TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/121889/12188900.038

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 8KB | 141 lines

CINEMA, Page 91

Of Time and the River

Coming to terms with bravery and tomfoolery


  DRIVING MISS DAISY
  Directed by Bruce Beresford
  Screenplay by Alfred Uhry

    It is the season when movies are ablaze with self-importance,
urging us to contemplate, through various fictive metaphors, the
great issues of our time. And, by the way, to spare some kindly
thoughts for the high-mindedness of their makers and their
worthiness for Oscar nominations.

    Such a metaphor is available in Driving Miss Daisy. If you look
hard, you can find in this account of the 25-year relationship
between Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), a genteel Southern, Jewish
matriarch, and her black chauffeur, Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman),
a microcosmic study of changing racial attitudes in a crucial time
and place (Atlanta, circa 1948-73). What you will not find in this
marvelously understated movie is overtly inspirational comments on
that subject, broad sentimentality or the slightest pomposity about
its own mission. In other words, Alfred Uhry's adaptation of his
Pulitzer-prizewinning play aspires more to complex observation of
human behavior than to simple moralism about it. Precisely because
it has its priorities straight, it succeeds superbly on both
levels.

    Director Bruce Beresford's tone is cool and shadowy -- like
Miss Daisy's fine old house. Hoke is introduced into it by her son
Boolie (Dan Aykroyd, displaying full credentials as an actor), when
at 72 Miss Daisy careers her car into a neighbor's yard. She has
objections, suspicions. She harbors -- yes -- more racial prejudice
than she has ever been forced to admit.

    But Hoke is a wise and patient man. And Miss Daisy is a woman
worthy of those qualities. She may be comically set in her small
ways, but she casts a shrewd eye on her immediate world. As she
ages, that world shrinks, so that Hoke looms ever larger within
it. As a result, she is forced to think harder about the growing
civil rights struggle than she might otherwise have. An encounter
with menacing red-neck cops on a country road, the bombing of her
synagogue, a distant but moving exposure to the force of Martin
Luther King Jr.'s oratory all have their effect on her. But mostly
it is the simple presence of a good man that grants her age's
greatest benison, expanding rather than shrinking her humanity.

    One cannot speak too highly of the subtlety that two great
actors, Freeman and Tandy, bring to their roles. Or of the faith
that Beresford places in their ability to convey large emotions
through an exchange of glances in a rearview mirror. Or of his
trust in a script that speaks most eloquently through silences and
indirection. All, finally, have placed their faith in the
audience's ability to read their delicately stated work with the
responsiveness it deserves. It would be a shame to fail them.


    GLORY
    Directed by Edward Zwick
    Screenplay by Kevin Jarre

    It just slips under the wire as the first large-scale Civil
War film of the decade. And it may be the last of the millennium,
so far out of favor (and economic viability) have historical epics
of all kinds fallen. Maybe one's good response to Glory derives
from the sheer novelty of the thing and from admiration for the
producers' gumption in flinging it in the face of the movie
audience's indifference to the pretelevised past.

    But not entirely. For the specific historical events the film
narrates -- the formation, training and terrible blooding in battle
of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first black fighting unit
enlisted in the Union cause -- are little known yet resonant with
high symbolic significance. The 54th, led by an idealistic
25-year-old white man, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick
skillfully blending shyness and tenacity), had to fight to fight.
Their white comrades-in-arms were full of contemptuous prejudice
against them, and the high command was afraid to arm black men who
had their own bitter racial grievances (many were runaway slaves).

    Yet precisely because of their lowly status, these men had a
more than usually powerful need to assert their manhood through
deadly exertion. Glory is at its best when it shows their proud
embrace of 19th century warfare at its most brutal. Director Edward
Zwick graphically demonstrates the absurdity of lines of soldiers
slowly advancing across open ground, shoulder to shoulder, in the
face of withering rifle volleys and horrendous cannonade. The fact
that the 54th finally achieves respect (and opens the way for other
black soldiers) only by losing half its number in a foredoomed
assault on an impregnable fortress underscores this terrible and
brutal irony.

    Kevin Jarre's script makes no direct comment on these matters,
and a squad of fine actors ground the film in felt reality: Denzel
Washington is a proud and badly misused troublemaker; Driving Miss
Daisy's Morgan Freeman a steadying influence; Andre Braugher a
Harvard student who finds Emersonian idealism of small help in
mastering the bayonet. It is the movie's often awesome imagery and
a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the
reality, granting it the status of necessary myth. Broad, bold,
blunt, Glory is everything that a film like Miss Daisy, all nuance
and implication, is not. But arriving together, they somehow
hearten: they widen the range of our responses to what remains the
central issue of our past, our present, our future.


    BLAZE
    Directed and Written by Ron Shelton

    It was an affair made in tabloid heaven: stripteaser Blaze
Starr ("Miss Spontaneous Combustion, and I do mean bustion!") and
Earl K. Long, fine Governor of the great state of Louisiana. Long
was too full of his princely power to be discreet about his
indiscretions. Blaze could have told him -- and in this lengthy,
clever, depressing film she does -- that "your political instincts
are clouded by the aroma of my perfume."  By 1959, when Long's
campaign slogan was the forthright "I ain't crazy," his liaison
with the stripper was as controversial as his tax evasion and
support for Negro voting rights. He lost. It was a little American
tragedy, played as farce.

    Ron Shelton (Bull Durham) directs Blaze with plenty of pungent
wit, but from a high, disinterested view. He never gets steam into
the affair. Paul Newman approaches Earl from the outside too, as
a growly-bear clown who doesn't realize he's King Lear. Lolita
Davidovich, making the most of her first big break, plays Blaze as
a sensible, loving career gal with an overripe body. But the
picture is not mainly about sex or even love; it is about an aging
man's loss of sexual, political and personal power.

    The film ends with a great shot. Blaze walks out of the state
house where Earl's corpse lies, and the camera ascends to take in
Long's old domain. Randy Newman's poignant song Louisiana 1927 --
a cracker's lament about a devastating flood -- reaches its apogee
of symphonic paranoia with the line "They're tryin' to wash us
away." Just then, the camera discovers the Mississippi roaring
past, washing away Earl and his wily, wild, pre-TV tradition of
Southern politics. What has happened down there is that the wind
has changed, and for its last three minutes Blaze finds potent film
poetry to express that change. The rest of the movie lacks Earl's
heroic craziness. And the stars could use a dose of Blaze's
spontaneous combustion.