The Sayles Phenomenon
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen THE SAYLES PHENOMENON BY ROBERT ASAHINA i regard John Sayles mostly with admiration. At 32 he has already written two novels, a collection of short stories, an off-Broadway play, plus...
...In addition, while most of the tunes are true to the period, for some reason (New Jersey chauvinism...
...Yet I found the writing sentimental and self-conscious, devoid of self-understanding...
...Instead, he drags out the moment, letting them sing one chorus too many...
...this is Sayles' first reasonably financed effort...
...When Jill nervously approaches the Drama Club bulletin board to see if she has won the lead in the high school play, she finds her name on the posted list, learns she has the part, starts to walk away, then turns around (toward the camera) and silently reads her name again, smiling...
...No fadeout, no transition, nothing: there's no dramatic arc in what we see or hear...
...Unhappily, Kathleen Knutsen Rowell's adaptation of S.E...
...The fadeout is one of those "bittersweet" finales that have by now become no less tiresome than the happy endings they were meant to replace...
...We thus anticipate that some kind of confrontation will follow, since he is (to put it mildly) a jealous type...
...Sayles' heroine was a complete drip, totally uninteresting except for her unmotivated, unbelievable decision to leave her husband and children and become a lesbian...
...Unfortunately, the writing shows no improvement...
...After she good-naturedly joined in, Sayles should have cut away immediately...
...Now Sayles offers his latest project, Baby, It's You...
...That probably explains the excessive praise the film garnered from audiences and critics who mistook clumsy sincerity for seriousness, projecting their own feelings into the blank spaces left by the writing and directing...
...They break up, get back together again, and so on, until they leave Trenton and each other-she to Sarah Lawrence, he to Miami Beach...
...Too often, as in his earlier films, he merely plops it down eight to 10 feet away from the performers and lets them converse in wearying two-shots...
...It's 1966, and they're both going through what were then called heavy changes...
...Another affected moment seems to be the actress' responsibility, not the director's...
...He is more an excuse for Jill to feel estranged, first from her middle-class friends in high school...
...Jill opens it-she has been accepted by Sarah Lawrence...
...She leaves the room to open a bottle of champagne in celebration, and Jill, standing alone, grins in embarrassment and hides her face with the letter...
...fidelity, astonishingly, is not one of the many subjects they eventually argue about...
...Just when you think it is time for .you to leave, the story starts over, and they're reunited, then separated, then reunited-maybe-once more at the end...
...Not even when he steals a car to drive north and visit Jill at school...
...If you can ignore Richard DiLello's story (a crude reform-school melodrama) and Rick Rosenthal's direction (unabashedly exploitative of the violence inherent in the setting), Bad Boys is worth seeing for a look at the most exciting American actor to come along since Robert De Niro...
...And Rosanna Arquette is quite impressive as Jill...
...Even Romeo and Juliet had a closer bond-like the Sheik they were both Italian...
...The holes in the plot are cavernous...
...Jill comes home late one night, and is handed a letter by her mother, who has been waiting up for her...
...Who is watching besides the camera...
...the histrionics rarely rising above soap-opera level...
...We see his accomplice being nabbed, and the cops actually chase him, and everyone else in Trenton knows the two are friends, yet the Sheik never has any problems with the law during the rest of the movie...
...Francis Coppola's portentous direction tries to turn the pathos of adolescence into high tragedy, Hollywood style, complete with silhouettes against flaming sunsets, an "epic" fistfight staged in a symbolic thunderstorm and other kitschy effects...
...But there's no payoff later...
...The worst of the lot was Lianna, released earlier this year...
...The single trait Jill and the Sheik have in common is being star-struck (not about each other: she wants to be an actress, he wants to be Frank Sinatra...
...At one point, Jill's friends start to tease her about the Sheik by singing "Chapel of Love...
...You would think teenagers had enough problems without being mythologized...
...I had enormous empathy for the plight of the characters, my peers, and I wanted to like the movie since it was a true labor of love, financed with nickels and dimes...
...There's loads of young talent in The Outsiders: Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Sway-ze, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Leif Garrett, Tom Cruise, and Diane Lane most of the leading lights of the un-der-25 generation...
...Still, it's all texture and detail with no drama...
...The film lurches along, accompanied by the most poorly edited music I've heard in years...
...In Baby, It's You, where she has to work harder in a much more subdued role, she succeeds in making a confused and sometimes unpleasant adolescent seem sympathetic, not simply foolish-an uphill struggle...
...Then suddenly the ride is over, and the song stops right in the middle...
...The first observation to be made is how much better it looks than his previous solo outings...
...Where he strives for something different, he resorts to cliches, as in the final scene-a crane shot that travels upward to show Jill and the Sheik dancing, then ever more couples on the floor around them...
...But the three films he has both written and directed (clearly the ones that mean the most to him) suffer from deadening earnestness...
...As the Sheik, Vincent Spano plays his undefined part with the correct combination of swagger and insecurity...
...then from her more sophisticated dorm mates in college...
...For the most part, though, Arquette submerges herself in the character, eerily conveying a sense of what it's like to be 18 and positive that nobody has ever experienced her growing pains...
...Lianna was spastically paced, awkwardly staged and photographed like a home movie...
...Baby, It's You does feature some nice vignettes of high school and college life: late-night rap sessions, awkward arranged dates, self-important confessions...
...The acting was bad, the directing worse...
...This nice bit brings an easy laugh, until the phone rings: Jill talks while the music continues to blare in the background, and the momentum dissipates...
...His second book, Union Dues (nominated for a National Book Award in 1978), is the best novel I know about cultural conflict in the late '60s...
...She was equally convincing in the recent TV movieof The Executioner's Song-not that she could miss as Gary Gilmore's lover, Nicole, a flamboyant character with sparks of nihilistic passion...
...Hinton's best-selling "young adult" novel (about the war between "greasers" and "socs" in early '60s Tulsa) is a mediocre imitation of Rebel Without a Cause...
...Somewhat better, though far from good, was The Return of the Secaucus Seven, about a reunion of '60s types who have accommodated themselves, for better or worse, to the '70s, a decade of very different cultural expectations...
...In one sequence, the Sheik takes Jill on a breathless joyride through Trenton to the tune of the Eisley Brothers' "Shout...
...As in Taps and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (a forgettable film where his zonked-out surfer was the highlight), he reveals no gap between actor and character here...
...When the Sheik skips town, it is not merely because he's following the sun-he's on the run from the police after committing a petty burglary...
...For his literary output I have only praise...
...Jill Rosen, a middle class Jewish-American princess in Trenton, New Jersey, falls in love with the Sheik, an Italian greaser, during their senior year in high school...
...As an admirer of Sayles', I'm pained to admit that her acting, not his writing and directing, is the best thing about Jill, and about Baby, It's You...
...Elsewhere, Sayles creates expectations that he fails to fulfill...
...the dialogue clever without being truly witty...
...Later, he throws in a shock cut of J ill miming a dance routine to a Supremes record in front of her bedroom mirror...
...His scripts for such low-budget thrillers as The Howling, Alligator and Piranha were amusing and exciting, ironic without being condescending-popular art at its commercial best...
...And once again the photography and direction were amateurish...
...The short stories in The Anarchists' Convention are models of the genre: wry, compact, pointed...
...Rosen tells Jill they should wake up her father with the news...
...Throughout, Sayles seems uncertain about what to do with his camera...
...The cinematographer is Michael Ballhaus, a former collaborator of Rainer Fass-binder's...
...That second look and that audience-conscious smirk are painfully false...
...Perhaps it is silly to worry about the Sheik's story, for he is not really a character to begin with...
...That is not necessarily a recommendation, although the late German director also made most of his movies on a shoestring, so Ballhaus probably felt right at home with Sayles...
...On top of all this he recently won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation...
...I have mixed feelings, however, about his movies...
...At 32 he has already written two novels, a collection of short stories, an off-Broadway play, plus scripts for two TV movies and nine feature films, three of which he also directed...
...At least the acting in Baby, It's You is much better than in Sayles' prior movies...
...But the sheer number of setups involved leads me to suspect the fault lies with Sayles (further evidence of his inability to conclude a scene...
...The Sheik storms into Jill's empty dorm room, for example, and discovers her birth-control pills, which the camera suggestively picks out of the clutter...
...Some fine performers are also wasted in two other not very fine movies, Bad Boys and The Outsiders, In the former, Sean Penn shows once again that he is a star on the rise...
...the soundtrack anachronistically includes a couple of Bruce Springsteen songs from 10 years later...
...True, she occasionally slips and gives the impression that her character knows she is on screen...
...In any case, debt is due Paramount Pictures for the higher "production values...
...Baby, It's You has your basic boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back plot, with routine "twists" to prove it is not exactly what it seems...
...All this to the strains of Strangers in the Nightl) Sayles also doesn't know how to end things...
...We never figure out why she chooses him as the vehicle for her alienation...
Vol. 66 • April 1983 • No. 7
