The Talkies/Thespians and Specimens

...Before they know it, they're on their way to New Mexico, with both CIA and KGB operatives nipping at their heels...

...Likewise, whereas some directors rise above the cliches inherent in their material, Hiller manages—indeed, one cannot help feeling, at times, that he tries his damnedest—to make everything in his films seem as pallid and contrived as possible...

...The film that resulted is a hilarious piece of cinema verite about contemporary Southern women and the frustrations of romance...

...McElwee is fascinated by the paradox of Sherman's character: as he reminds us more than once, the general—whom Southerners to this day despise for his merciless destruction of farms and cities—was in private life a good and humble citizen who "loved the South...

...and (7) another ex-girlfriend who is an elementary-school teacher and a left-wing activist...

...his ex-teacher (an outspoken Shelley Winters type who is the highlight of the film) gripes that he's a stick-in-the-mud who needs to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 35...

...But the film's director, Arthur Hiller—who is, I think, most responsible for Outrageous Fortune's weaknesses—just throws them away...

...and we are aware, too, that it was Sherman's use of modern weapons and his policy of total warfare against a civilian population that, in a way, marked the beginning of our present era—an era in which nobody, man or woman, civilian or soldier, can feel himself to be out of harm's way.learn how to sweep a woman off her feet, needs to stop using his camera to distance himself from real life...

...6) an ex-girlfriend of McElwee's who is a lawyer...

...It is a clash-oftwo-incongruous-characters movie (like The Odd Couple) that turns into an innocents-caught-up-in-internationalintrigue adventure comedy (like Silver Streak), and, somewhere along the way, also becomes a buddy picture (like Butch Cassidy...

...It is also, of course, about Ross McElwee, who claims to be enamored of each of these young women, but who apparently never puts his camera down, even when they're gently explaining why they don't love him, even when they're packing to leave, even when they're backing out of the driveway and driving out of his life...

...We are constantly aware of the role that his depredations played in shaping the insular, tragic postbellum South that is symbolized (however grotesquely) by the Georgians and Carolinians whom we meet in the film...

...But—though it's all there in the script—this thematic subtext fails to take shape, to take flight, in the actual film...

...A running "joke" throughout the film concerns McElwee's own recurrent nightmares about a nuclear holocaust and his childhood memory of an H-bomb test off the coast of Hawaii...

...There is something smug and self-satisfied, even arrogant, about the persona McElwee projects in this film...

...The two of them, classmates in a Manhattan acting class taught by a great Russian acting teacher (Robert Prosky), can't stand each other, but when their mutual boyfriend, Michael (Peter Coyote), mysteriously disappears, they team up to search for him...

...Sherman's March is, in short, a shameless exercise in solipsism...

...though he trains his camera relentlessly upon those around him, mercilessly exposing their foibles and foolishness, he seems perfectly content with himself just as he is...

...As such, however, it is an undeniable tour de force—quirky, funny, and almost continuously engaging throughout its epic two and a half hours...

...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 But Sherman's March is not only about McElwee's romantic misadventures...

...Refreshingly, the opposites-turned-buddies in this case are both women—actresses, in fact, though of very different kinds...

...And McElwee sits there politely taking all this criticism—a sweet, sane man, apparently, in a nest of crazies, a sensible guy surrounded by ridiculous folks who don't seem to have the slightest inkling of how ridiculous they are...

...Make no mistake: McElwee is a highly eccentric gent, and the ladies who allow him to enter their lives, camera poised constantly upon his shoulder while they calmly discuss the most intimate details of their lives, form a colorful gallery of grotesques who bear more resemblance to the bizarrest characters in Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Conner, Eudora Welty, and the early Capote than to the ordinary run of Southerners...

...4) a lice-ridden linguist who lives alone, in primitive, hermitlike fashion, on one of Georgia's Sea Islands...

...Lauren (Shelley Long), a stuck-up rich girl, is an aspiring classical thespian who wants to play Hamlet...

...Nor is it to say that Leslie Dixon's screenplay is worthlessly derivative: inBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer and author of The Middle Generation, a study of four twentieth-century American poets (Archon Books...

...if anything, he seems too nice, too laid-back, too willing to let himself be dumped on...

...3) a wholesome folk singer who, after spending a few weeks being courted by McElwee, confesses that she is a Mormon and wants to marry a man of God...

...T o be sure, the folks in McElwee's film seem unusually preoccupied with matters nuclear...

...another (the elementary-school teacher) spends her spare time organizing no-nuke protests...

...Indeed, Sherman and the Bomb aside, the subject to which the film keeps returning is McElwee himself—his thoughts, dreams, memories, desires, and chronic insomnia...

...Dixon plainly meant Outrageous Fortune, for instance, to be in large part a meditation on acting...

...This is not to write the film off entirely: Midler, after all, is always good for a few laughs, no matter what happens to be in the script or who happens to be behind the camera, and there are sequences in which she and Long play off each other to truly amusing effect...

...he simultaneously makes fun of the solemn pretenses of Lauren and her acting teacher, celebrates the sheer magic of dramatic illusions, and smiles at the outlandishness of his own plot (as well as its distance from Shakespeare, who is invoked at the film's beginning and end, and whose plays were, of course, themselves rich with meditations on reality, illusion, and the actor's art...

...C everal years ago, Ross McElwee, an independent North Carolinaborn filmmaker residing in Boston, received a $9,000 grant to make a documentary about General William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea and its lasting effects upon American society...

...At times, to be sure, he does set his camera on automatic, sit himself in front of it, and speak from his heart—but he's hardly the guinea pig that his friends and lovers are...

...He directs with a light head and a heavy hand...

...Thus Hiller fails to make us believe in either Sandy or Lauren's affection for Michael, or to make the evolution of the ladies' relationship from mutual loathing to loyal friendship seem anything more than the cliche that it is...

...Whereas some directors can take complicated pieces of material and turn them into lucid, coherent, effortless-looking films, Hiller (whose previous films include Making Love and Silver Streak) specializes in taking a relatively straightforward script and turning it into a confused, cluttered mess in which the tone wobbles, the characters never come into focus, and the jokes get lost in the shuffle...

...In this regard, McElwee seems to regard Sherman as something of a touchstone for our own time, in which a country made up of essentially good and humble people has at its command an arsenal of weapons capable of destroying the world...

...It is also, in a sometimes subtle way, about—yes—Sherman's march...

...Throughout the film, the enigmatic, emblematic figure of Sherman hovers in the background...

...But by the end of the film one realizes that both women have a point...

...To watch this flimsy farce is to have nightmares about what Tootsie would have been like with Arthur Hiller at the helm...

...One looks in vain, in a Hiller film, for a sense of style, of drama, of character, of humor, of pace—let alone visual interest or imagination or joie de vivre...

...It is always McElwee who is in control, always McElwee and his romantic quest that form the chief topics of conversation...

...Alas, the only tried-and-true way to entertain oneself while watching a Hiller film is to tote up themissed opportunities—the failures, on Hiller's part, to exploit promising possibilities in the script...

...His sister (in between grisly descriptions of her recent plastic surgery) complains to McElwee that he is too dull and unkempt to attract a really nice girl...

...At first one sympathizes with the graceless and unattractive filmmaker, who presents himself as a sincere young man in search of a good woman to love...

...Sometimes one wonders whether McElwee finds obsession with nuclear war aphrodisiacal...

...This is Hiller's forte...

...Sandy (Bette Midler) is a crude and raucous porno diva...

...One wonders frequently, during the film, whether he has sincerely chosen these women on the basis of their romantic appeal to him (they run the gamut from homely to mildly attractive), or whether he has deliberately sought out the most offbeat available specimens of Dixie womanhood...

...The pairing of Long and Midler sounds like a promising idea, but before their first sequence together is over you realize you've seen it all before: what this is, really, is Cheers: The Movie with Long playing a variation on her Diane Chambers character, Midler (in yet another rerun of her tacky-bimbo act) taking the place of Carla the waitress as Diane's loud, vulgar foil, and Peter Coyote replacing Ted Danson as the primary object of their rivalry...

...In all, unless I lost count, there are seven of these young ladies: (1) a nonetoo-bright aspiring actress and model who thinks that if only she can meet Burt Reynolds, he will fall in love with her and put her in a movie...

...deed, there are some very funny lines here—or, rather, lines that would have been very funny, if only they'd been directed properly...

...5) a rock-and-roll performer...

...2) an interior designer who matter-of-factly converses about Revelations and the imminent Apocalypse, and who introduces McElwee to a community of survivalists...

...But when he went South to begin work on the film, McElwee, who had just been abandoned by his girlfriend, found himself using his newly bought film stock to record the conversations and activities of his family and friends—and, in particular, of the series of unattached young women into whose company he insinuated himself by Bruce Bawer and his camera over the ensuing year...

...At least two of his women, for example, are doomsday fanatics who keep provisions stored in their home in preparation for a nuclear conflict...