might be expected to snap
out of his poignant lethargy and triumphantly shout, "Acting!"

By Richard Corliss.