I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 43
The most incredible thing in The Thing with Two Heads is not the head transplant, however, but what happens next. Within hours after Milland’s head has been screwed on, the two-headed escapee is on a motorcycle and being chased by no less than fourteen police cars. Every one of them is destroyed during the chase, a process that takes so long that seven, or even five, squad cars might have been enough.
The publicity for the movie warns against the possibility of “apoplectic strokes, cerebral hemorrhages, cardiac seizures, or fainting spells” during the movie, but they’re just trying to make themselves look good.
A Thousand Acres
(Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse; starring Jason Robards, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh; 1997)
A Thousand Acres is an ungainly, undigested assembly of “women’s issues” milling about within a half-baked retread of King Lear. The film is so unfocused that at the end of its very long 104 minutes I was unable to say who I was supposed to like and who I was supposed to hate—although I could name several characters for whom I had no feelings at all.
The movie is set on the thousand-acre Cook farm in Iowa, where the weathered and wise old patriarch Larry (Jason Robards) is the most powerful farmer for miles around. Then he announces he has decided to retire, and to divide his farm into three parts, giving shares to each of his daughters.
That’s fine with Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Ginny (Jessica Lange), who are married farm women—but Larry’s youngest and most favored daughter, Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a lawyer, questions the wisdom of the plan. Larry instantly disowns her and later slams a door in her face, and as the other two daughters and their husbands begin running the farm, we figure it’s only a matter of time until old Larry is out there in a raging storm, cursing the heavens.
We are correct, but A Thousand Acres wants only to borrow plot elements of King Lear, not to face up to its essentials. We are denied even the old man’s heartbreaking deathbed scene—that goes to one of the daughters, after her second bout with breast cancer. The movie repeats the currently fashionable pattern in which men are bad and fathers are the most evil of all; there is not a single positive male character in the movie, unless you count the preacher who says grace before the church supper.
The husbands of the two older daughters, indeed, are written so thinly that when one of them (Kevin Anderson) kills himself, we’re not sure why (until it’s belatedly explained) and don’t much care, and when the other (Keith Carradine) goes off to Texas to work on a hog farm, his wife scarcely seems to notice he’s gone. Along the way, in a development so badly handled it seems to belong in another movie, Caroline gets married in Des Moines and lets her sisters find out about it only through a wedding announcement in the local weekly; as nearly as I can recall, we never meet her husband, nor is he ever referred to again.
All white male patriarchs must be guilty of something in modern women’s fiction, preferably the sexual abuse of their children, and I was not surprised to find out that Larry visited the bedrooms of Rose and Ginny. Rose describes the visits in lurid detail, but Ginny cannot remember, although they took place as late as her sixteenth year; her memory lapse, I think, serves to prolong the breathless scenes of description. (“Daddy might be a drinker and a rager,” Ginny says, “but he goes to church!”) The youngest daughter was apparently not molested, maybe because (in the movie’s laborious Lear parallels) she was the most favored.
Among the other subjects dutifully ticked off are a husband’s rejection of his wife after she has a mastectomy; a woman who has five miscarriages because no one told her the local drinking water was poisoned with pesticides; the alcoholism of the father and one of the husbands; the inadequate sexual performance of both husbands; the betrayal of Rose and Ginny by a handsome neighbor man (Colin Firth), who is such a cad he sleeps with both of them but only tells one about the other; and a man who buys a tractor that is three times bigger than he needs—a clear case of phallic compensation. Toward the end we get the tragedy of Alzheimer’s, the heartlessness of banks, the problem of unnecessary lawsuits, and the obligatory “giant agricultural conglomerate.”
All of these subjects are valid and promising and could be well handled in a better movie. In A Thousand Acres, alas, they seem like items on a checklist. The movie is so distracted by both the issues and the Lear parallels that the characters bolt from one knee-jerk situation to the next.
Then there is the problem of where to place our sympathy. In King Lear, of course, we love Lear and his daughter Cordelia, and hate the two older sisters and their husbands. In A Thousand Acres it cannot be permitted for a man to be loved or a woman to be hated, and so we have the curious spectacle of the two older sisters being portrayed as somehow favorably unfavorable, while the youngest, by eventually siding with her father, becomes a study in tortured plotting: She is good because a woman, suspect because a lawyer, bad because she sues the others, forgiven because her father evolves from monstrous to merely pathetic. Many of the closing scenes are set in a courtroom, providing the curious experience of a movie legal case in which the audience neither understands the issues nor cares which side wins.
The movie is narrated by Ginny, the Lange character, apparently in an effort to impose a point of view where none exists. But why Ginny? Is she better than the others? At the end of the film she intones, in a solemn voice-over, “I’ve often thought that the death of a parent is the one misfortune for which there is no compensation.” Say what? She doesn’t remember her mother and is more than reconciled to the death of a father who (thanks to recovered memory) she now knows molested her. What compensation could she hope for, short of stealing him from his deathbed to hang him on a gallows?
A Thousand Acres is so misconceived it should almost be seen just to appreciate the winding road it travels through sexual politics. Many of the individual scenes are well acted (Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange are luminous in their three most important scenes together). But the film substitutes prejudices for ideas, formula feminism for character studies, and a signposted plot for a well-told story. The screenplay is based on a novel by Jane Smiley, unread by me, which won the Pulitzer Prize—which means that either the novel or the prize has been done a great injustice.
Three to Tango
(Directed by Damon Santostefano; starring Neve Campbell, Matthew Perry; 1999)
Neve Campbell is amazingly cute. I have admired her in other movies, but now, in Three to Tango, which gave me nothing else to think about, I was free to observe her intently. She has wide, intelligent eyes, kissable lips, and a face both sweet and carnal, like Doris Day’s. I support her decision to never wear any garment that comes within a foot of her neck.
In Three to Tango she is mired in a plot of such stupidity that there is only one thing to do, and that is to look at her. In her more erotic moments she twinkles with enjoyment at her own naughtiness; consider a scene where she slithers in a bubble bath and describes a lesbian flirtation with her Brazilian roommate in college. She’s having as much fun with this dialogue as we are.
She’s telling the story to a character named Oscar (Matthew Perry), who she thinks is gay. It’s all a misunderstanding. Oscar and his business partner Peter (Oliver Platt), who is gay, are architects who desperately need a $90 million commission from a rich Chicago builder (Dylan McDermott). The builder is a married man and the Neve Campbell character, named Amy, is his mistress. He assigns Oscar to “keep an eye” on Amy, assuming that Oscar is safe because gay.
Why does everyone think Oscar is gay? Because this is an Idiot Plot, in which no one ever says what obviously must be said to clear up the confusion. That’s because they want that commission. We see a model for their $90 million project, which resembles the Lincoln Park Conservatory in the eighth month of its pregnancy.
Of course Oscar and Amy fall in love. And what a Meet Cute they have! On their first evening together, they go out for the evening, their taxi explodes (yes, explodes), and they run in the rain and wade in the mud and find a restaurant where they eat tuna melts that make them sick, and they run outside and hurl. This is the Meet Cute as Meet Puke. And on the same date she manages to cause Oscar incredible pain with a sharp door handle to his netherlands. No movie like this is complete without male pattern bruising.
Only about a week after first being considered gay, Oscar is named Gay Man of the Year. It’s like they’re waiting outside the closet with his trophy. He can’t decline the honor because he wants the commission. But then, at the awards banquet, a door in the back opens and Amy walks in. (This is the old Dramatic Late-Arriving Person Who Means Everything to the Speaker Ploy.) Looking into her wide, intelligent eyes, cunningly placed eighteen inches above her wide, intelligent breasts, Oscar blurts out the truth: “I am not gay!” Then we hear the Slowly Gathering Ovation (one brave man stands up and starts to clap slowly, others follow, applause builds to crescendo).
I was wondering how easily the Gay Man of the Year could get a standing ovation for announcing at the awards banquet that he was not gay, but my question was answered in the end credits. Although skyline shots and one early scene create the impression that the movie was made in Chicago, it was actually shot in Toronto. Those Canadians are just so doggone supportive.
This review would not be complete without mention of a scene where Oscar grows distraught and runs through the streets of Chinatown. As he approaches the camera, several Peking ducks, or maybe they are only chickens, are thrown at him from offscreen. Why? Why, indeed. Why, oh why.
Tidal Wave
(Director uncredited; starring Andrew Meyer; 1975)
Bad movies are really getting awful these days. It seems like only yesterday we were savoring bombs like The Vengeance of She and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster—movies so terrible they achieved a sort of greatness. Movies in which there were lines like “I have waited 3,000 years for this day” and newspaper reporters who let their voices trail off at the end of declarations like: “But, doctor, if your predictions are correct, this means the end of civilization on Earth. . . .”
I was hoping Tidal Wave would be a movie like that. When the publicity photographs arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I was heartened by the sight of the staples holding together the cardboard skyscrapers: Here was a movie with real lack of promise! It even looked like a good bet to outflank King Kong vs. Godzilla. (What happened in that one, as I recall, is that King Kong lost and is currently trying to promote a bout with the Smog Monster, to establish himself as a contender once again.) But Tidal Wave let me down. It is purely and simply a wretched failure, a feeble attempt to paste together inept special effects (filmed in Japan) and Lorne Greene (filmed in America—to his everlasting regret, I’ll bet).
The story involves ominous happenings along the Japan Trench, a vast underwater geological feature which, when it’s viewed from a submarine, looks suspiciously like mud being stirred up by a garden hose. Japanese scientists regard it with horror, and no wonder: Their computers inform them all the Japanese islands will soon sink into the trench, with the possible loss of more than 100 million lives (under the circumstances, the title Tidal Wave becomes the understatement of the season).
This would, of course, be a great catastrophe, something the people in the movie are constantly assuring each other: “What a great catastrophe,” they intone. Cut to the United Nations, where poor Lorne Greene is addressing the world’s governments on plans to bail out the Japanese. There is, he observes, a certain degree of technological difficulty involved in an air and sea rescue effort involving 100 million people—but this is a catastrophe that threatens not just Japan, you understand, but all Earth’s nations, since who knows what will slide into the Japan Trench next?
There’s the obligatory love story, involving a scientist whose girlfriend makes a last-minute dash up Mt. Fujiyama and is trapped in a phone booth, where she calls him and makes plans, rather optimistically, I thought, to meet him in Geneva, Switzerland, when all of this is over. There are also people in boats who drift hither and yon before being swamped by tidal waves that look suspiciously like regular waves shot from a very low position with a wide-angle lens. The movie never ends, but if you wait long enough it gets to a point where it’s over.
’Til There Was You
(Directed by Scott Winant; starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Jeanne Triplehorn; 1997)
Here is the most tiresome and affected movie in many a moon, a 114-minute demonstration of the Idiot Plot, in which everything could be solved with a few well-chosen words which are never spoken. The underlying story is a simple one: A man and a woman who are obviously intended for one another are kept apart for an entire movie, only to meet at the end. We’re supposed to be pleased when they get together, I guess, although the movie ends with such unseemly haste that we never get to experience them as a couple.
’Til There Was You, directed by Scott Winant with a screenplay by Winnie Holzman, plays like half-digested remnants of a dozen fictional meals. We have flashbacks to the love stories of parents, college love affairs, shocking revelations about sexuality and parentage, a maladjusted former sitcom star, an architect who is a “perfectionist with low self-esteem,” a ghostwriter who falls in love with a colorful old apartment building, not one but two colorful old ladies who stick to their guns, a restaurant that’s an architectural nightmare, zoning hearings, bad poetry, endlessly falling rose petals, chain-smoking, gays in the closet, traffic accidents, and at the end of it all we have the frustration of knowing that 114 minutes of our lives have been wasted, never to be returned.
Oh, and we have disastrous casting decisions. I find it helpful, as a general rule, to be able to tell the characters in a movie apart. Several of the characters in this film (a gay college professor, an architect, and another guy) look so much alike I was forever getting them confused. They were all sort of would-be Pierce Brosnan clones. Since the plot depends on coincidental meetings (and close misses) involving people who should know each other but don’t, and people who do know each other but shouldn’t, the look-alikes grow even more confusing. The casting director no doubt thought that since several of the leads have appeared on TV sitcoms, the audience would recognize them and not be distracted by superficial physical similarities. Sorry.
The plot: A former sitcom star (Sarah Jessica Parker) owns a wonderful old apartment complex that has been earmarked for replacement by a condo. She begins to date the architect (Dylan McDermott) who will design the condo. His hero is an old lady architect (Nina Foch) who is apparently the Frank Lloyd Wright of her generation. She designed the colorful old apartment complex, but he doesn’t know that. (How likely is it that an architect would be unfamiliar with one of his famous mentor’s key buildings in the city where he lives? Not very.)
Meanwhile, a ghostwriter (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is hired by the sitcom star to write her autobiography. The ghostwriter and the architect met when they were children at summer camp. They are destined to meet again, but keep missing each other by inches or minutes. Some of their near-misses take place in a restaurant the architect designed.
This restaurant, of frightening ugliness, seems designed to keep personal-injury lawyers in work. When Tripplehorn enters it for the first time, she can’t get the door open. Then it flies open and she staggers across the entire room and bangs into something. Later, she beans herself on a low-flying sculpture, trips over a waiter, catches her heel in the floor, falls over a chair, etc. Did she train for a Three Stooges movie?
All of the movie’s heartfelt scenes are tangential. They involve major characters talking to minor ones instead of to each other. There is the heartfelt talk between the architect and his mentor. The heartfelt talk between the ghostwriter and a dotty old lady (Gwen Verdon) who lives in the colorful old building (which the writer staggered into after a coincidental car crash). There is the heartfelt talk between the writer and her old father, who tells her the childhood legends the movie began with were all fiction. There is the heartfelt love scene between the writer and her college professor, who is later revealed to be gay, and then disappears from the movie just when we thought the story would be about him.
Many details are just plain wrong. Since the Tripplehorn character is a literature student, we expect her to be a fairly sophisticated writer. Yet when we hear one of her poems read (after it accidentally sticks to the bottom of an architectural model thrown out of a window—but never mind), it turns out to be written in rhyming couplets of the sort found beneath the needlework column in women’s craft magazines. All of the characters smoke unpleasantly, and want to stop, and one of the movie’s near-misses, where the predestined lovers almost meet, is an “N.A.” meeting, which is described as “Nicotine Anonymous.” Warning: Before dropping “N.A.” into your conversation, be aware that most people think it stands for something else.
And what about those rose petals? Or lilac petals, or whatever they are? The courtyard of the colorful old building, we can clearly see, has no foliage above it. Yet petals drift down in endless profusion for days and weeks during every scene—so many, I sat through the end credits in the futile hope there would be mention of the Petal Dropper.
All comes together at the end. Landmarks are saved, hearts are mended, long-deferred love is realized, coincidences are explained, the past is healed, the future is assured, the movie is over. I liked the last part the best.
The Tin Drum
(Directed by Volker Schlondorff; starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf; 1979)
Allegories have trouble standing for something else if they are too convincing as themselves. That is the difficulty with The Tin Drum, which is either (a) an allegory about one person’s protest against the inhumanity of the world, or (b) the story of an obnoxious little boy.
