The Talkies/'The Child Is Father to the Man
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN amilies and sentimentality go toil. gether like Corn Flakes and milk. One of the easiest tricks in the cinematic trade is to put children in loco...
...Ford's transformation is too easy, as is the uplifting advice about finding out "who you are...
...fore...
...The kid gets some good moments, as when, for example, she tells the doorman of her apartment building that she and tier mother are going "to get mydad...
...Like so much of the film, this is just too pat...
...As he hadn't remembered the doorman in a scene just before the shooting, it makes the two of them complicit in suffering from his earlier neglect...
...When the old man returns to Sicily and, addressing his wife's grave, lies to her in turn that "Everybody's Fine," we are left with the pleasant, happy images of the warm South while the realities of Rome, Florence, Milan, and Turin, where his unsuccessful children live, are as shadowy to us as they are to him...
...The mother is left to go off into the lonely mountains by herself, and the fmal scene is of her walking back to the camera, obviously disappointed, as the meteors fmally begin whizzing across the sky behind her...
...entimentality is not exactly the L./ problem with James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but it is a not-unrelated difficulty...
...Cholesterol, nicotine, and hair gel represent moral as well as physical unhealthiness...
...The boy is actually a juvenile delinquent, but that's just because his foster parents are so awful and his mother is in the loony bin (oh, the injustice of it...
...They grow up quickly and it is experience, not innocence, that makes them, so unhappily, tutors to a parent...
...Here is a woman who tries to escape but who fails because of the past she brings with her...
...Again there is a cute kid: the boy, now ten years old, who we know is one day going to lead the human race in a war against the machines...
...Only for a second at the end does she turn her head and see one...
...The children are ashamed that their lives have not come up to their father's expectations, marred as they have been by divorce, illegitimacy, bad jobs, and career dead-ends...
...Robots probably do speak with Austrian accents...
...Do doormen really want to be hugged...
...Giuseppe Tornatore's Everybody's Fine ranks a little below these two as a schmaltz-dipper...
...it is to buy cigarettes that he goes into the convenience store in the first place...
...he doesn't remember me...
...Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead follows on from Home Alone as a popular demonstration that parents are unnecessary, and John Hughes's latest, Dutch, is about a really horrible child who has to learn to be a kid again from "a great big demented child...
...Cameron adds his $88 million worth to the tough-woman myth by making Linda Hamilton, a mere mother in the first Terminator, into a macha machine, a killerette who has nothing to learn even from Schwarzenegger, who really is supposed to be a machine, about blowing people away...
...Not only does he stop defrauding poor and helpless people, he starts making amends to those he once defrauded when he finds out about his past life...
...The premise here is that a shark of a lawyer can become a looney tuna, if you can contrive to blow away just exactly the right part of his brain...
...Remembering" henceforth has a double meaning, and it is only by forgetting what he was that Dad is able to remember not only by James Bowman his daughter but other people who were not important enough to make an impression on him before...
...This guy does need help...
...It only serves to remind us that this leisurely process of getting back in touch with the Really Important Things is being subsidized by the wicked law practice he is learning to hate...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 33...
...Thus, his first act on returning home from the hospital is to hug the doorman...
...The rest of the film is a road picture with a lot of the diffuse and unfocused quality of the genre...
...Above all, he must teach this killing machine not to kill and so strike a blow for the good old human race, which otherwise comes out of this film pretty badly...
...Afterwards he lets his hair flop and smokes no more...
...For the nineties, Superman has had a course in assertiveness and self-esteem...
...But fully to recapture Rousseau's dream of the "naturalness" of childhood, you have to have little saints and sages, strong in innocence, actually changing places with their corrupt old parents...
...El or that we have, as usual, to turn F to the French, and our film of the month is once again, I'm afraid, subtitled...
...The basic premise of Superman was that he was the boy-next-door who modestly hid away his powers until they were needed...
...Do we have to have Ford frolicking with a puppy to show that he doesn't eat people anymore...
...The happy family shot at the end with the puppy dancing on its hind legs and everybody going off to spend 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 lots of quality time together we know to be a fake...
...That embrace is typical of how the film overstates its points...
...here are children who, although they are very childlike in their desire, as their father says, for "order," have as much of a disabling past as adults...
...But when the girl rattles off what was once, apparently, the old, bad daddy's litany of chores by means of which his own father had taught him "to appreciate the work ethic," they both laugh at no longer knowing what that means...
...All anticipate the mutations to be caused by Doomsday's nuclear detritus...
...He even discovers that he doesn't like eggs or steak...
...Likewise, in Dying Young—which is so hokey that nobody actually has the gumption to die in it—the upper-class cancer patient, Campbell Scott, learns from the lovely but dimwitted Julia Roberts (not a child, it's true, but meant to be equally authentic) not only "how to live" but how not to smoke...
...It is one of several arresting visual images in this film, but, by focusing so much on the still very watch-able Mastroianni, it too degenerates intosentimentality...
...As the title suggests, it is about the lies that family life requires us to tell—since everybody, most emphatically, is not fine—and especially those that grown children tell their parents to prevent them from worrying or being disappointed...
...The 'Irminator is Superman without an identity crisis—just as naturally as Lois Lane becomes a muscle-bound, gun-toting single parent...
...So they conspire to put on a charade to convince him that "Everybody's Fine...
...Before he is shot, he slicks his hair back and smokes cigarettes...
...An ex-television star from Paris, she has left the family and now makes her living by doing personal appearances in the provinces...
...Therein lies the real sentimentality of this film...
...The idea of Schwarzenegger posing as a mild-mannered reporter is as ludicrous as his having to rescue his lethal Lois from any merely human evil—as opposed to the cyborg smoothie in the scary cop suit (Robert Patrick), who knits back together again when you blow him apart...
...for trying to warn the world about a nuclear holocaust and a war with killer machines that she knows is coming...
...Such a film is Regarding Henry, with Harrison Ford, Annette Bening, and Mikki Allen as their cute kid...
...But he might want to ask himself if this living business is really worth it with a girl who forces him to give up smoking and to eat health food, betrays him to his father, and wears peace movement earrings...
...We must accept that the robot really is the ideal father: he is an incredibly efficient protector, can teach the boy all about guns and stuff, and he does not have to make a living and so has nothing but time...
...He is not fooled for long...
...At one point the mother goes sofar as to say that only the Schwarzenegger-robot could ever measure up as a father to her son...
...Anyway, the child as teacher goes together with the mother as father, the woman as man, and the man as machine...
...but she lives a diffuse and unfocused life, and the fact that it all ends inconsequentially seems only appropriate...
...Every Other Weekend, by Nicole Garcia, presents Nathalie Baye as a mother who loves her children but who is just not very good at being a mother...
...The old iron-pumper, the self-created man, is clearly at his best in such a role...
...To show us how parents never stop worrying about their children, we see the father's recurrent fantasy of a black balloon trailing tentacles like a jellyfish which descends while they are at the beach...
...One of the easiest tricks in the cinematic trade is to put children in loco parentis as a way of teaching Mom and Pop what the Really Important Things in life are...
...And this fakery brings home the fakery of the rest...
...We do not remember so quickly as we do with Regarding Henry that this has nothing at all to do with the real world...
...Vincent, however, calls his father to tell him where they are, and he and the children's nanny, whom they are obviously very happy to see, catch up with them the day before the projected shower that the astronomy-mad boy is so eager to wit- ness...
...It is a nice touch to have the little girl who was so frightened of him now playing the stern parent to her childlike father, teaching him to read again from the children's book Are You My Mother?—which is both funny, in the circumstances, and a serious question to such a lackadaisical parent...
...In the one sex scene he tries to pull her T-shirt off the wrong way (four years at Yale plus graduate school and he thinks you pull down...
...But what accounts for his appeal...
...The children grab hold of the tentacles and the balloon reascends, taking them away with it...
...Again there is a role reversal here, since the parent (Marcello Mastroianni), is being protected by his children from the harshness of reality...
...The ex-husband fmds out and, claiming that this is in breach of their agreement, threatens to come and take them away from her...
...The girls of his favorite artist, Gustav Klimt, are more interesting, and they don't care if you have the occasional Camel or your hair falls out from chemotherapy...
...The boy instructs not his mother but Arnold Schwarzenegger, his own personal robot/bodyguard sent back from the future, how to say kiddie catch phrases like "No problemo" and "Hasta la vista, baby...
...She panics and runs away, with the children in tow...
...Ending on the lie may be good for relationships, but it is very bad for art...
...Shot in the head after dropping in on a convenience-store hold-up, Ford is restored with miraculous speed to everything but the memory and the morality of the man he was beJames Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...For a moment I thought Cameron was engaging in self-irony here, but I fear that people who make violent films with anti-violence messages take them far too seriously to have much of a capacity for irony...
...In the real world, people can't just forget what the work ethic means...
...A slightly hopeful ending to a depressing film, but the brief moments during it when rapport is almost reestablished between the mother and her children, both still bitter about her having left them, are hard-won and not tainted by the easy sentimentality that supposes that happiness comes with escape from the constraints of the world most of us actually live in...
...What keeps them going is her promise to her ten-year-old son, Vincent (Joachim Serreau), to take him to Spain in time to see a projected meteor shower that the two of them calculate is most likely to be visible there...
...When she gets a job as hostess of a Rotarian charity benefit at Vichy that coincides with one of her weekends to have the kids, she takes them with her...
Vol. 24 • September 1991 • No. 9
