The Talkies/Life With Father
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES v, 001H - 4 "1- • 1- - orti , LIFE WITH FATHER by Bruce Bawer T he new film The Mosquito Coast, tinually lectures everyone around grotesque parody of the traditional and absolutely...
...The actors in the principal roles, moreover, are strikingly good...
...MODERN TIMES is available now with a new or renewal subscription to The American Spectator for only $33.95—an $18.00 saving from the usual price of $51.95...
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...As a matter of Bruce Bawer is The American Spec- in the tropical wilderness away from duran jungle, a place as primitive as fact, the novel was most effective not tator's movie reviewer and author of Holiday Inns, Fudgesicles, Twinkies, Plymouth Rock must have been when as a tragic fable about the futility of The Middle Generation, a study of four and Duraflame logs makes him at once William Bradford first climbed off the challenging God's power or the folly of twentieth-century American poets (Ar- funny and frightening...
...So, abandoning the ruins of Jeronimo and disregarding the warning of the family's native friend, Mr...
...Box 12011, Columbia, S.C...
...F or a while, anyhow, Allie seems marvelously successful in his attempt to improve upon God's handiwork...
...In his mind, he's magnified the disaster of Jeronimo into a nuclear holocaust...
...River Phoenix, as the quietly decent, loyal, and brave Charlie, turns in a performance of extraordinary sensitivity and intelligence...
...And anybody without vision has no place here...
...When the family leaves Baltimore harbor, for example, Allie, one of whose gripes is the phony friendliness of store clerks, shouts sarcastically, "Goodbye, America—and have a nice day...
...But visionary excess, or (as some reviewers chon Books...
...Haddy (Conrad Roberts), that the rainy season will do them in, Allie takes his family to the coast and—all their money and supplies having been lost in the destruction of Jeronimo—eagerly improvises clothes and a dwelling from the rubbage scattered on the beach...
...In the film, furthermore, the initial humor and humanity of Allie's personality are brought to the forefront...
...At bottom, indeed, Allie's real American milieu, an excellently paced to a remote river settlement in the Mos- ucts, that TV is numbing our minds, gripe against America is that its civili- and suspenseful narrative (which gradquitia district of Honduras...
...in the film, the sequence concerning the Acre is brief and confused, and the intended antithesis doesn't come off...
...he believes, on the contrary, that everything can be changed for the better, that—at least with him at the helm—the poor natives can markedly improve upon the miserable circumstances that an inefficient and uncooperative Maker has forced upon them...
...But he is incapable of living in harmony with nature, because he is unwilling to learn anything from the natives who have been living in harmony with nature for generations...
...inventor and Harvard dropout who, dollar is worth only twenty cents, that labor-saving gadgets, eager to construct its strengths—aside from its memordisgusted with America, uproots his American kids are all drug addicts and a City on a Hill, cockily certain that able portrait of Allie Fox—were a richly wife and four children from their rural murderers, that we're selling our coun- all problems can be fixed, all burdens detailed depiction of the Central Massachusetts home and moves them try out by buying foreign-made prod- lifted...
...I'm happy," he says...
...Harrison Ford captures to perfection Allie Fox's energy, wit, and charisma, and the increasing rashness and illogic with which he tyrannizes his family...
...In the film, for example, Charlie plays a somewhat less active part than in the novel...
...y et there are differences in tone and emphasis between Theroux's Mosquito Coast and Weir's...
...And where the novel drew a sharp contrast between Allie's compulsion to change Jeronimo and the real harmony with nature enjoyed by Charlie and his native playmates (who, while Allie remade Jeronimo in the image of an American town, gamboled half-naked in a jungle clearing they called "The Acre"), the film fails to point up this contrast...
...jungle (the film was shot entirely on fathers dominate their young sons with On the whole, the film—which was location in the U.S...
...THE TALKIES v, 001H - 4 "1- • 1- - orti , LIFE WITH FATHER by Bruce Bawer T he new film The Mosquito Coast, tinually lectures everyone around grotesque parody of the traditional and absolutely incapable of comprowhich is based upon the.best-sell- him—especially his sensitive, level- foursquare American individualist— mise—and mostly because, as soon being 1982 novel by Paul Theroux, tells headed thirteen-year-old son, Charlie an arrogant, self-reliant, jeremiad- comes apparent, he is out-and-out the strange, captivating, and ultimately (River Phoenix), the narrator—to the happy New Man obnoxiously proud of insane—Allie leads his family into horrific story of a fanatical visionary effect that America has become a na- his "know-how" and his New England disaster...
...is a hodgepodge of familiar ozone layer...
...boat, and begins to transform it...
...One is particularly impressed by his handling of the voice-over narration, with which a less gifted young actor could singlehandedly have wrecked the film...
...Like many American protagonists before him—Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn, Sal Paradise—he is forever restless...
...The fact is that Allie can't tolerate a stable, prosperous society of the sort that Jeronimo was fast becoming...
...Haddy predicted, the rains come and almost wash the Foxes out to sea...
...And he refuses to put into any port, for that would be admitting defeat: "If it's on a map I can't use it...
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...As the town burns, Allie howls in horror, and one is reminded of the scream at the climax of Heart of Darkness...
...fortunately, however...
...But he is not demoralized for long...
...their makeshift log-and-tarp house floats (its "hull" is marked with the Conradian word Victory) and they manage to get it back on the river and to go upstream...
...I'm the last man...
...29211 frenetic pace of Charlie's life with father...
...His children, who don't like their sub-native standard of living, want toreturn to America, but Allie lies to them, saying that they can't go back "because it's not there anymorecataclysm—millions of Americans burned to a crisp...
...And even air conditioning...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 35...
...there's no ually assumed an almost mythic Allie's litany of grievances against aerosol cheese spread is destroying the wilderness to conquer, no way for him power), and a touching delineation of the U.S...
...John madness...
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...o be sure, as Mr...
...Rather, the novel succeeded gods, feel the world opening up to Seale's cinematography excellently capmost decidedly as an allegory about them, and become more able to under tures the primitive lushness of the fathers and sons—about the way stand, to forgive, and to love...
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...Soon Jeronimo is invaded by three evil-looking gunmen, and the town is destroyed by fire, the river polluted with ammonium hydroxide from Fat-boy, the native population fled into the arms of the Reverend Spellgood down-river...
...junk food is rotting our bodies, and zation is already in place...
...M. Buckley will accept no more than twelve participants in each seminar...
...Allie despises missionaries because, as he explains, they teach the natives to 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 tolerate poverty and to bear their burdens stoically...
...he wants to tame a primitive landscape and create a civilization, but he doesn't want to live there...
...His failure with Jeronimo has only made him more fanatical, more of a megalomaniacal visionary...
...The family is filthy and ragged by this point, and there's no food ("I don't know when well eat next," Allie says with a demented smile), but it is not till he dives into the river and fails to surface for a minute or so that Mother finally breaks down and screams, "I can't stand this...
...The perverse symbol of his audacious challenge to God is a huge, fire-powered ice machine called Fatboy, which towers over the huts of Jeronimo and looks rather like a church...
...Despite its paradoxical politics, then, The Mosquito Coast works marvelously as an allegory about the paradoxical bonds between fathers and sons...
...But Allie is too erratic and inane a figure to bear convincingly the weight of such inconsistent (and, frankly, silly) political symbology...
...and Belize), and threats, promises, lies, and the con directed by the Australian Peter Weir Thom Noble's editing accentuates the Overcome Anxiety Face The edia ersuap d y A d•ience The Buckley School of Public Speaking offers practical instruction designed for leaders (both reigning and rising) in the fields of business and industry, sales and management, and in the various professions men and women who desire to improve their public performances...
...Paradoxically, it also makes him a because he is reckless and headstrong vigorously maintained) as a cautionary THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 33 tale about the consequences of unre struction of personal mystiques, and (The Last Wave, The Year of Living strained American individualism, me about the way sons yearn for their Dangerously, Witness) and written by liorism, or colonialism (after all, Allie's fathers' approval, secretly and guiltily Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging most ruinous escapades are the conse long for their fathers' death, and, upon Bull)—is extremely faithful to the quence not simply of too much Ameri learning ultimately that their fathers novel, achieves much the same effects, can-style zeal and determination but of are not all-knowing and omnipotent and shares its main weaknesses...
...Charlie's feelings—of love and hate, left- and right-wing gripes, and he con- proclaims, and his obsessive determina- So it is that Allie drags his clan to resentment and worship—for his tyrantion to create a new life for his family the village of Jeronimo in the Hon- nical, godlike father...
...the script eliminates instances of his thoughtless cruelty to Charlie but carefully retains episodes that present Allie's funnier, more sympathetic side...
...Though her character, as in the novel, remains largely undefined, Helen Mirren, as Mother, has a very strong presence, which, alas, only makes one wonder all the more why this seemingly sensible woman permits Allie to torment and endanger her children...
...Yet by the time Allie and Charlie and their companions reach the mountainsettlement with their block of ice, it has melted away...
...He tells his family, "Living in harmony with nature—that's my vision...
...Consequently, it is all to the good that the emphasis at the close of the film is not upon political thematics or even upon the tragedy (if tragedy it be) of Allie Fox, but upon the archetypal relationship between Allie and Charlie—who, like Nick Carraway at the end of The Great Gatsby, emerges from the shadows of a strange, obsessive self-exile to become the real hero of the piece...
...he is determined to bring ice not only to the town's natives but (when they begin to take it for granted) to a tribe of "pure people' in the mountains who have supposedly never seen a white man or ice and who he hopes will, as Charlie tells us in his narration, "see his ice as a jewel and be amazed...
...and this event marks the turning point in Allie's fortunes...
...He turns the shabby little clearing of Jeronimo into a pretty town with sanitary huts, productive and mosquito-free gardens, and a happy, hardworking native population...
...The combination of lectures, workshops, press conferences, interviews with professional reporters cross-examination by experts and rigorous debate hone verbal faculties and build your confidence in the manner best suited to your personality...
...Instruction takes place within the highly personal setting of a small group...
...The novel's nightmarish vision named Allie Fox (Harrison Ford), an tion of mindless consumers, that the thrift, devoted to the invention of of their fate recalled Joseph Conrad...
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...among other things, Weir drastically de-emphasizes Charlie's role in saving his family during the destruction of Jeronimo, and has eliminated entirely Allie's fierce resentment of the boy afterwards...
...The film's politics are somewhat contradictory, to say the least...
...And when the Reverend Spellgood (Andre Gregory)—a missionary who is the local representative of Allie's chief rival, God, and is therefore Allie's principal antagonist in Honduras—tries to win this maverick over to the Lord with a copy of the "Blue Jeans Bible," Allie (who is extremely well versed in Scripture) holds up the dungaree-bound Good Book and says, "Look, kids, just what I've been warning you about...
...Ice is civilization," says Allie...
...he seems to see himself now not as a seventeenth-century Pilgrim, bringing civilization to a wilderness, but as a new Adam whose goal is to recapture Eden on Earth...
...Allie to build a New World of his own...
...While ridiculing the folly of which self-declared visionaries and idealists are capable, it patently intends to present Allie as an emblem of a pushy, parochial America—one that seeks to impose its values and technology upon the Third World, one that talks, talks, talks but refuses ever to listen, learn, or understand...
Vol. 20 • February 1987 • No. 2
