TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT3028> <title> Nov. 20, 1989: Festive Film Fare For Thanksgiving </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Nov. 20, 1989 Freedom! </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> CINEMA, Page 92 Festive Film Fare for Thanksgiving </hdr><body> With a Mermaid as hostess, Magnolias on the table -- and a turkey called Valmont By Richard Schickel <qt> <l>STEEL MAGNOLIAS</l> <l>Directed by Herbert Ross</l> <l>Screenplay by Robert Harling</l> </qt> Men have hunting, ball games and bars -- plenty of opportunities to practice the hearty, necessary rituals of male bonding. Feminist theory and common sense tell us that women have a similar need to renew gender loyalties. Their problem, traditionally, has been finding suitable places and occasions to do so. It was observant of playwright Robert Harling to see that a small-town beauty parlor can function as a little lodge hall for women, a place where they can let their hair down while it is being put up. It was clever of him to stock Steel Magnolias with Southern belles, wicked of eye and tongue, though ultimately forgiving of heart. It was shrewd of him to work his successful off-Broadway drama around personal milestones (marriage, birth, death) that everyone shares. His characters may be exotics, but their situations are achingly familiar. Above all, it was brave of Harling to place at the center of what might otherwise have been an episodic comedy the true, tragic story of his sister, a diabetic who doomed herself to early death in order to bear a child, and his mother's struggle to come to terms with that choice. It gives the piece the dramatic focus and the emotional weight it requires. The play was a swell show; it had something for everyone. The main thing preventing it from being an equally swell movie is the fact that it is a movie. A film must offer us something a little more spectacular than half a dozen white chicks sitting around talking. Accordingly, Harling's adaptation hustles them out of the beauty shop and into the life of the town. Suddenly the people they talked about so amusingly behind their backs must be met face-to-face. The conflicts and confusions that sounded so hilarious in the recounting are spread out realistically. And reality, as we know, is never that amusing when confronted head on. The stylized bitchiness of Harling's writing requires a stage setting. Failing that, it requires a director willing to let his actors throw good lines away or overlap them in ways that work in the movie's naturalistic context. But Herbert Ross insists on theatricality. His editing even provides awkward little pauses for the audience to fill with laughter, just as if this were still a play. As a result, some very good performers (Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, Dolly Parton) function less as full-scale sorority sisters than as chorus members who elbow their way up front in a crowd of even sketchier characters. The film's center lies in the bond between Julia Roberts as the young woman serenely accepting the risk of childbirth and Sally Field as her tightly wound mother, wanting to scream warnings at her daughter but only able to whisper despairing support for her -- right through the final coma. Their characters are fully and finely realized, and their work is supported, not subverted, by the style and mood of a film that cries more easily, and more persuasively, than it laughs. <qt> <l>VALMONT</l> <l>Directed by Milos Forman</l> <l>Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere</l> </qt> Call it by its rightful name, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Call it Dangerous Liaisons. Call it, if you must, Valmont. But in any case it looks as if we can now call it a day for stage and movie adaptations of Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos's intricate, instructive novel of sexual gamesmanship among the 18th century French aristocracy. For Milos Forman and Jean-Claude Carriere, while fiddling with the plot of this deliciously nasty tale, have studiously embalmed its spirit. Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures. The script is almost clinically clear about why the Marquise de Merteuil (Annette Bening) and the Vicomte de Valmont (Colin Firth) embark on a campaign to debauch a 15-year-old virgin, Cecile de Volanges (Fairuza Balk). The older woman is gripped by temporary insanity because she loves the man who intends to marry the adolescent. The vicomte too has his excuses. He is possessed by a passionate nature, the ill effects of which, it is implied, are also temporary. Give the kid some time, and he will probably turn out to be an admirable citizen. Indeed, his second amorous campaign -- to bed a virtuous young wife, Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly) -- is not presented as idle and amoral womanizing but as proof of his capacity for authentic emotion. Too bad he has what we now are fond of calling "an intimacy problem," and, as a result, this affair and ultimately his life come to a bad and premature end. How could anyone think it helpful to impose upon the behavior of a long-lost era and a vanished social class the wisdom of modern Pop psychology? It prevents the actors from tearing into their roles with the black comic gusto that Glenn Close and John Malkovich brought to their feverish performances in Dangerous Liaisons last year. But besides spoiling the fun, this approach blurs the work's value as a cautionary tale, capable of reminding us that motiveless malignity is a potent force in every age and one that not even Freud -- let alone humanistically inclined moviemakers -- can explain away. FESTIVAL FILM FARE FOR THANKSGIVING These days, nearly every popular movie wants to be a cartoon. For proof, check out 1989's five top hits: Batman; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Lethal Weapon 2; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Ghostbusters II. They all aspire to the freedom of form and story that any animated film takes for granted. Problem is, real life gets in the way. Location shooting is at the whim of weather; special effects can look chintzy onscreen. And actors! They cost the moon, and their bodies aren't elastic enough to perform the comic contortions that Daffy Duck can give you with the wave of an animator's pen. So here's a tip for the '90s, Hollywood: junk the live-action movie. Just make cartoons. Disney and Don Bluth can lead the way. Walt Disney, after all, created the genre, turning barnyard animals into superstars and a Sunday-supplement curiosity into the movie's most enduring subspecies. Bluth, a Disney renegade, showed his old masters that the cartoon possessed a social vitality for the '80s. Bluth's The Secret of NIMH was a parable on animal experimentation; An American Tail found much to say, endearingly, about melting-pot prejudice; The Land Before Time found love and death among the dinosaurs. Now Disney and Bluth have launched a welcome new Thanksgiving tradition, each producing a feature cartoon for the rescue of baby-sitters and the beguilement of the child in every moviegoer. In All Dogs Go to Heaven, Bluth takes a vacation from portent and dips into anecdote. Listen for familiar echoes (Little Miss Marker, Heaven Can Wait, even Disney's 1988 cartoon Oliver & Company) in the story of Charlie, a German shepherd who is reprieved from death and befriends a little girl kidnaped by his scurvy old gang. Visually, the picture is swathed in Bluth's trademark golden browns and moody blues. Aurally, it's a reunion of the Burt Pack: Burt Reynolds is the voice of Charlie, Loni Anderson is the moll Flo, the exuberantly flustered Dom DeLuise is Charlie's pal Itchy. All Dogs dawdles a bit, but it offers the requisite charm and a poignant moral: some things, like friendship and honor, are worth dying for. The end of The Little Mermaid wrestles with no such ambiguities. It comes with flourishes, a rainbow and a perfect kiss -- full heartstring accompaniment. But from the first frame, Disney's suave storytellers cue you to wonderment in their adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Ariel is a mermaid princess with a teenager's yen to travel beyond her world and become part of the forbidden one above. To her father, King Triton of the Mer-people, humans are "spineless, savage, harpooning fish eaters." To Ariel they are skyrockets and sea chanteys and buried treasure -- the thrilling unknown. Then she spies hunky, lonely Prince Eric, and it's impossible love at first sight. For Eric, when he is saved by the mermaid and nursed by her caressing song, it's love at first sound. A cross-species Romeo and Juliet: boy meets gill. Around these mismatched romancers, writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements have assembled enough entertaining creatures to stock a theme park. Sebastian the crab (voiced by Samuel E. Wright) is a Caribbean Jiminy Cricket, fussing avuncularly over Ariel but bound to break into calypso croon. Louis the French chef (Rene Auberjonois) brings sadistic elan to his dicing, flaying and serving of les poissons. Ursula (Pat Carroll) the sea witch is a fat, shimmying squid with malefic revenge in mind -- the sort of Disney horror queen who has given kids nightmares for a half-century. All these characters are given witty, hummable pop songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (the Little Shop of Horrors team), a reminder that the Hollywood cartoon has become the last, best refuge of the Broadway musical. The film's vocal, musical and painterly talents mesh ecstatically in the big water-ballet production number Under the Sea. As Sebastian limns the aquatic virtues, a Noah's aquarium of sea creatures animates a joyous Busby Berkeley palette. If ever a cartoon earned a standing ovation in mid-film, this would be it. But the whole movie is canny magic. For 82 minutes, The Little Mermaid reclaims the movie house as a dream palace and the big screen as a window into enchantment. Live-action filmmakers, see this and try to top it. Go on and try. </body></article> </text>