The Talkies/Zero for Four

...Among the unsatisfactory supporting players is Christopher Walken, whose performance as a slimy lawman named Kyril Montana is not only wooden but inchoate (why does he suddenly seem to turn friendly at the end...

...indeed, she's hardly taller than Fox...

...Given these formidable impediments to cinematic adaptation, the movie that McInerney and director James Bridges have fashioned proves to be rather a pleasant surprise...

...indeed, not only is Masquerade very poorly directed and written (a commonplace enough phenomenon in expensive Hollywood pictures), but its lighting, sound, and cinematography are of low-budget-horrormovie quality...

...When he stares bleakly at his dissipated self in a bathroom mirror, he looks less like a drug-ravaged wreck than like a Cub Scout who's had one too many malteds...

...awful...

...The rest of the movie consists mostly of disconnected episodes with no dramatic point and little or no comedic payoff: Eugene meets and romances a girl named Daisy (who, to all intents and purposes, remains nothing more than a name...

...In the highly charged social setting that is a movie theater, however, the ending of Bright Lights feels like a cop-out...

...To an astonishing degree, Masquerade is itself a masquerade-an amateurish production being marketed as the work of pros...

...But nothing more...

...What flatness, what preachiness, what solemnity...

...About fifteen minutes into The Milagro Beanfield War, the friend I'd brought with me leaned over and whispered: "I'm so glad this movie isn't taking sides...

...The nicest thing one can say about Lowe is that, for once, he's not the movie's maj or deficiency...

...Based on the novel by John Nichols and filmed from a script by Nichols and David (The Sting) Ward, this is a film that only Phil Donahue could love...

...the editing is so incompetent that I sometimes thought I was viewing a rough cut...

...What writer, after all, has won more renown than Neil Simon-who adapted the screenplay from his hit Broadway show-for his sheer craft, his gift for slick contrivance...

...the bad guys are the Anglo developer Ladd Devine (Richard Bradford) and his political cronies (among them the governor, played by M. Emmett Walsh) who are planning to surround the town with the Miracle Valley Recreation Area, "the largest leisuretime development" in the state's history...

...I was impressed by how well the filmmakers have managed, sequence by sequence, to capture the tone of the original, and amazed by the degree to which some of the scenes looked the way I had imagined them when I read the book...

...cheap sentiment...

...The good guys here are the dirtpoor, predominantly Hispanic, salt-ofthe-earth residents of tiny Milagro, New Mexico (milagro is Spanish for "miracle...

...Like others of his breed, Redford patronizes Hispanics without even realizing it: arguably, the film's real hero is not a Latino but an Anglo, Charlie Bloom (John Heard), a Milagro newspaperman and "progressive lawyer" who says things like, "These are not the sixties...

...And so forth...

...For there simply isn't much worth telling here: Eugene isn't that interesting, the other guys in his platoon aren't that interesting, and very little that happens to them is that interesting...

...But Fox's modest size and boyish appearance create problems...

...Even more miscast is Phoebe Cates as his fashion-model wife Amanda...

...Who, after all, wants to see a Major Motion Picture about factchecking...

...Boy, was he being sarcastic...

...For an equally silly look at the other end of the economic scale, there's Masquerade, which is set in the Hamptons and is positively awash in mansions, yachts, dinner jackets, dinner parties, and stately WASP surnames...

...his intellectual platoonmate Epstein (who at times comes off as a Woody Allen parody) challenges the disciplinary methods of creepy, laconic Sergeant Toomey (Christopher Walken again-one is tempted to say naturally...

...as in all these films (Dial M for Murder, Suspicion), the big question is whether the sweet young heiress's penniless-butdashing young consort will actually knock her off...

...This device gives the book a very special feel-and how to translate that to film...

...Having presumably sensed that this ending would seem less justified on film, McInerney drops a few hints along the way, mostly in the form of brief memory flashes of our hero's bedridden mother writhing in pain...

...Yet if the film ultimately collapses, it offers many pleasures along the way...

...And believe me, such evil-looking fat cats haven't been seen on film since the days of Edward Arnold...

...ceives that the eleventh-hour revelation-namely, that our hero's mother died exactly a year ago of cancerwon't wash on film...

...Once or twice (e.g., when Swoosie spurns a sexual come-on and mothers him instead), this childlike appearance seems a plus...

...And there are funny moments-notably a sequence involving a ferret and a goofy line delivered in a perfect deadpan by a blond transvestite...

...Milagro activist Ruby Archuleta (Sonia Braga), the local auto mechanic, is heartened by Joe's action...

...His first question to old Amarante: "What does Milagro mean...

...Vennera walks through the whole picture with a single expression of fatuous, bemused defiance...

...To be sure, the film doesn't really work as a whole in the way that the novel does...

...his platoonmate Hennessey is caught in flagrante with a fellow soldier and carted off to prison...

...watching the stolen water pour onto his land, she declaims (to no one except us, and in a voice reminiscent of La Pasionaria at her most apasionada): "I knew Jose Mondragon couldn't go through his whole life without attempting at least one great thing...

...For one thing, it's largely about writing and editing, and though fiction that contemplates such things can be quite compelling, it is exceedingly difficult to make them anything but deadly dull on screen...

...H A t III e The District of Columbia School of Law is a publicly funded law school established for people who are interested in: • quality practical legal education • public service • positive social change • legal services for low-income persons The new D. C. Law School is accepting applications to the Juris Doctor program for the Fall of 1988...

...This picturethe first to be directed by Robert Redford since his Oscar-winning directorial by Bruce Bawer debut in Ordinary People-is so crudely tendentious that it brought back memories of some of the more shrill and phony populist movies of the 1930s...

...For one per Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer His latest book, Diminishing Fictions, was published this spring by Graywolf Press...

...Alas, John Houseman's imposing editor-in-chief is the usual Professor Kingsfield retread...

...The images never cohere into a vision, though, and in the end the film seems little more than a harmless assortment of nostalgic cliches...

...At times, moreover (e.g., when he opens Swoosie's medicine cabinet and exclaims, "Valium-all right"), Fox falls back noticeably upon the limited repertoire of gesture, expression, and inflection that is Alex Keaton, the character he plays on the TV series "Family Ties...

...Since Heard looks quite a bit like Redford, and delivers a performance chock-full of Redfordisms, it is hard not to identify him with Redford-especially when the feisty-butunlovable Ruby, stung by his initial reluctance to join her revolution (well, there has to be some drama), spits out an accusation: "You're a tourist...

...they're not human beings, they're one-dimen 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 sional icons of noble poverty, courtesy of the cliche-infested, liberal-guiltridden imagination of a rich white movie star...

...Though Robbie Greenberg's cinematography, moreover, is (inappropriately) gorgeous, the dubbing and continuity are often surprisingly sloppy (Joe's bean plants, for instance, inexplicably shrink from one scene to the next...

...But it's impossible to admire any of the too-numerous characters in this film, because it's impossible to feel anything for them...

...But if this is the case, then why are the characters here even more plastic than is usual in his work...

...despite the brevity of her on-camera time, her performance is rich and strong and acutely moving...

...ZERO FOR FOUR M uch as I admired Jay Mclnerney's clever novel Bright Light Big City, I fully expected the movie to be...

...0 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF LAW `ULUMBIA S Y, ~° V*** The Law School that is not for everyone...

...Meg Tilly, in the role of Olivia Lawrence ("the richest nice kid on the East Coast"), is probably the best performer here, but she has little to do except to look innocent and credulous and to gaze adoringly into the utterly vacant baby blues of Rob Lowe, whom director Bob Swaim and writer Dick Wolf expect us to buy as a yacht captain ("the youngest guy on the Southern ocean racing circuit...

...And though Redford aims essentially for a Grapes of Wrath-style poetic naturalism, he also features a disconcerting touch of south-of-the-border "magic realism" in the form of a Shakespeare-quoting angel (Roberto Carricart) who is invisible to everyone except Milagro's oldest resident, the devout Amarante Cordova-played by Carlos Riquelme, who gives the second most endearing performance in the film (the most endearing is that of his pet pig...

...What a bad movie...

...Equally problematic is that the book's most distinctive feature is its second-person narration: the hero is referred to throughout as "you...

...but more often it works against the filmmakers' intentions...

...20010-0497 (202)639-2607 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 41...

...Braga, for her part, plays Ruby as one of those awful liberated women who seem to have exchanged all their warmth and gentleness for a sexless, steely determination-and of course we're supposed to admire the hell out of her for it...

...far from solving anything, however, these addenda come off as feeble attempts to disguise a structural flaw...

...Every now and then Simon seems to be taking fitful stabs at some large and serious theme or other, some statement about memory and youth, or love and war, or differences and prejudice...

...watching it, you picture Redford sitting in his Fifth Avenue apartment, sipping cappuccino and trying out script ideas on his valet: "How does this sound, Pablo...

...The supposed reason for the lack of structure and for the relatively paltry number of good jokes is that the story is autobiographical: according to Eugene's wraparound voice-over (which we are plainly being begged to accept as the voice of Simon), everything in the picture real ly happened to the writer when he was young...

...Most striking of all is Dianne Wiest, seen in flashback as the mother...

...She certainly doesn't look much like a fashion model...

...I n Biloxi Blues, on the contrary, we see an astonishing example of professionalism gone awry...

...The "war" of the title-actually more of a skirmish-begins when Joe Mondragon (Chick Vennera) defies the Anglos' plans by irrigating (with public water) and then seeding his beanfield, which, we learn, is "in the middle of what's going to be the thirteenth fairway" of the Miracle Valley golf course...

...District of Columbia School of Law Admissions Office Post Office Box 3497 Washington, D.C...

...If McInerney got away with it in the novel, it's because the novel's whole chic, nightclubby environment utterly ignores the existence of such things as mothers and families, and the ending exposes the phoniness of this environment in a quietly effective manner that is perfectly in key with the contemplative state of mind of an individual reading a novel-a state of mind to which the protagonist's kinetic Lebensart is bound to feel alien, wrongheaded...

...though attractive, she is hardly the "gorgeous, gorgeous creature" that everyone in the film considers her to be...

...Even Michael J. Fox, an actor of narrow range, is often surprisingly effective as the leading character (who's been dubbed Jamie Conway...

...In one scene the peasants actually sing "Cielito Lindo...

...Ordinary People, you'll recall, was likewise something of a stiff sermon masquerading as poignant human drama...

...Besides, shouldn't consummate pro "Doc" Simon know better than most of us that being true doesn't make a story worth telling...

...He hasn't even bothered to learn Spanish...

...For application and information contact...

...What's more, there are several utterly gratuitous characters, notably Herbie Platt (played by the irritating, overexposed Daniel Stern), an NYU grad student in sociology who has (quite unbelievably) come to Milagro for six months to write his thesis, and whoalthough Redford doesn't seem to realize it-comes off as impossibly stupid, even for an NYU grad student in sociology...

...likewise, when he drags himself out of his disheveled bed, wearing only underwear, after a day-long post-party snooze, he looks as if he's all of eleven years old...

...Aside from the fine direction and superb cinematography (by Gordon Willis), it's rich in memorable characterizations: Swoosie Kurtz's sympathetic coworker, Frances Sternhagen's spinsterish supervisor, Jason Robards's hasbeen writer...

...When things get rough you run away to somewhere comfortable...

...Granted, it's funny when Eugene loses his virginity to a prostitute-but it's funny more because of the boy's clumsiness, as enacted by Broderick and directed by Mike Nichols, than because of any lines in Simon's script...

...Result: a good chuckle here, a sober moment there, a few touches of sentimentality...

...It's an entertainingly dopey thrillerwith an increasingly byzantine (and increasingly improbable) plot-of the marry-her-and-murder-her type...

...Yes, the book has a zippy pace, a clean story line-our unnamed young hero, supposedly anguished over his wife's recent desertion and over his inability to get a writing career underway, drinks too much vodka and snorts too much coke and consequently screws up royally on a fact-checking assignment at the New Yorker-type magazine that he works for, thereby losing his job-but otherwise it's far from promising feature-film material...

...It is remarkably faithful to the novel, both in structure and spirit...

...nobody gives a shit anymore...

...Toward the end one realizes that there is simply no way that Bridges and McInerney-who are clearly about to follow the novel faithfully to its conclusion, wherein we learn what's really tormenting our hero-will save this picture from falling apart...

...This is, most assuredly, a tourist's film...

...He was being sarcastic...

...predictable jokes about the heat and the foodwithout partaking of any of his usual strengths: shape, focus, and a generous proportion of big laugh lines...

...Yet Biloxi Blues, which follows Brooklyn boy Eugene Morris Jerome (Matthew Broderick), the hero of last year's Brighton Beach Memoirs, to boot camp in 1945, suffers from Simon's congenital weaknesses-formulaic characters, plots, and situations...