The Talkies/Past and Present

...Of course, he's right...

...It is good to be a good liar...

...As James Gardner put it in the June 1985 Commentary, "To a degree unparalleled in the Old Master tradition, Caravaggio would appear to have preserved through four centuries the power to awaken in us the kind of interest that we can ordinarily summon only in respect to our contemporaries...

...for another, a deliberately absurd sequence that takes place at Peggy Sue's grandfather's lodge is so bizarre that it all but throws the picture off kilter...

...At first Charlie protests Lulu's high-handedness...

...the other is a handsome tough named Ranuccio (Sean Bean...

...The film, for the most part, is concerned with chronicling the development of, and the complications that arise from, their violent mutual attraction (which, by the way, is more convincingly acted by Terry than by Bean...

...This would explain why, in one scene, Demme puts a book about Winnie Mandela in Audrey's hands...

...when it arrives it will be the present, and will not be "exciting" in any simple way, but will be, rather, an ambiguous mixture of pleasures and disappointments and regrets, for which technological triumphs and such will merely provide a- context...

...What are we to make of this...

...by film's end virtually everyone has traded period garb for twentieth-century shirts and trousers...

...You get to where you are, the film is saying, not by waking up and finding yourself there, but by living your way there, day by day...

...Near the end of the film, accordingly, Charlie makes a remark that sounds an awful lot as if by Bruce Bawer it is meant to be taken as the film's moral (it appears earlier in the film, too): "It's better to be a live dog than a dead lion...

...the road to happiness is paved with irresponsibility...

...Offering him a lift to his Manhattan office, Lulu drives him instead to New Jersey, guzzling scotch all the way, throwing his beeper out the car window, and stopping in a liquor store to rifle the cash register...

...In Pennsylvania, Lulu (whose real name, it turns out, is Audrey) takes Charlie home to her gentle, harpsichord-playing mother, and introduces him as her husband...

...Twice near the end, groups of characters fall into dramatically lit Caravaggio-type poses, in what comes off as a joke at Caravaggio's expense, an implicit suggestion that his work is artificial, that art—of Caravaggio's old-fashioned type, at least—can't reallyhope to capture reality...

...It's 1960 again, and everything is as it was —except she's got the mind and the memories of a fortysomething-year-old woman who's already lived through the sixties, seventies, and half of the eighties...

...Their sensibilities are so fundamentally immature and solipsistic that the only conception thatthey have of their theme is as follows: Being a rebel is fun...

...Why all the anachronisms...

...To some he would even seem an emissary of our times sent back into the benighted years of Counter-Reformation Europe...

...the worst thing you can do with your life is to hold down a job, especially a good job...

...She then puts on a sweet little white dress and takes Charlie, still posing as her spouse, to her high-school reunion...

...Caravaggio the boy (a tough, unlovable urchin) enjoins someone to speak "in plain English...

...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 They come across as pretentious and self-indulgent, even flippant: one approaches this film wanting to become immersed in Caravaggio's life and art and time, but Jarman keeps shoving a string of electric light bulbs or a motorcycle or truck in the way...

...And before you know it they're in a roadside motel having a lusty bit of afternoon delight—complete with handcuffs and black stockings and (to Charlie's horror) a phone call to his boss in medias res...

...Rejecting convention is fine if you've come up with something better—but Jarman hasn't...

...He doesn't even seem to be especially interested in Caravaggio's art...

...Next thing you know they are all back in New York, where, after a few minutes of grisly violence, Ray is killed and Charlie—having "seen the other half" of himself and decided to throw over his "boring but very safe life"—quits his job...

...And just as one expected, the denouement takes place in the SoHo coffee shop where it all began...

...Whatever one thinks of Winnie Mandela, there's something very offensive about this sort of facile political gesturing, this distribution of Consciousness McNuggets...

...In this regard, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio fails miserably...

...Patently, Demme and Frye idealize rebellion...

...This mindless, Peter Sellars-type nonsense is so frustrating—and, ultimately, so predictable and boring—that before long one finds oneself eyeing the exit, glancing at one's watch, and echoing the exasperated words of Rex Harrison's Pope Julius II to Charlton Heston's Michelangelo Buonnaroti, as he labored on the Sistine ceiling in The Agony and the Ecstasy: "When will you make an end of it...

...Our would-be hero is Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels), a Yuppie nerd who, in the film's opening sequence, establishes his sterling character by pocketing his check in a SoHo coffee shop and sneaking out without paying—just for kicks, you understand...

...Suddenly Audrey's and Charlie's adorable, harmless crimes give way to Ray's violent ones...

...Charlie (who, we are supposed to believe, has come to care for Audrey) trails them covertly and steals her back...

...The idea here is plainly that Lulu (who defends her crimes by speaking of "equal distribution of assets") is introducing Charlie, the naive corporate lackey, to The People—and to The Open Road, as Bruce Bawer, a regular contributor to the New Criterion, is The American Spectator's movie critic...

...To be sure, the film has its weak points...

...he's just been promoted to v.p...

...Does the film mean to suggest, therefore, that Ray is some kind of tragic hero, a guy with the right idea who maybe went a little too far...

...Clearly, Peggy Sue is under great tension—and the tension becomes so acute, when she and Richard are called onstage to be named queen and king of the reunion, that she passes out...

...Besides, as a statement of political solidarity with the Mandelas, putting that book in Audrey's hands hardly makes sense: would an intelligent pro-Mandela filmmaker want even to hint at an equation between the Mandelas and the reckless, selfish pair of "rebels" in this movie...

...she has created it...

...The film echoes It's a Wonderful Life in a couple of respects (for example, the inscribed book at the end), but the message that Peggy Sue—and all of us—are meant to receive is not that our lives are necessarily wonderful, but that, whatever our lives have been, they couldn't have happened any other way, simply because they didn't happen any other way...

...But before long he's swilling scotch with her as they speed down the New Jersey Turnpike and admitting that, by golly, he is a rebel ("but I channel it into the mainstream...

...My own impression, while watching the film, was that Jarman was playing with the popular image of "Caravaggio our contemporary...

...Being a rebel means not going to work, means stiffing a coffee shop on a check, means getting a free ride...

...Because the idea of time travel—specifically, the idea of being able to go back and do it right this time around, which is what Peggy Sue proclaims her intention of doing—is itself absurd...

...free will and comes down strongly on the side of fate...

...One of the things that Peggy Sue comes to learn is that she was mistaken to think that life, back in high school, had offered her an infinite number of choices...

...But the film's message is that "the future," as such, doesn't really exist...

...The ensuing scenes are both funny and touching: she laughs hysterically when her proud father shows the family his new car—an Edsel—and is moved to tears when she finds herself speaking on the phone with her grandmother, who died before 1986...

...How can you compare flesh and blood with oil, ground pigment...

...The film has received considerable acclaim for its profusion of deliberate anachronisms, the number of which increases exponentially as the film proceeds...

...when he carries the act off with aplomb (though her weirdly serene mother, Peaches, is not deceived), she's impressed: "You're a pretty good liar when you wanna be, Charlie...

...Derek Jarman both wrote and directed this British film, which purports to be about the life of the Italian painter Michelangelo Amerighi da Caravaggio (1573-1610...

...Is Ray thus the "dead lion"—which, at least compared to a "dog," sounds rather heroic and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 33 romantic...

...But the movie proves to be something other than the sentimental journey into the past that its first few minutes might suggest...

...Clearly, Jarman's major aim in Caravaggio was to avoid making a film like The Agony and the Ecstasy—that is, a conventional movie biography with a plot, some sign of an attempt at period authenticity, and a deferential tone toward its subject...

...Does "lion" mean rebel and "dog" mean wage slave...

...Their principal purpose seems to be to establish their political correctness (i.e., leftism...

...He takes them to a convenience store where he knocks the counterman unconscious and empties the cash register...

...Capturing life perfectly is impossible...

...Jarman gives no indication of having the slightest interest in such questions...

...How did he discover his Muse...

...An article in Art News, based in part upon interviews with Jarman, tells us that he meant, by them, to give us all an idea of how radical Caravaggio's paintings would have seemed to his contemporaries...

...Vatican officials use pocket calculators and Royal typewriters and read the art magazine FMR...

...But rebellion, to them, has no moral dimension, has nothing to do with self-sacrifice or commitment to a principle, with the right challenging the power of the wrong...

...He then forces Audrey to accompany him to Virginia...

...She learns, in short, to accept her life because it is, simply enough, all hers...

...A class reunion and an estranged husband also figure prominently in Peggy Sue Got Married...

...This is not an impossible task...

...THE TALKIES PAST AND PRESENT omething Wild is a contemptible film, and the obtuse reviewers who have hailed it unequivocally as a delightfully wacky comedy—a "wonderful offbeat movie," as one of them put it—are contemptible too...

...character is fate...

...a couple of years ago, after all, Martin Scorcese took the same basic premise—Yuppie boy meets counterculture girl—and came up with After Hours, a witty, perceptive, gorgeously constructed Kafkaesque comedy that had something truly original and thought-provoking to say about life in the age of condos, computers, and Commie chic...

...Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) is one of the men...

...There she sees Charlie (Nicolas Cage), her failure of a hubby, once the class hotshot, with his new lady friend, and Richard, the onetime class nerd who is now a big success...

...well...

...The obligation of every artist, however, is to attempt nonetheless to capture it as richly and accurately as he can—not to make a joke out of everything, not to abandon the rigor and self-discipline that are necessary to any sort of artistic success...

...Just as it seeks to demystify the future, the film deromanticizes the past...

...Back in 1960, when Peggy Sue describes to Richard the glorious technological triumphs of the next quarter-century, he replies, "The future is so exciting...

...As Jarman's Caravaggio says, "All art is against lived experience...

...CT omething Wild is a screwball comedy, but it is also clearly trying to be something else, to make some kind of statement about Yuppies and rebels...

...she coos admiringly, clearly recognizing that the two of them are soulmates...

...But the anachronisms hardly have this effect—after all, Caravaggio isn't the only one in the film with whom they are associated...

...You're a closet rebel, aren't you...

...He's got to get back to work, he tells her...

...It disturbs me profoundly to think of the number of children and teenagers who will be exposed to this movie, and of the number of reviewers who have blithely praised its madcap comedy while managing thoroughly to ignore its moral scuzziness...

...our would-be heroine is Lulu (Melanie Griffith), a zanily dressed counterculture cutie who, intrigued by Charlie's crime, follows him out of the coffee shop...

...For one thing, it's hard to understand Peggy Sue's attraction to the nauseating Charlie (if only Coppola would stop hiring relatives...

...That done, they leave Lulu's car behind (it's hot, naturally), buy another, and hie it to Pennsylvania, picking up along the way a earful of hitchhikers—a poor black family, a hippie type with a guitar, et al...

...And when she awakens, she's backin high school...

...What forces shaped him...

...But perhaps not: it's my genuine impression that Demme and his screenwriter, E. Max Frye, are not absolutely certain what they mean to suggest...

...If The Agony and the Ecstasy skirted Michelangelo Buonnaroti's homosexuality, Jarman seems to have chosen to take on the life of Michelangelo Caravaggio (who is widely thought to have been, like hisnamesake, a homosexual) because it offered him the opportunity to invent a story of two men's sadomasochistic passion for one another...

...One is reminded that the film's director, Jonathan Demme, is also responsible for Melvin and Howard, another quirky picture about a have and a have-not together on the American road...

...It didn't, according to the guiding philosophy of this film, for life has brought Peggy Sue to where she is now, and was never going to take her anywhere else...

...W hat Jarman is interested in, however, is sex...

...I f you like Caravaggio, you'll hate I Caravaggio...

...Caravaggio and most of his lowlife cronies speak in pronounced Cockney accents, and their grubby communal way of life suggests not Rome during the Renaissance but the East End of London in 1986...

...The definition, needless to say, has its corollaries: Stealing and lying and drinking behind the wheel are really neat (so long as you don't physically hurt anybody...

...Which, I suppose, is why Jarman, the film artist, doesn't consider it worth his trouble to try to comprehend the sensibility of the age in which Caravaggio lived—though I suspect that we are meant to feel that Caravaggio, with its graphic bloodspilling and overt sexuality, brings us closer to "reality" than does Caravaggio...

...He doesn't seem to understand that the main reason we are interested in the life of a great artist is that we want to know how this particular person, in this particular time and place, came to create these particular immortal works...

...But, far from making it easier to identify with Caravaggio, Jarman's anachronistic touches keep the real Caravaggio perpetually at a distance...

...Perhaps...

...On the whole, however, this is an extremely admirable piece of work—not the major artistic accomplishment that many might expect from Coppola, but clever and thoughtful nonetheless...

...As the story develops, director Francis Ford Coppola initiates potentially affecting sequences only to slice through the sentiment, time and again, with some pointed piece of absurdity...

...Why the hitchhikers...

...It is at the reunion—where they run into her psychotic ex-con husband, Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta)—that the film radically shifts gears...

...The film, in short, takes on the theme of fate vs...

...In his cheap and puerile way, Demme too wants to make a serious statement along these lines while being funny at the same time...

...Demme and Frye don't seem to realize that in a screwball comedy, it's just the characters who should be screwballs, not the writer and director too...

...But it's not darkly or nihilistically fatalistic, as one might expect from Coppola...

...learns the proper relation between the person shewas and the person she is now...

...On the contrary, it's a film in which the heroine learns to live in the present, not in the past or the future...

...That this is a screwball comedy by no means excuses such frivolous and muddleheaded moral logic...

...And it tells this unpretty story with less and less clarity: while the inane anachronisms multiply, the plot spirals off into almost complete incoherence...

...The title character, played charmingly by Kathleen Turner, is so nostalgic for her high school days, when she was homecoming queen and life was full of promise, that she attends her Class of '60 reunion in her prom dress...