I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 32
The Night Porter
(Directed by Liliana Cavani; starring Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling; 1975)
The Night Porter is as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering. It is (I know how obscene this sounds) Nazi chic. It’s been taken seriously in some circles, mostly by critics agile enough to stand on their heads while describing 180-degree turns, in order to interpret trash as “really” meaningful.
That’s not to say I object per se to the movie’s subject matter, a sadomasochistic relationship taken up again fifteen years after the war by a former SS concentration camp officer and the inmate he raped and dominated when she was a young girl. I can imagine a serious film on this theme—on the psychological implications of shared guilt and the identification of the slave with the master—but The Night Porter isn’t such a film; it’s such a superficial soap opera we’d laugh at it if it weren’t so disquieting.
Fascism and its favorite sexual taste, sadomasochism, have come into a certain degree of fashion in the movies recently, and that’s the subject of a scary essay by Susan Sontag in the New York Review of Books. She finds films like The Night Porter to be, on one level at least, attractive to certain audiences because of their undertones of doom and death. That may be an aspect of the times or it may just be that such movies reach areas of the personality that weren’t widely admitted before; she’s not sure. But she’s worried.
I am, too. For a long time I’ve defended the belief that what we see in the movies doesn’t direct our behavior, if we’re more or less normal; that there are infinitely greater influences all around us in society to explain deviant and violent behavior, and that the movies are just a convenient whipping boy. I still believe that, but I’m getting awfully weary of the violence I have to witness week after week as a critic.
It’s been years since most movie violence was motivated, explained, or even taken seriously by the characters themselves. In most of the violent exploitation movies I see, the killings and hurtings are just there, a way to get through a few minutes of screen time. The audience laughs, most often. But now here’s a movie that’s not intended for the action-and-escapism crowd, a movie presumably intended for more intelligent and venturesome audiences, who don’t laugh at it (although maybe it would be better if they did). What’s going on here?
The Night Porter has a nice, classy visual style, filled with browns and blacks (and blues), and good performances by its romantic leads, Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. But it’s such nonsense. It gives us, through flashbacks and sketchy hints, the story of the relationship they had years earlier in the concentration camp, where his “little girl” appealed to him in a demented way, and she found herself enjoying the raping, the beating, and cuts and bruises.
Now they meet again in a Vienna hotel. She’s the wife of an American conductor, and he’s the quiet little night porter. All he wants to do, he says, is live “like a church mouse.” From the moment she sees him again, she’s bound to him. She stays behind when her husband leaves, then moves into his apartment and the fun and games start again: Chains and broken glass and slaps on the face are their aphrodisiacs, and they make love mostly on the floor.
Meanwhile, there’s a subplot so ridiculous it must be intended as fantasy. The Bogarde character is a member of a sort of Nazi encounter group that specializes in expiating past guilt and destroying evidence against itself. The Rampling character, alas, is the last surviving witness against Bogarde and so the Nazis want to kill her. They lay siege to the apartment, and the lovers slowly starve together. There’s no reason at all why the couple can’t be killed straightaway except that then, of course, the movie would be over.
The director, Liliana Cavani, describes her film as a love story, praises the honesty between her two leading characters, and sees the story as a straightforward handling of one aspect of the concentration camp experience. I see it as a shallow exploitation of that theme, containing no real insight or understanding. Even worse, the movie is now being marketed as a controversial audience-grabber. One theater marquee quotes the New York Times: “A kinky turn-on!” I looked up that Times review. Its opening sentence was: “Let us now consider a piece of junk.”
No Looking Back
(Directed by Edward Burns; starring Edward Burns, Blythe Danner; 1998)
Hobbies. That’s what the characters in No Looking Back need. Bowling or yard sales or watching the Knicks on television. Anything. Although the movie wants us to feel sympathy for them, trapped in meagre lives and empty dreams, I saw them as boring slugs. There is more to existence than moping about at bars and kitchen tables, whining about unhappiness while endlessly sipping from long-neck Budweiser bottles. Get a life.
The movie is the latest from Ed Burns, who won the Sundance Film Festival in 1995 with his rich and moving The Brothers McMullen, but has since made two thin and unconvincing films: She’s the One (1996) and now this one, in which self-absorbed characters fret over their lives. I have no brief against that subject matter; I simply wish the characters and their fretting were more interesting, or their unhappiness less avoidable.
The film is set in the bleak, wintry landscape of Rockaway Beach, New York, where Claudia (Lauren Holly) works in a diner and lives with Michael (Jon Bon Jovi), a mechanic. They are engaged, in a sense, but with no plans for marriage; Michael wants to marry her, but she’s “afraid to wake up ten years from now” still working in the diner.
As the film opens, Charlie (Edward Burns) returns to town on the bus after an absence of three years. He was once Claudia’s lover, but ditched her without a farewell. Now he apparently hopes to pick up where they left off. He moves into his mother’s house; she has his number, and tells him to get a job. And then Michael, who was his best friend, comes over for more beer and conversation, and explains that he and Claudia are “together” now.
Will Claudia accept the dependable Michael? Or will she be swept off her feet once again by the flashier, more charismatic Charlie? “It’s different this time,” he tells her. “This time I need you. I love you.” He’s not the soul of eloquence, but she is willing to be persuaded.
The problem is, Charlie is an enigma. Where was he for three years? Why is he back? What are his skills, his plans, his strategies? His vision for the two of them is not inspiring: They’ll leave town and go to Florida, where he has no prospects, and “start over.” Still, Charlie paints a seductive picture.
Or does he? The film wants us to see Michael, the Bon Jovi character, as a boring, safe, faithful but unexciting choice. But I sort of liked him; Bon Jovi plays the role for its strengths, which involve sincerity and a certain bottom line of integrity. Charlie, on the other hand, is one of those men who believe that true happiness, for a woman, consists of doing what he wants. He offers Claudia not freedom, but the choice of living in his shadow instead of her own.
The story plays out during overcast days and chilly nights, in lonely barrooms and rented houses. Some small life is provided by Claudia’s family, which includes her mother (Blythe Danner) and her sister. The mother is convinced her husband, who has deserted her, will return some day. The sister is dating the local fishmonger. As the three women discuss the comings and goings of the men in their lives, they scheme like some of Jane Austen’s dimmer characters, for whom the advent of the right man is about the most a girl can hope for.
It is extremely important to some men that the woman of their choice sleep with them. This is a topic not of much interest to outside observers, and often not even to the woman of their choice. No Looking Back is really only about whether Claudia will sleep with Charlie, stay with Michael, or leave town. As the characters unhappily circled those possibilities, I felt like asking Claudia to call me when she made up her mind.
Nomads
(Directed by John McTiernan; starring Leslie-Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan; 1986)
I would like to describe the plot of Nomads, but my space is limited. Maybe I can give it a try. A French anthropologist (Pierce Brosnan) moves to Los Angeles with his wife. Their new home is immediately made the target of a roaming band of fierce street people who dress in leather and chains and paint slogans on garage walls.
The anthropologist discovers that these people are not your average, big-city vandals, but an urban version of the Innuat. And, about halfway through the movie, we learn what the Innuat are. According to Eskimo legends, they are nomadic spirits who wander Earth in human form, spreading evil.
That is not the complicated part of the plot. The hard part is what we have to slog through before we find out about Innuats.
The movie starts with Lesley-Anne Down as an emergency-room doctor. A deranged patient (Brosnan) is brought in and handcuffed to the bed. Everybody thinks he’s on a bad drug trip, but no, it’s simpler than that; he has gone stark raving mad.
He keeps screaming the same phrase in French: N’y sont pas; sont des Innuat. This translates as, “They are not there; they are Innuat.” But nobody can figure that out, because they don’t know “Innuat” is an Eskimo word, you see, and they simply think his French is bad.
That reminds me of a classic story from the Cannes Film Festival a few years back, when Rex Reed got an engraved invitation in French. The only word he could read was “Eskimo.”
He had heard that there was a great new Eskimo film in the festival, however, and so at midnight he went bravely out into the rainy night and got a cab and went to the address on the invitation, only to discover that he was a guest at the opening of an Eskimo Pie ice-cream store.
Now you may argue, not unreasonably, that my story has little to do with Nomads. True. But it has at least as much to do with Nomads as the ancient Eskimo myth of the Innuat.
Nomads is a very confused movie, especially after the berserk Brosnan leaps out of his manacles and bites Lesley-Anne Down on the neck, transferring all of his memories into her head, so that she goes crazy and relives all of Brosnan’s traumatic experiences with the Innuat.
This grows very confusing for Brosnan’s wife (Anna-Maria Monticelli), who does not understand why Down is telling her things only Brosnan would know. It is also very confusing for the audience, because the movie keeps switching signals on us. Sometimes we see Down and then we get a point-of-view shot that is supposed to be inside her head but looking out through Brosnan’s eyes. Sometimes we see Brosnan from the outside. Sometimes that means we are looking at the real Brosnan, and sometimes it doesn’t. We’d really be confused, if we cared.
But we don’t. The movie tells one of those stories where the characters have only themselves to blame for going out into dark nights and looking for trouble with the Innuat and not getting on the next plane back to France. Everybody in this movie gets what’s coming to them, except for Lesley-Anne Down, and even she should have been smart enough not to shine her flashlight into the eyes of a man who was foaming at the mouth.
Nomads does, however, have one great shot. An Innuat on a motorcycle is chasing the two women down a lonely interstate highway. Suddenly, the Innuat turns back, and the camera pans slowly to reveal a highway sign: the California state line. Apparently Nevada is not loony enough for the Innuat. And so the lonely Innuat wheels his motorcycle around, and drives slowly back to Los Angeles, where, in keeping with the ancient Eskimo legend, his spirit will haunt the backlots of Hollywood, waiting for another movie that wouldn’t be quite bad enough without him.
North
(Directed by Rob Reiner; starring Elijah Wood, Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander, Dan Aykroyd, Kathy Bates; 1994)
I have no idea why Rob Reiner, or anyone else, wanted to make this story into a movie, and close examination of the film itself is no help. North is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I’ve had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails.
The film stars Elijah Wood, who is a wonderful young actor (and if you don’t believe me, watch his version of The Adventures of Huck Finn). Here he is stuck in a story that no actor, however wonderful, however young, should be punished with. He plays a kid with inattentive parents who decides to go into court, free himself of them, and go on a worldwide search for nicer parents.
This idea is deeply flawed. Children do not lightly separate from their parents—and certainly not on the evidence provided here, where the great parental sin is not paying attention to their kid at the dinner table. The parents (Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) have provided little North with what looks like a million-dollar house in a Frank Capra neighborhood, all on dad’s salary as a pants inspector. And, yes, I knew that is supposed to be a fantasy, but the pants-inspecting jokes are only the first of several truly awful episodes in this film.
North goes into court, where the judge is Alan Arkin, proving without the slightest shadow of a doubt that he should never, ever, appear again in public with any material even vaguely inspired by Groucho Marx. North’s case hits the headlines, and since he is such an all-star overachiever, offers pour in from would-be parents all over the world, leading to an odyssey that takes him to Texas, Hawaii, Alaska, and elsewhere.
What is the point of the scenes with the auditioning parents? (The victimized actors range from Dan Aykroyd as a Texan to Kathy Bates as an Eskimo). They are all seen as broad, desperate comic caricatures. They are not funny. They are not touching. There is no truth in them. They don’t even work as parodies. There is an idiocy here that seems almost intentional, as if the filmmakers plotted to leave anything of interest or entertainment value out of these episodes.
North is followed on his travels by a mysterious character who appears in many guises. He is the Easter bunny, a cowboy, a beach bum, and a Federal Express driver who works in several product plugs. Funny, thinks North; this guy looks familiar. And so he is. All of the manifestations are played by Bruce Willis, who is not funny, or helpful, in any of them.
I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
I hold it as an item of faith that Rob Reiner is a gifted filmmaker; among his credits are This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery. I list those titles as an incantation against this one. North is a bad film, but it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover—possibly sooner than I will.
Nowhere to Run
(Directed by Robert Harmon; starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rosanna Arquette; 1993)
I am trying to remember where I saw Nowhere to Run before, but I have forgotten—just as, before too much longer, I will have forgotten Nowhere to Run itself. This is the kind of movie that is so witlessly generic that the plot and title disappear into a mist of other recycled plots and interchangeable titles.
If you have seen the ads on TV, you already know everything that happens in the movie. A prisoner (Jean-Claude Van Damme) escapes from a prison bus and ends up camping on the farm of a sexy widow (Rosanna Arquette) and her two young children, including Kieran Culkin, brother of the little superstar. At first Arquette wants him to leave, but no sooner has he said nineteen words, which are a lot for him, than attraction begins to grow between them.
Meanwhile, an evil real estate developer (Joss Ackland) has designs on the idyllic valley wherein nestles Arquette’s farm. He wants to bulldoze her out, and replace this Eden with suburban sprawl. She resists, and he enlists hired goons and the corrupt local lawman (who is smitten with Arquette) to strong-arm her off the land. Van Damme comes to her rescue, and after assorted barn-burnings, pitchfork stabbings, knife fights, gun battles, motorcycle chases, and bulldozer duels, victory is distributed among the just, while the evil are carted away, sneering, “Don’t you know who I am?”
Van Damme has specialized in kickboxing and martial arts pictures up until now, but Nowhere to Run gives him a few quiet conversational scenes—almost too quiet, since he seems reluctant to speak up. Rosanna Arquette is rather thanklessly used in the film, but shows a quiet grace that should have served a better script. After Van Damme wins her over by repairing the farm machinery, befriending her children, saving her life, and letting her see him in the shower, the erotic tension builds until she finally cracks and utters the movie’s best line: “Want to see what my room looks like?”
The movie’s screenplay includes a contribution by Joe Eszterhas, author of Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge. I have a feeling this one was in the bottom of the desk drawer for a long time.
Oh Heavenly Dog
(Directed by Joe Camp; starring Chevy Chase, Benji, Jane Seymour, Omar Sharif, Robert Morley, Alan Sues; 1980)
Satire has such a curious way of catching up with itself. Just a few short years ago, Chevy Chase was on Saturday Night Live, that sworn enemy of our national tendency toward the smarmy. Now Chevy Chase is playing Benji in a movie. Among the great unrecorded conversations in Hollywood history, we must now include the one in which Chevy Chase’s agent convinced him that playing Benji would be the right career move.
The conversation itself could no doubt have played on Saturday Night Live, and there’d also be endless possibilities for the ads: You’ll believe a man can bark! Just when we thought it was safe to go back into the pond!
