Screen:
Baumann, Paul
SCREEN SCORCHING THE SCREEN 'SEX, LIES' & 'LETHAL WEAPONS' vulnerability to my conduct makes me a better listener in prayer, as in my life with Kate. I try to be more solicitous of what really...
...Graham's precise emotional injury is left pretentiously vague...
...Pesci is a voluble little nerd, brightening every scene he's in...
...It's a difficult part, for while Graham is the story's moral provocateur and hero, he is also its most artificial and instrumental agent...
...With a touch of gray in his hair, Glover played Detective Sergeant Roger Murtaugh, a stolid police veteran, middle-class homeowner, and fretting family man...
...Like its predecessor, Lethal Weapon 2 is well-written and competently acted...
...Lethal Weapon 2 is trashy and tawdry, but it moves so quickly you barely have time to feel shame...
...Unable to differentiate between people and things, his own desires and the responsibility he owes to others, John is the triumphant narcissist celebrated in commercials and college catalogues...
...Among other things, it was the old odd couple routine...
...Once our All-American couple is pushed "beyond the law," the ensuing carnage seems straight out of the Clint Eastwood-Dirty Harry School of Swift and Sure Retribution...
...Yet, as I do, the Lord stands back, watches, and grants the freedom to explore, to discover, to sense new strength and skill, and to learn...
...It's blood-drenched fluff, but there is real chemistry between these two accomplished actors, and director Richard Donner (Superman) laces the sentiment with wit, both visual and verbal...
...His command of the camera seems effortless, and he brings to his story a rare intimacy, exploration of character, and concern for psychological nuance...
...We have done a good many years of rooting or nurturing, but it seems that ever increasingly we are giving wings...
...One should not presume from all that I have said above about seeing myself as "God's agent," that I go through life burdened by some sense of obligation at every turn...
...God must have the same sense of having to step back, stand by, and watch as a developing human being learns life's skills...
...I try to be more solicitous of what really may be going on in the life of the other, to be more attentive to the other's real needs in a given situation...
...Gallagher gives his character-a nattily suspendered over-achiever-all the charm of a dirty-minded eleven-year-old caught pulling the wings off flies...
...In his adolescent moodiness and desire to shock, he's tiresome...
...Ironically, Graham's camera brings him closer to Cynthia and Ann than lover/husband John could ever get...
...However, there is a soap opera dimension to this tale of sexual love lost and redeemed...
...This is a hypnotic film...
...He lurches about at the center of Soderbergh's dark vision of American life, a professional liar living an almost hallucinatory existence...
...His henchmen appear to be drawn from a race of albino mutants...
...In the popular Lethal Weapon, Gibson and Glover were mutually suspicious detectives who wisecracked their way to interracial harmony through a thousand car crashes...
...He has a superb ear for how people talk around what they mean to say...
...As Soderbergh has written her, and Miss MacDowell radiantly plays it, Ann, though easily shocked, is both a shrewd judge of other people's foibles and obliquely troubled by her own...
...As a father responding to a child's claim that "I can do it," I find I must step back, stand by, and watch...
...This trio slaps and bashes into each other in some of the film's most entertaining moments...
...But now both the theme, "I can do it," and the implication, "without your help," repeat themselves in ever more complicated situations...
...This Janus-faced lawyer is Soderbergh's demonic villain, the product of a world immured in false images and endless consumption...
...There's more of everything here, from car chases to various forms of demolition work...
...Soderbergh's cathartic sexual resolution, where all the paraphernalia is shunted aside and love, not sexual fantasy, brings people together, is merely wishful...
...Joss Ackland plays Arjen Rudd, a jowly South African diplomat who combines a Nazi's sadism with a banker's fastidiousness...
...Gallagher makes a loathsome exhibition of himself without ever turning John into a stereotype...
...Sadly, he seems a harbinger of sequels to come...
...In between the gunplay, our attractive heroes are whispering sweet nothings to each other...
...The feeling is rarely one of burden, and is mostly one of opportunity...
...Rutting with his wife's sister, John exudes an almost infantile sense of entitlement...
...As I sometimes do, the Lord must clearly foresee the "bad result" that seems inevitable-the spill, the crash, the fall...
...A drifter with a bohemian aura and a prying video camera, Graham is at once timid, morose, and confrontational...
...Eleven years ago, at the arrival of our firstborn, we received a plaque with an inscription which said that there are two gifts parents can give their children-one is roots and the other is wings...
...As Cynthia in writer/director Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape, she plays a younger sister out to settle sibling grievances with a scorched bed campaign...
...Indeed, how Ann ended up with such a vile mate is one of the movie's nagging incongruities...
...John and Cynthia see each other almost literally as sex objects, while Ann is a paragon of Victorian repression longing to be set free...
...Murtaugh's reassuring home life and psychological composure contrasted sharply with Riggs's haphazard existence...
...Soderbergh's relative shortcomings lie in the summing up...
...It won best picture at the Cannes Film Festival...
...Moviegoers need not be alarmed, however...
...This tidy reversal is a bit of a cliche, as is the juxtaposing of the sensitive, failed artist with the aggressive, wholly self-serving lawyer...
...As the film itself acknowledges, the story is little more than a Three Stooges romp, where guns and other forms of mayhem have been substituted for the mops, ladders, and pails, the eye-poking and nose-twisting...
...He is filling in for Tom O'Brien, who is on vacation.rien, who is on vacation...
...In a similar position, Hemingway's hero could only rebuff Lady Brett Ashley with a more sober and truer, "Isn't it pretty to think so...
...Like Art Linkletter's little kids, he'll say the darnedest things...
...Soderbergh, twenty-six, elicits splendid performances from his actors...
...She sizzles, and her physical presence is as lacerating as the razor-edged lines Soderbergh supplies...
...PAUL BAUMANN Paul Baumann is a staff writer and movie critic for The Day in New London, Connecticut...
...This ambitious lawyer and priapismic philanderer can barely stop smirking and scheming long enough to take calls at the office...
...Set in contemporary Louisiana, sex, lies, and videotape is an astonishing feat for a first-time feature filmmaker...
...The closer we get to the so-called truth behind Graham's debilitating alienation, the murkier things become...
...Our invincible duo is pitted against an army of catastrophi-cally Caucasian South African drug dealers this time...
...Andie MacDowell plays older sister Ann, an ethereal beauty whose proper attitudes and manners hide the usual dissatisfactions...
...His video games seem more like a prop than a voyeuristic obsession...
...This is a buddy movie that puts professions of love where John Wayne's silent shrugs used to be...
...Still, her own motivations and desires remain largely a mystery to her...
...Ann's sudden and purposeful blossoming is a storybook ending, a princess brought back to life with a videotaped kiss...
...My sense of God working through agents enhances my joy in the lives and actions of others...
...Graham (James Spader) brings a prophet's mysterious authority and contempt for complacency to his encounter with this incestuous trio...
...Ann may be pious, but she is also pensive, and her conventional presentation of self is easily mistaken fora lack of heart...
...We have three, one of whom is just moving into adolescence, and both Kate and I can feel the multiple influences, in addition to ours, which now bear increasingly upon our children's lives...
...This experience as a father has enriched my sense of God, who, like me, has helped bring into the world persons who are destined to grow, change, decide...
...in many ways John is the film's most indelible character...
...Graham, a kind of suburban version of Hemingway's sexually wounded Jake Barnes, uses the video camera to insulate himself from any real emotional or sexual contact...
...Those claims started, as far as I can now recall, at around age two with some fairly simple tasks...
...Peter Gallagher plays Ann's callow husband John...
...Unattached in any meaningful way to his wife, mistress, or even his work, John is a cipher...
...Or Gibson, having been mauled by South African villains, hovering between death and the next fearless quip while cradled in Glover's lap...
...In fact, Lethal Weapon 2 even provides a third stooge, admirably played by Joe Pesci (Raging Bull) as a witness placed under Riggs's and Murtaugh's protection...
...Heartthrob Mel Gibson (The Year of Living Dangerously) has never looked prettier, Danny Glover (Crimes of the Heart) never more endearing, than they do reprising their roles as Los Angeles's most perfect couple...
...Gibson played Martin Riggs, an unstable and unpopular but absolutely fearless Vietnam veteran with a penchant for using his skull as a nightstick...
...And so it must be, I am told, for healthy growth...
...There hasn't been a collection of blond psychopaths like this since Visconti's Nazi nursery tale, The Damned...
...What respect and love this takes...
...But Spader, with his boyish good looks and nervous confessions, does a superior job of balancing the movie's outsized ambitions and the specific demands of character...
...Just as I believe I can and should be God's Laura San Giacomo has Sophia Loren's firm, sensual mouth and coloring and a throaty voice that would turn Warren Beatty's head at fifty yards...
...He just wants to be left alone with his sense of degradation and his fabulous toys...
...Sophisticated, witty, and sincere, sex, lies, and videotape deserves the praise it has enjoyed...
...There is enough explicit homoeroticism in Lethal Weapon 2 to get the propeller on Senator Jesse Helms's beany spinning like a dervish...
...Riggs was the so-called "lethal weapon," and Murtaugh's soothing influence tamed him...
...Just as I can be one of God's agents to reach clients and Kate, so can I be to our children...
...Worse, his sexual reawakening is too magical...
...This is a story of true love...
...Some of the rare moments of intimacy include Glover stuck on a booby-trapped toilet bowl with Gibson holding his hands and plighting his troth...
...Everything from nail guns to seagoing cargo containers is used to drive the point home, so to speak...
...Lethal Weapon 2 ratchets up the level of violence and male bonding...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 17
