Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen WRITERS WRONGED NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT ON FILM I THINK I take personal offense at the way writers are depicted in movies. Even though the writer is not as a rule some lowly critic, but a...
...Author...
...Garp is an original...
...All that remains of Irving's novel, once the movie has removed other complications, is the story of a man bedeviled by women...
...Like Garp, Author...
...shows us how feasible-indeed, how desirable-a world of men without women might be...
...Not that the novel is a great modern classic...
...Steven Tesich's script eliminates the convolutions of the novel's plot-for instance, the whole Austrian junket to the pension whose guests include a bicycling bear-and in the scenes that do remain, director George Roy Hill has done nothing to compensate for the loss...
...It's a curious coincidence that two comedies about writers should appear in a single season, and more curious still that both should cast their heroes in the conventional woman's role as homemakers...
...He is a wonderful homemaker-he crows about how much he loves raising kids and keeping house-with a wife (Mary Beth Hurt) whose infidelity results in an accident that costs one of their sons his life...
...His adventures are a surrogate for Irving's struggle with language...
...While inviting you to laugh at their writer-heroes, both movies invite you to laugh out the other side of your face at the same time...
...On the one hand, a writer is a buffoon...
...A scene or so later, she shows herself to be a selfish, heartless bitch...
...He is at most a mild eccentric, a word duffer of the sort to which Hollywood has always reduced writers on the screen...
...Irving's writing is a lot like that...
...She organizes her half dozen kids by former marriages into a swell surprise party for Ivan's birthday...
...Author...
...At least Garp is a movie that once had a real writer connected with it...
...In part the answer is that writers provide a license for foolishness...
...She walks out on Ivan and deserts her kids...
...What else does a writer have to offer as a hero...
...Garp is a loyal son whose dotty mother (Glenn Close) runs a commune for self-mutilating radicals in the women's movement...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Author!, I've decided that such characters are an insult to the whole profession...
...In Garp's case the insult is of course added to injury-the one done to the John Irving novel on which the movie is based...
...Finally Ivan grabs the manuscript from their hands and, announcing that he will now "bounce" it off them, throws the pages in their faces...
...In the last scene the party with which the film began is repeated, except that this time Gloria, who was the impetus behind the original fete, is not present...
...The result is writing that has the straining, awkward grace of a wrestling match...
...In the second scene his wife Gloria (Tuesday Weld) shows herself to be a loving, understanding woman with a great sense of humor...
...I guess Hiller and Horovitz were afraid we wouldn't get the joke unless that phrase were repeated ten times first...
...Like Ozzie, Garp is a man with no visible profession...
...What's the point, since neither movie has any interest in its subject as a writer...
...Wrestlers are as maniacal as writers...
...It becomes a tediously episodic story set in a big suburban house, the type in which Ozzie and Harriet lived...
...He's just a benign father figure...
...Irving's ability to surprise and amuse us, the zaniness that makes his prose entertaining, is what the movie lacks...
...They can get along without her, as this celebration in honor of the success of Ivan's new play proves...
...Once Ivan has the kids to cope with, it's easy to make his relationships with all other characters into similar misadventures...
...The effect is to turn Garp into a kind of period sit-com...
...I just wanna bounce this off you," "Lemme just bounce this off you," they keep repeating...
...Can we learn anything about writers from people who put dialogue like this in their movie...
...Author!, having been done from an original screenplay by Israel Horovitz, doesn't even have that...
...It's just a bestseller...
...The comedy has undertones that are, if not misogynist, at least anti-feminist...
...He is in the midst of a family crisis, as usual, but they insist he listen to their suggestions anyway...
...The advantage this unaccountable twist gives Horovitz and director Arthur Hiller is that it allows them to drag everything in their movie down to the level of domestic farce...
...So I come back to my original question...
...Author...
...One of the things that Garp has in common with Irving is a passion for wrestling...
...The only member of his mother's group who gets really sympathetic treatment is the trans-sexual, Roberta, a former pro football star played by actor John Lithgow in drag...
...It shows some inventiveness with plots, characters, and occasionally even words...
...But then Roberta is just a variation on Garp's own self-sufficiency as a man...
...Even though the writer is not as a rule some lowly critic, but a novelist like Garp (Robin Williams) in The World According to Garp, or a successful playwright like Ivan Trevelyan (Al Pacino) in Author...
...Her presence is no longer necessary to either Ivan or her own kids...
...They're perfect subjects for comedy because everyone knows that a writer is a kind of nincompoop, someone with laughable solutions to life's little problems...
...He is a famous writer whose grief at his mother's death is scorned by other feminists, and who is himself killed by an evil prude who is one of his mother's misguided disciples...
...Nothing, as both Author...
...Such obviousness carries over into the movie's dialogue as well...
...The star of his play (Dyan Cannon), his producer (Alan King) and his director (Bob Dishy) become an extended family...
...But at least it's both by and about a credible writer...
...He creates a basic situation and then concentrates on extending it, flipping it in unexpected directions where he can get a better grip on it, stretching the elaborations as far as he can without throwing off his timing or losing his balance...
...but on the other hand, he is also a figure of male sufficiency, a character who unites masculinity with the feminine principle of creativity...
...Why are these two movies about writers...
...and the movie version of Irving's novel demonstrate...
...affirms manhood in similar terms...
...The star even moves in with him for a while, just to make sure the equation of the literary life and family life isn't lost on us...
...They train compulsively in order to be able to stretch that extra inch to get better leverage, in order to develop that extra ounce of strength or half second of speed...
...This is the story of a struggling playwright who is hoping his new work will be a hit on Broadway, and is living in a million-dollar townhouse in the meantime...
...If you couldn't get something of the uniqueness of a writer's experience into a story about him, what would be the point in telling it...
...Author...
...Author...
...To this traditional anti-intellectualism, however, these two movies add a more contemporary touch...
...One evening the director and producer arrive at Ivan's townhouse to propose changes in the second act...
...He embodies Irving's aspirations as a writer...
...His personality is Irving's style...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 15
