The Talkies/Women and More Women

...P.S...

...and of whom we get the briefest of glimpses—just enough to support Anna's contention that he's a prude...

...that you'll see how subtly the filmmakers have faked you into buying a nightmarish view of the relations between men and women—relations which, though the director and writer are both men, are observed entirely from the women's perspective...

...Every man, in short, is a potential rapist...

...Even Katheryn's fellow lawyers at the D.A.'s office talk about Sarah's case in a manner that is subtly but chillingly reminiscent of the ignorant, aggressive creeps at The Mill...

...I tried to raise Molly freely," Anna tells her lawyer, Mr...

...When at the beginning of the film she is assailed for her insensitivity by Sarah's rape counselor, Katheryn barks: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 35 "I'm not a rape counselor...

...I'm a prosecutor and I have to make a rape case...

...and it offers men who have never committed, contemplated, or encouraged rape the opportunity to enjoy their moral superiority to the vermin who attack Sarah...

...In the scenes between her and Molly, which are meant to establish the closeness of their bond, the child might just as well be a favorite niece, for all the intimacy that the scenes communicate...

...And yet, presumably in thrall to her own conventional impulses, she married Brian, and stayed married for seven years...

...Finally, Sarah gets a chance to tell her story and to be recognized as a victim...

...THE TALKIES WOMEN AND MORE WOMEN by Bruce Bawer Based loosely on a real event, The 1, Accused tells the story of a young waitress named Sarah Tobias (Jodie Foster), who one night walks into The Mill, a white-trash bar in Washington state, and finds herself being raped by three strange men on a pinball machine...

...to Mr...

...The film seeks to show, in incidental ways, how men's images of women are fed by everything around them: at The Mill, in the distant background, we see a close-up of a sexy pair of lips on a TV commercial...

...It should destroy us when Molly is taken from Anna...

...Anna seems to be admitting that she's been "using" Molly all along, that her legal attempt to recover custody did not represent an attempt to end Molly's misery but to preserve her own happy little world of orgasms and purposeful motherhood...

...They're horrible...

...There is little doubt as to what the final verdict will be...

...Thus the book's title...

...Yet the movie is considerably easier to take than the novel...

...Her mother is Anna Dunlop (Miss Keaton), a piano teacher and lab assistant who lives with Molly on the second floor of a small, shabby house in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...They fall in love, and he becomes a fixture around Anna's house and a friend to Molly...

...the pinball machine itself is called SLAM DUNK and is illustrated by a picture of a curvaceous blonde stuffed into a basketball hoop...

...Anna's grandmother (beautifully played by the radiant Teresa Wright) is more congenial here, Leo is less slimy and obnoxious (in the book he collects pornographic pictures and is "fascinated with the inability of painting, print, to convey a sense of the pornographic in the way photography did"), and Anna herself (mainly because she's played by our Diane) is more sympathetic...

...In fact, there's very little warmth in The Good Mother, only Elmer Bernstein (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Santini), who wrote the musical score, seems to have understood completely what this story required of him...

...Anna emphasizes to Mr...

...Let me explain...

...By the end of the film she's realized that, hey, it's part of every woman's obligation to be a kind of rape counselor...

...Molly might just as well be a piece of community property whose loss she has to accept in order to (in the popular phrase) get on with her life...

...And the director slips in images of violent sports (Katheryn and her fellow lawyers discuss legal strategy at a hockey game, where the men explode with excitement when something savage happens on the ice...

...Molly, as she's told Leo, is her "commitment"—the point being not that she feels an innate, ineradicable sense of obligation to thechild, but rather that Molly has come in handy as an organizing principle in her life, and that she has accordingly made a conscious decision to make Molly's needs a priority...

...When you think about it afterward you're surprised to realize how effectively you've been manipulated...

...Katheryn feels that this development is her fault, and consequently puts her career in jeopardy by bringing a precedent-setting suit: she takes three of the rape witnesses to court on a charge of egging the rapists on...

...Shorn of both daughter and lover, Anna tells her grandmother, "I'm starting all over again...

...The Accused offers women the opportunity to say to themselves, "Men...

...What's worse, Brian—the wimp!—didn't realize it was nothing...

...it doesn't...

...This naturalism is even more of a triumph because the film, though itdoesn't come across as a shrill tract in sexual politics, has a strong polemical bent...

...Indeed, it may not be till you try to describe The Accused to a friend, and realize that it is next to impossible to do so without dipping into feminist rhetoric ("victimization," "sisterhood," "solidarity," "consciousness raising," etc...

...Men are regarded here less as opponents in some frothy Racy-and-Hepburn-style battle of the sexes than as threatening figures who, whether friends or lovers or strangers, could at any moment turn into attackers...

...Muth that she was frigid with Brian but not with Leo, and that this revolutionary sexual breakthrough "was good for Molly...

...If the film nonetheless feels vivid and original, and even quite powerful at some points, it is because Tom Topor has written a solid script, Jonathan Kaplan has directed it expertly, and the cast—especially Miss Foster—has enacted it with wit and sensitivity...

...Remember Alan Bates in An Unmarried Woman...

...Yes, another movie that ends up in court...

...We had been naked around her, it's true, but it was all part of this world Leo had opened up to me where I was beautiful and he was beautiful and Molly was part of our life and our love...

...But the question that this movie actually addresses is: "Should a man who couldn't give his ex-wife an orgasm be allowed to have custody of their six-year-old daughter...

...The trailer for Diane Keaton's new film, The Good Mother...

...based on the 1986 novel by Sue Miller, implies that this question—read in voice-over by a deep, solemn male voice—has something to do with the content of the film...

...Kaplan: Next time you direct a film in Canada that's supposed to be set in the U.S., don't show a sign in the background which reads Media Centre...

...So frustrated is she that when she is taunted in a shopping-mall parking lot by one of the bar patrons who witnessed her shame and who urged the rapists on, she rams his pickup with her car, sending both of them to the hospital...

...Muth (Jason Robards...

...The formula could hardly be more familiar: we open with a crime and end with a trial, and in beBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer tween we watch the victim and prosecutor work their way through mutual suspicion and learn gradually to trust and understand one another...

...44 an a court tell us how we k../ should raise our children...

...The logic here is striking...

...the TV at The Mill broadcasts a boxing match), as if to imply a connection between men's enjoyment of these sports and the inclination to commit an act of rape...

...Katheryn Murphy (Kelly Mc-Gillis), decides that rape convictions will be hard to secure and makes an out-of-court settlement at a reduced charge...

...So the situation stands until Anna meets Leo Cutter (Liam Neeson), a passionate, earthy Irish sculptor whose apartment is full of pieces with names like "Celtic Twilight" and "Drunken Boat...

...I didn't want her to be ashamed of her body and think of it as something to hide...

...The idea here is that it's women against men, and Katheryn's big achievement is her recognition, finally, that her principal bond is not to her fellow lawyers (all male) at the D.A.'s office but to her fellow woman, Sarah...

...In the novel, Anna was pretty humorless...

...We can fix that," Leo says generously, and proceeds to give Anna her first orgasm...

...Sex between us was nothing," Anna says...

...When Molly's taken away, Anna's upset not for Molly's sake but for her own...

...Keaton has eliminated that problem, though she doesn't do much to convince us that Anna is an especially loving mother...

...What preoccupies her, at the end, is not whether Molly has the best of all possible family lives but whether she herself is a "good mother...

...But the influence of her cigarette-smoking, boy-chasing Aunt Babe—a teenager who dismissed Anna's conventional parents and grandparents as "assholes"—was critical...

...My review of Sue Miller's novel has been reprinted in my new book, Diminishing Fictions (Graywolf Press, $18.95...

...This last comment is typical of Anna...

...I wanted to be like her, wanted to take risks and be passionate...

...to visit him and his new wife) and sues for custody on the grounds that Leo—in accordance with Anna's "relaxed and natural" household rules about nudity and such—has permitted Molly to touch his genitals...

...In her presence," Anna tells us, "it just seemed as if everything was possible...

...Same idea...

...Their first time in bed, Anna confesses, "I don't think I'm very good at it...

...The truth is that while Anna thinks she's interested in what's good for her little girl—and while the director (Leonard Nimoy, of all people) and screenwriter (Michael Bortman) seem to think so too—the girl's well-being consistently takes second place to Anna's karma...

...The daughter in question is Molly (Asia Vieira), your typical cute, bright movie kid...

...Sarah—who wanted the crime officially recognized as a rape, and herself certified as a victim—is furious, and feels betrayed by Katheryn...

...The film's offense is that, in the course of indicting men who regard women as mere hunks of flesh, it ends up suggesting that most men are themselves sexist beasts...

...Her father is Brian Dunlop (James Naughton), a sober, affluent businessman who lives in D.C...

...the child is an integral part of the life she's made for herself, the identity she's forged...

...In many ways this is a very conventional movie...

...But after the court decision goes against her, and Molly seems miserable living with her father, Anna rejects her lawyer's advice to use this misery as the basis for an appeal: "I didn't want to use her misery, I wanted to end it...

...Anna herself, mind you, was once like Brian—she was, she tells us in voice-over while we watch scenes of her own childhood, a "shy" girl, a "conformist...

...In any case, by the end of the film it is extremely clear that Molly is not the point—if in fact she ever really was...

...As a wise critic wrote in a review of Sue Miller's novel a couple of years ago, "Anna seems less concerned about what happened to Molly while in her care, and about how it may have affected the child emotionally, than with the question of how the whole sordid incident reflects on her...

...Sarah's story feels real...

...SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB KTVN WITS WGTC WAJI CORPORATE OFFICE 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989...

...Sarah's not the most respectable type—she lives in a trailer with a dope dealer, talks tough, dresses provocatively, and was drinking and smoking pot at the time of the rape—and so the prosecuting attorney, deputy D.A...

...They divorced, and Anna built her life around Molly, whom she adores...

...But this happy menage self-destructs when Brian refuses to return Molly (the child having been shipped off to D.C...