The Talkies/The Winter of Our Discontent
Bawer, Bruce
THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT W inter has brought with it a blizzard of widely heralded new films, the most lauded of which is probably The Accidental Tourist, directed by Lawrence Kasdan from a...
...Beats me...
...In part, this Lebensart is a family trait...
...So is the way the KGAB management treats Champlain—not telling him about a syndication deal, for instance, until three days before it takes effect...
...T Ike Beaches, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels makes use of an "odd-couple" pairing...
...The development seems random, pointless: first Macon ignores Muriel's attentions...
...Why does he feel that this woman more than the other would help him to escape his rut...
...But the two women's performances are wonderful, their chemistry is perfect, and the way their lives develop and in32 tersect has a naturalness about it that is very engaging and, in the end, astonishingly tender...
...So they make a wager: whoever can bed the pretty young heiress Janet Colgate (Glenne Headly) can stay...
...This show is about saying what's got to be said...
...Michael Caine plays an adroit, sophisticated English con man named Laurence Jamieson, who routinely takes wealthy ladies for millions in a Riviera resort town...
...It's almost embarrassing to sit in the theater and realize that one has been taken on so long a journey for so little...
...But they're united by their fascination with each other: C. C. is awed by Hillary's preppie-ish way of life...
...All you are," he tells Champlain, "is a f-----g suit salesman with a big mouth...
...Hurt plays a middle-aged Baltimorean named Macon Leary, author of a series of travel guides for on-the-go businessmen who want to visit "the most exotic places in the world without feeling they'd left home...
...spiel in Network...
...The jobs by Bruce Bawer here are invariably goofy: Macon's brother Charles makes bottlecaps for a living...
...Quite a voice, indeed...
...Weirdest of all is Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis), a young obedience trainer for dogs, who is inexplicably attracted to Macon...
...Macon is like nobody one has ever known, and the "lesson" he ultimately learns is one at which the filmmakers have been tiresomely hammering away since the opening frames...
...he insists...
...Based on a novel by Anne Tyler, this movie—which reunites William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, the stars of Body Heat—has been called "perfect," "a triumph," and "one of the best movies in many years," and was cited as Best Picture of the Year by the New York Film Critics' Circle...
...But Midler's movie feels realer, truer than Shirley MacLaine's...
...At various points over the years, the two women room together, fall for the same man, become estranged...
...And so, finally, is the film's gruesome conclusion—which cynically rips off the sensational demise of real-life Denver deejay Alan Berg, for no better reason than that this feebly plotted, dreadfully stagey talkfest has to wind up somehow...
...And whereas Terms gave us a mother and daughter, Beaches presents us with two women, C. C. Bloom (Midler) and Hillary Whitney (Barbara Hershey), who meet on the beach in Atlantic City as 11-year-old children and remain best friends for thirty years...
...Hillary envies C. C. her talent and determination...
...Champlain (as we learn from a clumsy flashback) is a former suit salesman who got into showbiz because a radio deejay walked into his store one day and said, "You've got quite a voice...
...the other must go...
...the actors have the serious air of TV stars doing an Arthur Miller play on PBS...
...Yet The Accidental Tourist proved to be a first-rate disappointment—an incredibly lifeless and programmatic concoction, the most solemnly dull award-winner since Chariots of Fire...
...Unlike his siblings, Macon is married, but since the sudden, shocking, recent death of his 12-year-old son, he has reverted to type: his wife, Sarah (Kathleen Turner), has left him, and he's moved back in with his pathetic, eccentric clan...
...Forget about America, though—Stone and Bogosian don't even have a halfway intelligent take on their central character...
...It would be an exaggeration to describe this film as having a plot...
...It's not half as exciting as it sounds," he tells Macon's publisher...
...So is a scene at a basketball game (one of the few episodes set outside the radio studio), where Champlain—supposedly a ratings king—is booed by the entire audience...
...A composition in brown and gray, it's lugubriously paced and equipped with a solemn, self-important John Williams score...
...Caine and Martin never stray from character, and Frank Oz's direction (though it could be tauter) never loses its light, charming touch...
...And the only hope for a solution would seem to lie in his show...
...Only KGAB's station manager appears to have the picture in focus...
...Synthetic as it is, though, this movie looks profound...
...Needless to say, the salesman-tosuperstar flashback is hard to buy...
...Want to know which hotel in London has the best plumbing...
...Champlain is an opinionated loudmouth...
...All this may well be more than enough to convince the Academy voters, come spring, that The Accidental Tourist is a worthy successor to Terms of Endearment...
...Now, when you get crowds like that on a snowy night in Manhattan for a non-Woody Allen movie, you know you're in the presence of something special—namely, The Prestige Film of the Year, the latest answer to Amadeus, On Golden Pond, and Gandhi, the movie-to-beat at the Academy Awards...
...Amen...
...It's a top-notch contrivance...
...Up to a point, it's a valid comparison: like Terms, Beaches follows a relationship through its ups and downs, from childhood to an early death, and was directed by a man (Garry Marshall, in this case) who is famous for his TV sitcoms...
...Always take a book with you on an airplane flight, he advises, so as Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...This country," he declaims, "is in deep trouble, people...
...But there isn't much to get attached to in Hurt's Macon...
...His guidebooks speak to the most banal, unadventurous side of the business traveler, and we are meant to understand this as a metaphor for his approach to life in general...
...That's about as deep as this movie goes...
...THE TALKIES T n other hands, this material might I have been truly affecting...
...then Sarah talks him into a reconciliation...
...Who's his agent...
...The film's attitude toward these folks is schizophrenic: it feigns compassion even as it ridicules them, making (for example) a cruel running joke out of the numerous and exotic allergies of Muriel's small son, Alexander...
...The screenwriters (Dale Launer, Stanley Shapiro, and Paul Henning) keep things moving deftly from reversal to reversal...
...Scoundrels is a farce of prelapsarian wit and elegance...
...Steve Martin plays a slovenly American named Freddy Benson, a small-time operator who tries to crowd his turf but who, finding himself outclassed, blackmails Jamieson into teaching him (as Robert Redford does Paul Newman in The Sting) how to pull off The Big Con...
...Stern's a comic who puts down his own program and the pretensions of radio people...
...It's the last neighborhood in town...
...Stern is a pro with a natural-sounding delivery...
...Alas, in seeking to convey this quality, Hurt has muffled his very expressivity...
...For he moves through life like an accidental tourist, doing his best to avoid contact with other lives, to evade new experiences, to cushion his somber and solitary progress through the world...
...30 to avoid being bothered by your seat-mate...
...The grotesques in Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers have nothing on this bunch...
...When school's over, though, Benson refuses to leave town...
...nonetheless, the two large adjoining Upper East Side theaters in which The Accidental Tourist was playing had both sold out an hour and a half early, and though it was only nine o'clock I had to buy a ticket for the 11:45 showing...
...Bogosian's character has been compared to so-called shock-jock Howard Stern (whose morning radio show is heard in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington), but though Bogosian seems to have copped a few of Stern's trademark gags, there's no real similarity...
...What pretension...
...Hershey is lovelier and more simpcitica than ever, and Midler is superlative at every turn—funny, touching, and in great voice...
...It could be argued that the film (written by Mary Agnes Donoghue) contains too many episodes, and that they are too loosely strung together...
...But that's where the similarity ends...
...Yes, the film has major weaknesses, among them a maddening series of false endings, and a loud, idiotic rock song that almost ruins the film's moving climax...
...Hurt's Macon, by contrast, is uncompelling, a cipher...
...It's one of those slick, phony-from-the-word-go radio voices, and it makes everything Champlain says sound utterly insincere (an effect that would seem to be unintentional, since this is how Bogosian really talks...
...The most important thing," Champlain's ex-wife tells him, "is you've got to start loving yourself...
...Talk Radio is desperate to make a point...
...He's at once paranoid, messianic, apocalyptic...
...Macon's aging, unmarried sister and brothers—who live together in the family manse—are all anal retentives who spend their time alphabetizing groceries and road maps, and who get lost if they wander so much as a block off their usual neighborhood routes...
...But what is it...
...C. C., a brash kid from the Bronx with dreams of showbiz success, goes on to spend years singing in shabby nightclubs and acting in off-off-Broadway plays before finally becoming a star...
...In the end, he picks one woman over the other, because "she's given me another chance to decide who I am—to step out of the Leary groove and stay out...
...both of them lose direction (and husbands), and each helps the other get back on track...
...The night I went to see it, New York had been hit by a snowstorm and traffic was almost at a standstill...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989...
...And all the people around him—excepting the ever-natural Sarah—are utterly bizarre...
...They're as different as can be: Hillary, a proper little rich girl from a San Francisco suburb, ends up attending Stanford and becoming a high-profile lawyer...
...No apparent reason...
...then she manipulates him into a relationship...
...Bogosian—a New York "performance artist" who, with director Oliver Stone, adapted the film from his off-Broadway play—stars as Barry Champlain, the host of "Night Talk," an infamous radio phone-in show in Dallas, Texas...
...Watching him, one has increased respect for the late Peter Sellers, who in Being There took an equally numb, shambling, and matter-of-fact character and made him truly affecting...
...He plods across the screen like Frankenstein's monster, his face pale and eyes dead, and delivers every line in the same robotic monotone...
...Champlain talks endlessly about America—yet his message amounts to little more than a garbled replay of Peter Finch's "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore...
...Why does Macon suddenly achieve this sense of resolution...
...It's a mistake," he declares, "to plan everything as if it were a business trip'!--and this feeble insight is actually meant to constitute an epiphany, a profound moment of truth...
...What's even more unconvincing is that he seems astonished by the reception: Doesn't he know how the city feels about him...
...where to find a Burger King in Paris...
...You can see the denouement coming all the way down the Riviera, but the fun is in watching it work itself out...
...So is the fact that practically every other caller is a rabid anti-Semite...
...Of course, Prestige Film doesn't necessarily mean Bad Film, and there was no reason not to expect that at least some of the critical encomia were justified...
...he screams into his mike, and mostly the movie consists of his doing just that: arguing with bigots, talking down would-be suicides, ranting about everything from drugs to the Holocaust...
...Champlain takes himself more seriously than Jerry Falwell...
...There's something so muffled about the way you experience things," Sarah complains...
...Seated in the family parlor, the Learys look as if they're awaiting an appointment with Diane Arbus...
...continued on page 32) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 WRCB KTVN WTTS WGTC WAJI CORPORATE OFFICE 111111111111111^MIIII SARKES TARZIAN INC Speaking of which, they've been comparing Bette Midler's new picture, Beaches, to Terms of Endearment...
...Leary's books have the answers...
...In Talk Radio, Eric Bogosian brings new meaning to the word obnoxious...
...THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT W inter has brought with it a blizzard of widely heralded new films, the most lauded of which is probably The Accidental Tourist, directed by Lawrence Kasdan from a script by Kasdan and Frank Galati...
...People just don't talk to each other anymore...
...You ever do radio...
...For all this, however, it's extremely gratifying to see a contemporary film that's set over a long period of time, and that regards friendship and its attendant responsibilities with sympathy and respect...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 3
