TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122892/1228420.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8.4 KB | 191 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 64

Why the Christmas Films Don't Sparkle


Half a dozen releases ignore the rules of keeping audiences
entertained. A seventh remembers how.

By RICHARD SCHICKEL and RICHARD CORLISS


    'Tis the season to be jowly. After pursuing the youth
market most of the year, Hollywood devotes December to prestige
films aimed not at the huge post-Christmas audience but at the
senior citizens in the Motion Picture Academy. The goal is a
batch of Oscar nominations; the reality is a glut of ambitious
pictures that give no one a very merry Christmas. Of seven
holiday movies, all but one ignore Hollywood's hard-learned
rules of storytelling:

    A Life Is Not an Epic. When David Lean died, did he take
the secret of epic movies with him? Lean knew that life is full
of dramatic events, but it's what's inside that counts; the
enthralling vistas matter less than the interior vision. That
lesson is lost on Hollywood, whose idea of epic biography is a
story of a big shot (Gandhi, Bugsy Siegel, Malcolm X) who got
shot. Violent death is meant to lend tragic grandeur.

    Hence Hoffa, an utterly externalized view of the corrupt,
crusading boss of the Teamsters, James R. Hoffa. The R stood for
Riddle, and David Mamet's lean script is content to leave him
at that. Hoffa does stuff -- bullies management, connives with
the Mob -- but who is he? The movie gives not a clue. Jack
Nicholson looks eerily like his subject, and he has the abrupt
gestures and staccato voice of a man who overcomes lack of
eloquence by force of will. But director Danny DeVito, who also
plays Hoffa's closest ally, gets way too fond of slo-mo shots
and swooping cameras; instead of a hard-edge portrait, we get
painting on velvet. It's epic-style vamping around the void of
epic character.

    If You Must Make an Epic, Be Sure You Have the Right
Subject. Genius is one-tenth inspiration and nine-tenths
obsession. Chaplin makes you think it is ten-tenths passivity,
a matter of landing in the right place at the right time. So
Richard Attenborough's film breaks new ground. Instead of
casting Charlie Chaplin in an unnaturally heroic mold, it makes
him a distracted twit who wanders through his life as if it
belonged to someone else.


    All the things that shaped the immortal mime -- his
Victorian sentimentality (of which his passion for underage
girls was the most obvious, least agreeable part), his pretense
to intellectuality, the torments of his vast celebrity -- are
only vaguely alluded to. These are tough topics, wrong for the
form (and indulgent attitude) Attenborough has chosen. Robert
Downey Jr., who plays Chaplin, might have been up to them, but
this episodic film gives him only cautious scenes, not an
incautious character, to play.

    A Movie Sound Track Should Be Accompanied by a Movie. The
Leap of Faith album is a little masterpiece of gospel music,
mixing the real thing (as performed by the Angels of Mercy,
Patti LaBelle, Albertina Walker) with soulful tributes from pop
acolytes (John Pagano, Wynonna Judd, Lyle Lovett). But the
movie, like The Bodyguard, doesn't live up to the craft or
fervor of its music. This tale of a tent-show evangelist (Steve
Martin) -- he promises "miracles and wonders" while lining his
pockets with the gullible hopes of decent people -- can't even
take energy from Martin's holy rants and amazing body wit.

    Director Richard Pearce and writer Janus Cercone purport
to present an insider's view of con artistry, but their
seen-it-all cynicism is a fraud too. By the end we're eye-high
in butterflies, walking cripples and God's own rain shower. The
greenest born-again Christian does not believe in climactic
miracles as desperately as does a moviemaker looking for a way
out of a troubled scenario. No wonder, then, that this Elmer
Gantry wannabe winds up as a Field of Streams. And no miracle,
either.

    If You're Going to Get Cute, Lose Weight. There's a reason
why the Good Lord in his wisdom did not endow the elephant with a
sense of whimsy. A person could get crushed by a large
creature's attempts to trip the light fantastic. That's pretty
much the way Toys leaves you: flattened, bruised and whimpering.

    Based on a moldering script by director Barry Levinson and
Valerie Curtin, Toys is informed by a sensibility still more
antique: 1960s peacenik. It posits a conflict for control of a
family toy company between a near holy fool (Robin Williams) and
his uncle, a retired Army general (Michael Gambon) who wants to
convert the plant to military-weapons production. Both are
predictable types. Their employees are so sweetly innocent one
longs for Hoffa's Teamsters to come in and give them mean
lessons. But everyone's main function is to trigger special
effects and lend scale to production designer Ferdinando
Scarfiotti's overweening sets, which sometimes quote wittily
from the modernist tradition (Dada, etc.) but also overuse the
pachyderm motif at the heavy heart of this disastrously
miscalculated movie.

    Be Sure You Copy the Good Stuff. A better title for Used
People might be Used Goods; it's this year's Moonstruck
knock-off. The chief difference is that, as written by Todd
Graff and directed by Beeban Kidron, this lower-middle-class New
York City family is glumly dysfunctional instead of chipperly
so. The matriarch is newly widowed Pearl (Shirley MacLaine), and
oy, has she got troubles. One of her daughters (Marcia Gay
Harden) is developing multiple personalities based on celebrity
models. The other (Kathy Bates) is fighting fat and single-mom
bitterness. Grandma (Jessica Tandy) is, perhaps sensibly,
threatening to move to Florida.

    Pearl herself is being pursued by a mysteriously
persistent suitor (Marcello Mastroianni) -- a sleek Italian
rooster fluttering a hysterical Jewish hen house. She's wary,
attracted, distracted all at once. What's worse, she's supposed
to be endearingly eccentric. So is everyone else in a film that
some idiot in the quote ads is sure to call heartwarming.
Mind-numbing is more like it. What this bunch needs is a team
of psychiatric social workers.

    Remember: Some Stars Are Worth the Paycheck. He broods,
suicidally, about his blindness. He snarls orders like the Army
lieutenant colonel he once was. He pretends to a worldliness
that is not entirely authentic, and he can't quite hide the
arrested adolescent lurking beneath his spit, polish and
bluster. Frank Slade is a piece of work, all right, and playing
him Al Pacino is always an actor acting -- in love with his own
prodigious technique. For which, thank heaven, it permits him
to range boldly outside the conventional lines of Bo Goldman's
script for Scent of a Woman.

    Frank has a minder, an ingenuous, fretful prep schooler
named Charlie Simms (played with sturdy discretion by Chris
O'Donnell). The pair go off to New York for a Thanksgiving
weekend full of wine, women and rented limos. Will Charlie help
Frank gain a new lease on life? Will Frank help Charlie assert
moral superiority over snooty schoolmates and snaky headmaster?
Will Martin Brest's movie go wheezy (2 hr. 25 min. for a simple
two-hander -- pass the No Doz!) as it takes these matters too
seriously? Need you ask? Need you care? If you're here for
anything but the star turn, you're at the wrong movie.

    Relax Guys, It's Only a Movie. Bereft because the love of
his life is in what her doctors insist is an irreversible coma, a
test pilot (Mel Gibson) volunteers for an experiment in
cryogenics. Frozen in 1939, Daniel is filed and forgotten until
the day before yesterday. Thawed out, he naturally finds the
world greatly changed, his old passion utterly unchanged.

    Sure, Forever Young is Rip Van Winkle, The Time Machine
and E.T., plus all their hundreds of heirs and assigns, rolled
into one. But amid the huffing and puffing of these holiday
movies, there is something very agreeable about Jeffrey Abrams'
affable script, Steve Miner's gently romantic direction and
Gibson's easy-riding charm. Jamie Lee Curtis and Elijah Wood are
good too, as the mother and son who take Daniel in, wise him up
and protect him from government snoops who want to pry into the
scientific secrets he contains. Forever Young reminds you that
unpretentious, unself-conscious sober-silliness -- once every
moviegoer's birthright -- has been sold out in this age of
excess.