Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN BOYS WILL BE BOYS 'FATMAN' & 'BAKER BOYS' Fatman and Little Boy was meant as a compelling update of the Faust story. Despite a strong conclusion, it is, on balance, a great disappointment....
...It has a fine production design (just wait until one of its streamlined steel 1940s trains appears...
...How can this go bad...
...When she returned to her seat next to mine, I thought of buying her a dozen donuts...
...The trio rises to immediate success and fortune in the lounges, hotels, and inns around Seattle...
...Too bad a good history lesson and moral fable is so badly flubbed...
...The photography in this movie is so good it makes something of the old metaphor "two ships passing in the night" in a twilight blue scene set in the Seattle harbor...
...TOM O'BRIENt...
...Groves knows the weaknesses of the scientific mind: "just get them close," he says, "and they'll go the rest of the distance...
...here she attempts to reach the lost, tightfisted soul of Jeff Bridges, who has squandered his talent and resents everyone else for it...
...The Fabulous Baker Boys is so fine-tuned it even gets away with a ten-ton animal symbol, an aging black Labrador who represents the soft side of Jeff's nature...
...At a Dunkin Donuts off 40th and Fifth: between coffee sips I suddenly realized that the almost painfully slim young woman dashing back and forth from seat to pay telephone was Michelle Pfeiffer...
...So what goes wrong...
...She's the chanteuse who joins an on-the-skids piano duet (the Bakers are Jeff and Beau Bridges, real-life brothers...
...The Fabulous Baker Boys relies on Pfeiffer's star-power, exceptional direction and writing from Steve Kloves, poetic photography from Oscar-winner Michael Ballhaus, and crackerjack chemistry among the leads...
...then uses blackmail, appeals to glory, and other forms of persuasion to make him toe the line...
...It pulls no punches on the way that ego, careerism, and scientific hubris may have played as much a role in the project as national defense...
...The next time I saw Michelle Pfeiffer was in The Fabulous Baker Boys...
...The movie is sometimes valuable as history...
...they lean easily on the crisp but not heavy-handed dialogue, where a line like "we're taking a bath," resonates as a witty Freudian slip...
...It emphasizes the original reason for building the bomb: fear that the Nazis were building one...
...his whole strategy is to create a momentum even physicists can't resist...
...In itself, the love story is convincing...
...Instead, I quietly took out a handy copy of the industry rag, American Film, held it up for her to notice, and hoped for casual conversation, a handshake, an introduction to a director, my first screenplay...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges play out their own pas de deux with just the right hesitations...
...He sees Oppenheimer's brilliance, makes him ringmaster at Los Alamos, feeds his vanity...
...More childish are exchanges with sexual innuendos between Newman and Schultz...
...Still, the subplot is forced...
...The movie only works if Pfeiffer impresses us as much as she does audiences in the film, and she's a knockout, giving slinky sultriness new definition in her evocative versions of old Rodgers and Hart songs (which she sings herself...
...He corrals Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz, of The A-Team) to build the bomb...
...Jeff plays a version of the alienated romantic hero...
...Set mostly in San Francisco or the Southwest (supposedly the Los Alamos, New Mexico, test site) the film aims at paradox: a bright-looking, morally purposeful film noir...
...At first the role seems thankless, but Beau gets mileage from a nerdy lovableness...
...The beginning of the film moves fast, too fast...
...Cusack is compelling, and Dern has a face tailor-made for crying...
...One number-she sings in a red dress on top a piano at a New Year's party-is among the best scenes in film this year...
...The equation they suggest between unorthodox sexuality and mass murder is offensive...
...One scene on a hotel balcony has them dancing together before Beau passes Pfeiffer on to Jeff...
...It even fits in as a commentary on the twisted emotions between Groves and Oppenheimer...
...Liberty and equality may have seen better days, but not fraternity...
...Jeff and brother Beau also sparkle...
...and a nostalgic look from all the smart brown and tan army uniforms on display...
...Indeed, its opening reminds us that it was Hitler who first declared war on us...
...One of the film's best scenes drapes the Labrador underneath a jet black piano as Jeff improvises at the keyboard and Pfeiffer leans above it...
...Joffe and Robinson force in homosexuality as the cause of the power games that go on between men...
...Except for some messiness in tidying up the plot, the movie never misses a beat...
...Directed by Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields), and starring Paul Newman, the film details the building of the first atomic bomb...
...Something called drama, or more precisely dramatic pacing...
...he is disturbed if they ever drop one of their standard songs from the repertoire, if they even vary a note...
...Casting the two brothers plays off their own real-life relationship: until some weak closing scenes, they deftly convey scores of nuances about affection, sibling rivalry, resentment, and ineradicable lifelong bonding...
...Joffe tries to make a virtue of this necessity, but his overspeedy exposition nearly matches the breakneck recklessness that he claims went into the bomb project and short-circuited asking and answering vital moral questions...
...Still, the force of Paul Newman's curmudgeonly Great Satan holds you...
...Originally intended to run three hours, the film had to be cut by a third...
...Joffe parallels the Groves-Oppenheimer story with a subplot about a young physicist (John Cusack, brother of Joan) who falls in love with a very lovable local nurse (Laura Dern, daughter of Bruce...
...I missed another chance at stardom recently...
...At times, I thought I was reading Helen Caldicott's Missile Envy...
...This strategy also means two fine actresses (the radiant Bonnie Bedelia as Oppenheimer's wife and Natasha Richardson as his mistress) are seen all too briefly...
...Phallic images of machismo, including shots of the bombs (nicknamed "Fatman" and "Little Boy") abound...
...Newman is no scientist, but he is the project director, General Leslie Groves, bent on building "the biggest stick in the playground," as he calls the bomb...
...Beau is the ever reliable, less talented, but more organized business-minded partner and driving force in the group...
...Pfeiffer also has a fine acting range: in Dangerous Liaisons, she was compelling as a moral character...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 20
