TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123091/1230420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.8 KB | 284 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 70

Santa Leaves a Six-Pack


In half a dozen Christmas movies, Hollywood worries a lot, has
an affair, pays for a wedding, loses its faith and the rain
forest, and gets stoned

Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss


    GRAND CANYON

    The business of the movies is to reassure us. The boy
eventually gets the girl; the bad guy bites the dust. And maybe
Grand Canyon, which ends on a subdued but nevertheless
optimistic note, must finally be construed as a conventionally
cheering film.

    But before it brings most of its principals to the edge of
the title gorge, there to commune with a symbol of the timeless
universe's indifference to our petty bedevilments, the film
accomplishes something remarkable: it forces us to contemplate
the fragility of our everyday arrangements, the ease with which
brutal chance can void the habits and relationships we count on
to give life its continuity. It is hard to think of another
American movie that has so directly, even naively, confronted
the basic source of our existential unease. Or done so with such
easy humor and graceful sentiment.

    Grand Canyon's structure is rewardingly complex,
intertwining disparate lives that represent a fair cross section
of big-city life. The fulcrum character, discovered in a
slightly off-center condition, which will get worse before it
gets better, is a mildly depressed, mildly humorous man named
Mack (Kevin Kline). The process that will force him to higher
consciousness begins when his car breaks down in a bad
neighborhood and his life is threatened by a menacing gang, then
saved by Simon (Danny Glover), a lonely tow-truck operator. The
episode is Mack's first lesson in just how tenuous our grip on
normality is.

    Others quickly follow. Mack's discreet little affair with
his secretary (Mary-Louise Parker) threatens to become
indiscreet. His best friend, a heedless movie producer (Steve
Martin), is permanently crippled in a mugging. His wife Claire
(the luminous Mary McDonnell) discovers an abandoned baby on her
morning run and, afflicted by empty-nest malaise (their son is
growing up), begins a campaign to adopt the foundling. An
earthquake thunders through town, a neighbor dies suddenly, and
overhead the police helicopters endlessly circle, their probing
searchlights constant reminders of disorder and imminent sorrow.

    Against which everyone bravely, touchingly, builds his or
her none-too-sturdy defenses. Mack, in fact, turns into a
benign busybody, trying to pat almost all the lives that touch
his into shape. His work comes out a little too neatly, but
Kline's performance, like all the others, is engagingly
soft-spoken. And well spoken. The screenplay -- by Lawrence and
Meg Kasdan -- has a nice, unforced wit, and Lawrence Kasdan's
direction has its jagged edges. If sometimes this loose and
anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And
it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities --
generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither
smug nor sentimental.

By Richard Schickel.


    THE PRINCE OF TIDES

    There's the love story, of course, in which opposites
warily circle, passionately and adulterously engage, and
ruefully part. Then there's the memory piece, in which a man
comes to grips with the dark, dangerous and deeply buried secret
of his childhood and by so doing achieves peace and
self-reconciliation. There's comedy too: shrewd bumpkin goes to
New York City and shows them city slickers a thing or two.
Finally, there's a teacher-student relationship that leads to
some mutually instructive, emotionally gratifying male bonding.

    Wow! Four movies for the price of one. The Prince of Tides
may be the biggest bargain of these recessionary holidays.
Excessive is the word for director Barbra Streisand's movie --
and not an entirely pejorative one either. It is adapted -- by
Pat Conroy and Becky Johnston -- from Conroy's romantic,
sentimental and gothic novel, which has attracted a passionate
following precisely because, in an age when most serious fiction
has a pinched quality, his work is so gloriously unbuttoned.

    The movie is as lush visually as Conroy's book is lush
verbally. There is something tidal -- that is to say, patiently
inexorable -- in its rhythms. And as Tom Wingo, protagonist of
all the movies Streisand is sweeping along on the imagistic
current she has unleashed, Nick Nolte gives a force-of-nature
performance -- shrewd and gullible, bitter and innocent, bigger
than life but still in touch with it.

    Good father, impotent husband, unemployed football coach
and tormented modern male, he is summoned to New York because
his sister Savannah, a poet, has again attempted suicide. It
develops, of course, that her psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein
(played not entirely believably by the director), has a life as
miserable as Tom's. Her husband (Jeroen Krabbe) is a cold,
egomaniacal concert violinist, her son (played well by
Streisand's real-life son Jason Gould) the victim of the Golden
Boy syndrome, torn between the violin and a rough sport (in this
case football).

    With all this trouble, can a love affair -- healing for
him, liberating for her -- be far behind? Unfortunately, the
look that Streisand imparts to this passage -- that of a
commercial for a feminine-hygiene product -- is a deal breaker,
the moment at which at least some portion of the audience is
likely to realize that their eager-to-please saleslady has been
soft-soaping a hard sell all along. By slamming several minor
domestic dramas together in one handsomely presented package,
Tides achieves the length and weight of an epic. But it is a
false epic, a grandiose delusion compounded of conventional
problems, easy sentiments and pretty pictures. R.S.


    FATHER OF THE BRIDE

    Annie (Kimberly Williams) is home from Europe with big
news. Good news, if you are not her father George (Steve
Martin). She met a guy, she's in love, they're getting married.
The first pleasure this sentimental comedy offers is the sight
of Martin's reaction to Annie's plans: the tan seems to seep off
his magnificently fretful face. He will pay for this wedding in
many ways.

    On its surface, Father of the Bride is a parable for the
New Depression, in which a middle-class family is expected to
pony up $100,000 or so in lieu of letting a young couple elope.
At heart, though, the story is about the deep, complex,
poignant love a man has for his daughter: it's the Lolita
syndrome without the lust but with every bit of the doting
possessiveness. Annie's budding maturity means that George can
no longer even pretend he is young; her engagement is a
renunciation of their old flirtatious bond. "I was no longer the
man in my little girl's life," he says with a sigh. For this
father, a wedding is a funeral.

    Back in 1950, when middle-class values were less besieged,
MGM told this story sharply and beautifully, with two stars --
Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor -- who were born to play
Everydad and Gorgeous Gal. Neither the '90s nor the husband-wife
team of Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer (they wrote the new
version, she co-produced, he directed) can match the original
film's grace or wit. The humor is sometimes gross, often wan.
Which doesn't mean you can't shed an agreeable tear at the
climax, or take pleasure in recalling what weddings, families
and movies were like in the chapel of optimism where, once upon
a time, America worshipped.

By Richard Corliss.


    AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD and BLACK ROBE

    Not so long ago, even nonbelievers looked upon them with
a certain awe. It took courage for priests and ministers to go
among the savage heathens, trying to claim their souls for a
Christian God. Now, in the age of cultural relativism, even some
believers look upon these evangelicals skeptically; who are they
to impose their beliefs on others? Amazing how the missionary
position, or perhaps one should say our position on
missionaries, has changed.

    At Play in the Fields of the Lord presents a team of
Fundamentalist interlopers in the Amazon rain forest whose
leader, Leslie Huben (John Lithgow), has made a secret deal with
local authorities to help drive an isolated, innocent tribe off
its valuable land. Martin Quarrier (Aidan Quinn), the man
directly in charge of bringing the good word to the natives,
starts losing faith after his son dies and his wife (Kathy
Bates) rather too colorfully goes bonkers.

    Their behavior is contrasted to that of the noble
half-savage Lewis Moon (Tom Berenger), a bush pilot who is part
American Indian. He crashes his plane near the endangered
tribe's village, dons a teeny-weeny bikini and passes himself
off as one of their sky gods. He means well, but he too carries
civilization's taint: the virus of lust, for Huben's wife (Daryl
Hannah), which will lead to the villagers' destruction.

    This is supposed to be a tragedy. But the contrivances are
so loopy that the film often plays like a comedy: Monty Python
on an off day. The rest of the time it plays like a documentary
-- PBS on an off night -- as director Hector Babenco solemnly
records native customs, an activity that accounts for much of
the absurd three-hour length.

    Black Robe, in contrast, is dark and stark, the perfectly
controlled story of one Father Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau), a
17th century Jesuit priest whose burning faith is expressed as
an obsessive desire to save the souls of Canada's Huron Indians.
They are relentlessly cruel, licentious, obscene in their
behavior, squalid in their way of life. Yet as it is slowly
revealed to him, their religion -- a thing of dark dreams, not
texts, and peopled by forest spirits -- is in its way as subtle
as his own, and perhaps rather more suited to this harsh
environment.

    In the end, priest and natives can do no more than grant
one another their mutual irredeemability, the dignity of their
otherness. Screenwriter Brian Moore, adapting his novel, avoids
anachronistic political correctness, and director Bruce
Beresford refuses melodramatic imposition -- no dancing with
wolves for them. This magnificently austere epic makes us too
feel (and taste and smell) that otherness, the discomfiting
strangeness of these lives, the authentic tragedy of their
collision.

By Richard Schickel.


    NAKED LUNCH

    "The unfilmable Naked Lunch." Even this movie's producer
called William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel that, and he was right.
A gallimaufry of hallucinations, literary gossip and medical
info, Burroughs' confession of a hipster junkie is its own
X-rated movie, so vivid is its evocation of a mind gone bad, a
soul shriveled. "Gentle reader," he writes, "the ugliness of
that spectacle buggers description." Which Burroughs of course
describes, in language both raw and heroically ironic. The novel
is a detective story in which the private eye is desperate to
forget, not learn, life's mysteries; or maybe sci-fi set in the
lunar wastes of an addict's mind; or else it's a spy story, in
which the secret agent is bug powder.

    Bugsy could be the name of the film David Cronenberg has
woven from remnants of Naked Lunch. Its main character, Bill Lee
(Peter Weller), is an exterminator who sees roaches everywhere
-- not least because his wife Joan (Judy Davis) has been
stealing the bug powder he needs for his job; she cuts the stuff
with baby laxative and injects it into her breast. "It's a Kafka
high," she says. "You feel like a bug." In his daymares, Bill
is visited by beetles -- big ugly things, chatting away through
purulent orifices -- that send him on a spy mission into the
Tangier of his delirium. Typewriters turn into bugs, and so do
the humans Bill meets, who are verminous to begin with.
Cronenberg, whose 1986 movie The Fly was a great parable of love
and decay, takes this line as his mandate: "Exterminate all
rational thought."

    The movie welds snippets of scenes from the novel to
elements of the writer's life: his accidental shooting of his
wife Joan; his friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg,
Paul and Jane Bowles; his own sepulchral charisma. With his
cracked voice and deadpan insolence, Burroughs was the Beat
Generation's W.C. Fields -- a raconteur of depravity, a
cracker-barrel coroner. Weller gets the haunted look right, but
he can't get inside the junkie's pocked skin. Burroughs lived
and nearly died there; Cronenberg and the actors are only
visiting. The movie is way too colorful -- cute, in a repulsive
way, with its crawly special effects -- and tame compared with
its source. Instead of an insider's view of drug despair,
Cronenberg takes us to the Hell Pavilion at Walt Disney World.

By Richard Corliss.