The Talkies/Sunny and Cher

...The fundamental rules of dramatic construction don't appear to be relevant in these parts...

...In place of characterization, he gives us goofy grotesquerie...

...the soupy score—which draws on Puccini as well as the kitsch classic "That's Amore"—is there not only to amuse us with its schmaltzy excess but to touch our hearts...

...This is not the only violent episode in Five Corners...

...There is so much that is unbelievable in this movie—so many extremely unlikely coincidences, decisions, lines of dialogue, and changes of character—that one gets the feeling that Shanley doesn't believe in believability, that he feels if we see something happening on screen, we should accept it and keep still, and not bother him with questions of motivation...

...Yes, he may have stopped denying his Irish Catholic parents and the Bronx natives among whom he was raised...

...But he's not denying those things anymore...

...In the author's note to his 1986 play The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, John Patrick Shanley muses as follows: Who am I? This is a courageous question...

...21.95 hardcover...

...There are related problems with the film...

...Send Order to: Wyndham Hall Press, Box 877, Bristol, IN 46507 Pre-payment required...

...in this one he has a limp...

...Yet every so often Shanley shifts abruptly from absurdist comedy into his own special brand of treacly sentiment: in one sequence, for instance, Cher, her mother, and her uncle all climb out of their beds in the middle of the night to stare at the moon and speak Great and Simple Truths to their respective bed-partners...

...My parents, my Bronx origin, my Americanness, my Irishness, my appetites, my mortality, my need for love and acceptance, my jealousy, my violence, my anger...

...Most importantly, he coaxes from Edwards a performance of subtlety and coherence, with the result that we feel throughout the film as if we truly know and care about this boy...

...but unlike Spielberg's movie, Boorman's is scaled to the perceptions of a child...

...he moves through the film with an urgency that feels willed, and at various climactic points breaks into big phony eyepopping bursts of enthusiasm or sorrow—at which moments the music invariably swells up as if to tell us what to feel...

...Every fact of my specific self...

...With the help of his cinematographer (Allen Daviau), lighting director, and production designer (Norman Reynolds), Spielberg makes everything, from the war-torn streets of Shanghai to the hovels of the internment camp, look distractingly beautiful...

...W hich is more than one can say for Five Corners...

...Linda (Jodie Foster) is the girl he tried to rape two years ago...

...Who knows...

...Harry (Tim Robbins) is the huge, tough Irish street kid who saved her from Heinz last time around, but who, in the wake of his dad's murder and thanks to the rhetoric of Dr...

...In Ballard's novel, the war manipulates Jim's mind in ways that are complex, curious, even (superficially) contradictory, but ultimately comprehensible: he idolizes his Japanese captors, cherishes violence, cheers an American air raid...

...It should be a compelling story, but no such luck...

...likewise, when Jim sneaks out of the camp to trap a pheasant, the tone is precisely the same as when Richard Dreyfuss sneaks onto the alien landing strip in Close Encounters of the Third Kind...

...Like Moonstruck, too, the film seems at times to be little more than a catalogue of tacky, eccentric, and/or grotesque details: the white sequined dress on a middle-aged woman in a bar, the awful picture of Jesus on Harry's mother's living room wall, the plastic flowers in Heinz's mother's hair, the cop with one foot twice as large as the other, the high-school teacher killed by an arrow...

...Now, violence and absurdist comedy can be combined successfully: the Coen brothers did so in Blood Simple...

...Another shot—of Jim standing behind the barbed wire of the camp—looks just like a Ralph Lauren ad in GQ...

...Cher plays a widow in her mid-thirties who has no sooner agreed to marry her unappealing, inarticulate boyfriend (Danny Aiello) than she falls in love with his equally unappealing, inarticulate estranged brother (Nicolas Cage...

...to him, the way the light reflects off of the suitcase that Jim throws into the water in the film's last shot would seem to be more important than his reason for throwing it...

...While the film puts Jim through essentially the same paces as the novel does, it skirts the darker places in the boy's soul—the only places where his behavior makes sense—and thus gives us an incoherent, unconvincing protagonist whose director simply doesn't recognize the degree to which he is not the same as the inBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...indeed, one of Shanley's remarks in the aforementioned author's note would seem to indicate that he has little use for those rules: "I see no difference between writing a play and living my life...

...If the bombastic Empire of the Sun leaves one cold, one is surprised to find oneself being intensely moved by the simplest events and the smallest gestures in Hope and Glory...

...No sir, these days young Mr...

...Some of these details are particularly reminiscent of Moonstruck: for instance, in that film the heroine's lover is missing fingers...

...His latest book, Diminishing Fictions, will be published this spring by Graywolf Press...

...Hope and Glory is another story entirely...

...The main plot itself—Heinz abducts Linda, and James and Harry give chase—gets underway as the result of a thoroughly unbelievable decision on Linda's part: Heinz phones her and tells her to meet him at midnight in the park, and she complies...

...Somebody who thinks this way has no business passing a playwriting course, let alone writing a film script...

...Heinz (John Turtorro) is a psychotic thug who's just returned home from prison...

...No postage or shipping charges THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 35...

...Yawn...

...By the end of the film, several people will be killed—most of them, naturally, in zany ways...

...Of the two, Steven Spielberg's Empire, which was written by Tom Stoppard and based on J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel, is a major disappointment...

...It is all the same thing...

...to see these films is to be astonished at the crudeness and superficiality—the sheer falsity—with which both the principal characters and their lower-middle-class ethnic Outer Boroughs milieux are drawn...

...Office manager in a funeral parlor...

...But he's not quite sure how he wants us to feel about such people—for he is still less than certain how he feels about them...

...A freak bakery accident, caused by Aiello, in which Cage lost some fingers, and which is described in such a way as to make the audience roar with laughter...

...Yet if Shanley's screenplays in two current films, Moonstruck and Five Corners, prove anything, it is that to accept one's background and to be capable of writing about it with intelligence, sensitivity, and perception are two drastically different things...

...Boorman doesn't strain after epic effects, doesn't engage in pointless displays of cinematographic brilliance...

...Its dialogue is frequently padded and stilted (a flaw more common among bad plays than bad movies), and its exposition generally clumsy ("Harry got so serious after his father died...

...Indeed, it hardly seems an exaggeration to say that thereal subject of the film is its own cinematography...

...in place of plot development, roller-coaster reversals...

...To enjoy the film on its own terms one must be willing to engage in Doublethink—to laugh, that is, at the cartoonlike qualities of Cher and Cage's romance, and yet to believe in (and to root for the triumph of) the romance...

...Or maybe he doesn't...

...But Spielberg's benign Weltanschauung simply can't accommodate such unwholesome states of mind...

...nor does he seem comfortable with the idea of aliens (of the non-extraterrestrial variety) who are vicious rather than friendly...

...I ain't wearin' no clothes either...

...Derived from writer-director John Boorman's own childhood, it depicts the Battle of Britain as experienced by eight-year-old Billy Rohan (Sebastian Rice Edwards) and his low-er-middle-class London suburban family (including Sarah Miles as Mum...

...The truth is that Shanley, for all the distinctiveness of his style, simply does not have a strong sense of tonal control...

...There's also a ridiculous subplot involving the shenanigans of two vapid gum-chewing girls who, waking up one morning in a strange flat, engage in typically sparkling Shanley dialogue: "I ain't wearin' no clothes...

...Cher's job...

...But to combine these elements with the sort of simpleminded sentimentality and genial screwiness in which Shanley specializes is to court incoherence...

...Martin Luther King, has become—presto!—a convert to nonviolence...

...The story could hardly be simpler...

...A superb job on war, nuclear arms, and the bishops," says William F. Buckley, Jr...

...After all, the more goofily erratic a character's behavior, the more interesting he is...

...The reason for the brothers' estrangement...

...Or so Shanley wants us to believe...

...Yet we don't feel...

...To look at these images is to recognize that Spielberg has absolutely no comprehension of the life they are supposed to represent...

...and when Shanley throws in platitudes about civil rights and nonviolence, the whole structure collapses under the weight of its own pretensions...

...It has an honesty, a modesty that Empire sorely lacks...

...Directed by Tony Bill and set in a lower-middleclass Bronx neighborhood in 1964 (though it was actually shot in Queens), the movie covers two days in the lives of several local teenagers...

...A big part of the problem is the film's unsuitably lush visual style...

...Everything in this film is played for laughs—and cheap ones at that...

...I have, at one time or another, denied everything...

...he learns "that kindness, which his parents and teachers had always urged upon him, counted for nothing" and feels lightheaded "not because his parents had rejected him but because he expected them to do so, and no longer cared...

...FOREIGN POLICY SINCE 1933 by Anthony T. Bouscaren (The President's National Advisory Board), $12.95 paper...

...When the boy salutes a group of Japanese pilots about to take off on a bombing raid, for instance, there should be irony and pathos in the air, but instead there's just the usual Spielbergian joy and wonder...

...Everything about the film is pure Shanley...

...The film tells the story of Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a bratty eleven-year-old who is separated from his parents during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai and spends the war in an alien internment camp...

...ENDURING THE SOVIETS: U.S...

...As ever, he confuses weirdness with wit: things are offbeat here for the sake of being offbeat...

...it's hard to say...

...Like Empire of the Sun, the film is episodic...

...Spielberg appears to be more interested in lighting surfaces in pretty ways than in exploring the ugly depths of the material...

...James (Todd Graff) is her boyfriend...

...And the music doesn't help at all: John Williams has contributed one of his patented sappyand-jaunty adventure-movie scores, which, while appropriate enough for a Superman, an ET, or an Indiana Jones, sounds particularly vacuous when coupled with images of a World War II internment camp...

...Spielberg, who is more in tune with the fantasy life of the typical lighthearted American boy than any other director, proves himself incapable of understanding the effect war might have upon a boy's psyche...

...Indeed, what makes Five Corners so much more intolerable than Moonstruck, in the end, is that Shanley here takes Moonstruck's already uncomfortable mixture of absurdist comedy andshameless sentiment and adds two further ingredients: violence and serious political theme-mongering...

...By far the better of the two films is Moonstruck, directed by Norman Jewison and starring Cher, wherein Shanley substitutes Brooklyn for the Bronx and Italians for Irishmen...

...Aside from Cher's winning performance, though, what makes Moonstruck a palatable—and even, occasionally, a charming—entertainment is the fact that, for the most part, Shanley keeps it light...

...The 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 film sets us down in present-day Brooklyn Heights, which in real life is Brooklyn's most expensive, highfalutin neighborhood, full of Wall Street yuppies and Benetton stores, but which has been cast here as a lower-middle-class Italian ghetto...

...Accordingly he does his best to treat war as if it were one of his usual escapist themes...

...Shanley is embracing himself wholeheartedly and, alas, is charging us up to seven dollars a head to watch...

...We never feel as if we know this boy intimately...

...nocent California suburban kids in E.T...