The Talkies/Sex and Candy
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES SEX AND CANDY by Bruce Bawer S teven Soderbergh, the 26-year-old writer-director of sez lies, and videotape (lower-case letters, please), has never been to film school. And it shows:...
...Well, sort of...
...He has the tapes neatly labeled, by name and date, and views them regularly in private...
...The owner of a tire store, she wants Buck to straighten out, settle down, and work for her...
...if character, sex, and circumstance have interacted in such a way as to make John and Cynthia unusually randy, the same forces have operated together in the cases of Graham and Ann to the opposite effect...
...By any means possible, as it turns out: threatening the boy with an ax, advancing on him menacingly with a power tool, tying him up and stuff-ing him in the trunk...
...As for the story, Soderbergh has put together what is essentially (like Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...Throw Away The Phone Book...
...Anyone who sees Uncle Buck will not soon forget, among other things, the sight of our extremely stout hero trying to make use of the tiny rest-room facilities in a grade school (an episode which Candy fans may recognize as a variation on the jockey-phone-booth bit in last year's Who's Harry Crumb...
...This turns him on in a big way...
...while technically unimpeachable, Soderbergh's debut picture also glows with a refreshing distinctiveness of tone, a fine quirkiness of imagination, and a gratifying sensitivity to details of character and atmosphere...
...Somewhere in there he makes a living...
...Paradoxically, he's ideal for the role precisely because he's so wrong for it...
...Given even this middling material, however, Candy makes it work uproariously...
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...the fiancee situation could quite easily have been set up afterward...
...And she's touched, too, by his sexual plight: as he confesses to her (on the day after their first meeting, no less), he's psychologically impotent, unable to make it with women...
...This is, Gallagher makes clear, a man who will never be able to understand sexual relations beyond the level of macho conquest and intramural competitiveness...
...She's so desperate for love, in fact, that she's about to go all the way with her creepy boyfriend, Bug—something that Buck, who doesn't share her parents' strictly laissez faire approach to these things, makes it his personal goal to prevent...
...Even Candy's first appearance—in a restaurant-table chat with his girlfriend that sets up their relationship—is static, colorless, unrevealing...
...her face seems frozen in a grimace and at times she seems to think she's Glenda Jackson doing Ibsen...
...Suddenly, during this scene, one recalls how very young, after all, the film's writer-director is...
...one hopes that the studios, instead of putting him to work making glossy big-budget movies that are indistinguishable from everybody else's, will give him the freedom to follow his own line of development...
...I t's not until the last half-hour or so, when Graham's videotape fixation takes center stage, that the movie falters...
...His main achievements are (a) not trying to make Buck "lovable," as is the dire fate of many comedians who appear in movies with kids, and (b) not getting too serious about the plot (i.e., dissolute uncle helps transform demoralized family,and vice-versa...
...All at once, the focus shifts unaccountably, motivations seem to enter out of left field (nine years ago, Graham reveals, he was deeply hurt by a girl named Elizabeth), and an apparently vital thematic nexus (between love and lying) is introduced but not clearly enough explained...
...Not to put too fine a point on it, Ann and Graham are birds of a feather, and one of the questions the film implicitly poses is whether they'll try (and, if so, manage) to burst the bars of their respective cages and fly off together...
...His brother has done such a good job of keeping him at arm's length that the two younger kids, a little boy named Miles (Macauley Culkin) and a little girl named Maisie (Gaby Hoffman), don't even know they have an uncle...
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...and that Graham's predicament has a far more profound meaning for the writer-director than he has succeeded in communicating to his audience...
...Restaurants, shopping, nightlife, emergency services, museums, theaters, and much more --- organized in the perfect Rolodex file...
...It's a testament to Soderbergh's skill, moreover, that he manages to introduce all four of them in apt, memorable, and funny ways—and to establish their relationships and conflicts—before the movie's first ten minutes are up...
...The sex-happy Cynthia, for her part, is fascinated by Graham's inventive, if aberrant, means of achieving release: Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...Enter John's old college buddy, Graham (James Spader), a sensitive, laid-back, underachieving drifter who floats into town and inadvertently lures both of John's women into his orbit...
...These are top38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 notch performances, and none of them would have been achieved without a superior director...
...One feels, to speak plainly, as if it's not Graham but Soderbergh himself who's crying out in pain and confusion over the traumas and betrayals of youth...
...Written and directed by John Hughes, the uncontested master of inane teen comedy-drama (Sixteen Candle.% The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off), Uncle Buck is the silly, derivative, but exceedingly amusing story of Buck Russell (John Candy), an undependable, quasi-shady (but goodhearted) bachelor who lives in a shabby walk-up in downtown Chicago, drives a dilapidated car that violates the emissions standards for a Boeing 747, bowls, smokes cigars, swills beer, fixes parking tickets, and bets on the ponies...
...Not Candy...
...And the other actors are commendable without qualification: Ann, who might have come across as either a tic-ridden dingbat or a locker-room joke (the sex goddess with no interest in sex), is invested by Andie MacDowell with charm and dignity...
...Indeed, this would've been perfect as Buck's introductory scene...
...Notwithstanding the failure of his big scene, Spader mostly does a very fine job...
...And—believe it or not—it's all hilarious...
...Louis San Diego San Francisco Seattle Washington D.C...
...Thanks...
...Which—when Ann finds out about it—turns her off in a big way...
...What makes it so, of course, is Candy...
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...Much to his credit, however, Soderbergh steers completely clear of Henley territory: compared to her goofy stereotypes, his characters are living, breathing people, whom we soon find ourselves caring about (or, in the case of John, despising...
...And he's finally agreed to do so when an emergency, late-night call comes from his brother, an upper-middle-class executive type who lives in the suburbs...
...And it shows: the slick, style-over-substance look and the glib, assembly-line sensibility that typify movies by today's film-school alumni are nowhere in evidence here...
...In his hands, Buck doesn't come across as ruthless and insensitive but as guileless and well-intentioned—he wants to do right by these kids, and axes and power tools and knockout punches are the only language he speaks...
...Louis —Thea despises everyone, including herself...
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...And this isn't the only problem Buck handles in his unique way...
...Yet for most of its length, sex lies, and videotape is an intelligent and remarkably compelling piece of work...
...How does Graham do this...
...But in Candy's second scene, everything clicks: jolted awake by his brother's phone call, Buck claps his hands loudly to turn on a lamp (he's got one of those "Clapper" devices) and Hughes cuts to a street shot to show lights going on all over the block...
...But in fact both Ann's conviction that "sex is overrated" and Graham's video fetish exemplify a shared fear of intimacy...
...Laura San Giacomo succeeds at the difficult job of making the truculent, devious Cynthia sympathetic...
...So Buck heads for the suburbs...
...Likewise, when he cooks Maisie an ample breakfast of scrambled eggs and onions that even a starved linebacker couldn't finish—or when he packs an unopened tin of sardines in Miles's lunchbox—it's not because he doesn't care about the kids but because he doesn't know what's appropriate to the situation...
...it's their 15-year-old sister, Thea (Jean Kelly), who despises him on sight...
...Steven Soderbergh is unquestionably a young man with a future...
...His wonderful execution of this and similar bits suggests that Candy, with enough of the right material, could give the late, great Jackie Gleason a run for his money...
...During Graham's speech, one has the uncomfortable feeling that Soderbergh, who all along has kept a seemly distance from his characters, is suddenly embarrassingly close to one of them...
...A family illness, the brother says, requires him and his wife to be away for several days...
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...But then—neglected as she is by her career-happy mother, and upset by the family's recent move from St...
...and Peter Gallagher, down to his last gesture, gets John exactly right...
...during the last several years, he's talked a number of women into sitting on his couch, staring into the lens of his videotape camera, and outlining their erotic histories in graphic detail...
...black-sheep Buck is needed to take care of the kids...
...Nor is it his videotape fixation, per se, so much as it is his ardent, cryptic, and protracted account of its etiology—which he delivers in an awkward, unprepared-for scene with Ann—that throws this hitherto exquisitely poised film off balance...
...How...
...that the speech, which does not work well dramatically, exists primarily for other than objective dramatic purposes...
...With Cityfile, there is no need to ever use the phone book...
...or Noel Coward's Private Lives) a witty, provocative, and fastidiously crafted four-character play, has set it in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has cast it with an attractive quartet of gifted, thirtyish performers...
...Called in by the school principal for a conference about Maisie's disciplinary problems, Buck soon loses his cool with the woman—a severe, exacting monster—and chews her out as only a Chicago racetrack regular could...
...We look forward to hearing from you...
...This is not to suggest that Hughes's script and direction are anything more than competent...
...Certainly he's one of the two or three funniest men in movies today, and this picture—though not quite worthy of his talents—is his best vehicle yet...
...Date: Return this form to: Metro Files • 225 Secaucus Road • Secaucus, NJ 07094 For more information call: 1-800-426-5564...
...Likewise, when a clown hired for Miles's birthday party shows up drunk and surly, Buck decks him in no-nonsense fashion...
...ross Mary Poppins with the old Cary Grant movie Houseboat, stir in a bit of The Seven Little Foys and Little Miss Marker, and you've got Uncle Buck...
...Dad and Mom are vapid and witlessly acted, and when they leave (not to return till the closing sequence), one is thrilled to see them go...
...The opening scenes, which introduce the kids and their parents, are highly unpromising...
...Well, Ann's drawn to him out of empathy...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 39...
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...The movie takes a while to hit its stride...
...Needless to say, this is quite a neurotic foursome, who in raw summary may not sound much different from the bizarre, empty-headed Southerners that populate the plays and movies of Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart, Nobody's Fool...
...The least likable of the four characters is John Mullaney (Peter Gallagher), a slimy, fast-track, red-suspenderwearing yuppie lawyer, whose boredom with his sweet and beautiful but oddly naive and sexually impassive wife, Ann (Andie MacDowell), has led him into a sleazy, clandestine affair with her wanton sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo), a seductive artist who tends bar...
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...The mother is particularly annoying...
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...An actor who was even remotely credible as a small-time racketeer—a Harry Dean Stanton, say, or a Robert Duvall—would scare the hell out of you in such a part...
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...It takes only two brief, flawlessly delivered lines of dialogue, for instance, to convey the purely utilitarian, businesslike nature of John's liaison with Cynthia: after a midday roll in the hay, they don't part with a kiss, a romantic word, or a lingering look, but with a mechanical request by one to "drive safely" and the other's sneering reply of "Yeah, right...
...They take to Buck readily enough, however...
...Reviewed in the April 1989 TAS...
...Oh, and he's got a fiancee (Amy Madigan)—a tough (but also goodhearted) dame whom Buck, like Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, has been stringing along for years...
...she's touched by his shabby, solitary existence, his dread of commitment, his desire to live in his car rather than in an apartment because "I like having the one key...
...And one's disappointment is compounded by the film's pedestrian and overly tidy wrap-up, which betrays both the movie's distinctiveness and its sense of verity...
...It's a funny gag, and from this point onward the humor (such as it is) stays dependably on track...
...The entire film, as a matter of fact, is marked by an admirable precision and economy of word and gesture...
...Why waste time turning pages in the phone book...
Vol. 22 • November 1989 • No. 11
