The Talkies / Commonplace Comedy

...But Marshall is, in fact, better at depicting the luxurious than the notso-luxurious life...

...Initially, then, the overall feel is that of a homely, relatively realistic domestic comedy on the order of Mystic Pizza, and it makes one wonder why Kline's performance is such a caricature...

...Rosalie (Tracey Ullman), his devoted wife, who's so obtuse she doesn't realize he's been two-timing her left and right until she sees him necking in the public library...

...rin his last line epitomizes the wacky 1 tone that Kasdan takes so long to find his way to...

...He makes Vivian's flat (which is supposed to be shabby) look pretty...

...For Pretty Woman is the very model of the slick, formulaic contemporary star vehicle, the sort of glossy, diverting, outrageously synthetic picture that nobody involved could possibly take seriously but that almost everybody involved is sure will pack them in at the multiplexes...

...They look like drug addicts," Rosalie whispers to Devo after he introduces Harlan and Marlon...

...On the one hand, Kline renders Joey in a broad, burlesque manner (he goes around singing "Non Dimenticar" and saying things like "I'm a man, I gotta lotta hormones in my body") that seems wholly indebted to the character of Father Guido Sarducci on the old "Saturday Night Live...

...Smile at the customers...

...it's the sort of picture whose every last line feels as if it has been test-marketed...

...y ou've probably got to be either British or Catholic, or both, to respond fully to the humor of Nuns on the Run...

...That's the American way...

...THE TALKIES COMMONPLACE COMEDY T he first thing you should know 1 about Pretty Woman is that it was directed by Garry ("Laverne and Shirley") Marshall, a man who became famous back in the seventies for doing the impossible—namely, lowering the intellectual level of the television sitcom...

...but several attempts on Joey's life—by Rosalie herself, by Nadia, by Devo, and by an amateur hit man from the Old Country—fail to do the job...

...So they quit their gang and head for Heathrow with two suitcases full of money stolen from a drug-pushing Asian syndicate...

...In another direcBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...To describe it in publicist's terms, Pretty Woman is a Cinderella story for the nineties...

...One is also reminded occasionally of Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl...

...The truth is quite the opposite: these establishments are patronized largely by gauche, overpaid show-biz types and their dependents, many of whom not only dress but talk and behave very much like cheap hookers...

...On the other hand, Kasdan solemnly soaks up the local color and focuses in on such naturalistic (if amusing) details as the awful, sickly-yellow paintings of the Pope, Christ, JFK, and Sinatra on the wall of Joey's pizza parlor...

...tor's hands, this detail might have seemed grimly ironic, even witty: in the hands of Garry Marshall, it comes off as a dumb Neil Simonish gag...

...Woody Allen often pays homage to Bergman and Fellini...

...The Old Country hit man, for instance, disguises himself with a Lincoln mask and swings at Joey with a baseball bat (a symbol, we're reminded, of the National Pastime...

...streetwalker from Milledgeville, Georgia...

...Likewise, when Harlan is about to shoot Joey in the heart and can't recall which side it's on, he remembers that the Pledge of Allegiance is said with one's right hand on one's heart, and proceeds, with Marlon's help, to recite—in a perfect deadpan not unlike that of which Kasdan made extensive use in The Accidental Tourist—a funny, fractured pledge that incorporates elements of the Lord's Prayer and ends with the words "deliver us from freedom...

...Anyone strolling into a Rodeo Drive boutique clothed the way Vivian is at the beginning of Pretty Woman would probably be taken for a rock star and treated like royalty...

...I don't want any romantic hassles...

...Don't think of them as drug addicts," Devo suggests...

...The tone doesn't really click into place, in fact—and Kline's exaggerated performance doesn't begin to make sense—until a pair of dense, spaced-out druggies named Harlan (William Hurt) and Marlon (Keanu Reeves) come on the scene...

...Think of them as killers...

...Not that Kasdan is entirely at fault here: Kostmayer himself is responsible for one of the picture's major liabilities, a running gag (though one with Serious Thematic Implications, natch) about America...

...But their car runs out of gas, and—with the cops, the Asian mobsters, and their own former confederates on their tails—Brian and Charlie are forced to hole up in a London convent, disguised as nuns...

...But these strike one as contrived, ineffectual attempts to inject energy into what is essentially a tired piece of work...

...I don't like having drug addicts in my house," she complains...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990...

...Now the nineties are here, and so is Marshall's biggest hit ever, Pretty Woman, a romantic comedy (written by J. E Lawton) which will do nothing to tarnish Marshall's reputation as a schlockmeister par excellence...

...Rosalie, you see, having finally discovered Joey's infidelities, has decided she wants him dead...

...We're supposed to laugh when her rakish, revealing attire shocks the hell out of his fellow hotel guests...

...If, in spite of all this, Pretty Woman is entertaining to watch, it's mostly because Julia Roberts is adorable—especially when she smiles, which is virtually all the time...

...Indeed, compared to the outfits that some actresses wear to the Oscars, Vivian's streetwalking attire looks downright demure...

...At least in the opening scenes, however, the clash between these potentially farcical characters and Kasdan's sober direction is merely baffling...

...You can almost hear Marshall behind the camera, saying, "Smile, honey...

...As in Blue Velvet and Heathers, the implication throughout I Love You to Death is that this absurd tale of violence (which is based, believe it or not, on a true story) reflects some larger truth about America...

...The point of the movie's opening sequence is to underline the squalor of Vivian's existence—a simple enough proposition, one would think, given the seediness of downtown Hollywood...

...Edward and Vivian meet when he, on the first night of a week-long L.A...

...Lynn has taken a silly but not unpromising premise—it's pretty much the same as that of Some Like It Hot, one of the funniest film comedies ever—and has come up with a succession of terribly unimaginative complications...

...Watching this scene, one wonders how much Garry Marshall would've wept if someone had forced him to score Pretty Woman with serious music instead of with insipid hard rock...

...Devo (River Phoenix), the soft-spoken young New Age waiter in Joey's pizzeria, who loves Rosalie, knows Joey's a rat, and wants her to give the guy his walking papers...

...And her street isn't just any street: it's Hollywood Boulevard, where she and her fellow trollops use the names of celebrities on the Walk of Fame to mark their territorial boundaries...

...but over the next few days—surprise!—they fall for each other and overcome their mutual unwillingness to "become emotionally involved in business...

...But Marshall can't bring himself to show things as they really are...

...There's even a scene in which Vivian watches the closing moments of Charade on TV...

...Hurt and Reeves (the latter of whom has a ring in his nose, a razor haircut, and a tattoo of a marijuana leaf on his neck) are hilarious, and when they're on screen, responding in matter-of-fact, dimwitted fashion to the most outrageous goings-on, everything seems to come together...

...He makes the bar where she and her friends hang out (and which is supposed to be grubby) look pretty...

...Critics have described it as a fairy tale, and I guess it is, if you can imagine the brothers Grimm confabbing poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a gaggle of box-office-obsessed Touchstone execs...

...Even when the body of one of Vivian's colleagues turns up in a local dumpster, everything in sight is clean and colorful and radiant...

...It's the story of Brian (Eric Idle) and Charlie (Robbie Coltrane), two English bank robbers who, finding that the criminal life isn't what it used to be, decide to go straight—straight, that is, to Rio de Janeiro...

...He's plainly trying to turn her into a new Audrey Hepburn: her wide, by Bruce Bawer sparkling smile is very much like Hepburn's, and the dresses she buys on Rodeo Drive strongly suggest the Givenchy fashions Hepburn made famous...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 31 (Eric Idle's romance with a girl named Faith is particularly tiresome...

...For the leading characters' chief motivating traits—Joey's unthinking combination of Catholic piety and extreme promiscuity, and Rosalie's quickness to turn from servility to murderousness—strike one not as American at all, but as the manifestations of an Old World peasant mentality...

...There are moments, too, when the storyline of Pretty Woman recalls, variously, Sabrina, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and My Fair Lady...

...Next to Marshall, Steven Spielberg is an Italian neo-realist...

...I want a professional," he tells her...

...Our Prince Charming is Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), a handsome, divorced, and exceedingly busy New York tycoon whose mistress has just left him because she finds herself speaking to his secretary more than she does to him...

...Writer-director Jonathan Lynn tries to jazz things up by using funky, pseudo-Wellesian camera angles, and editor David Martin does his part by cutting briskly between scenes...

...But these episodes are sheer balderdash, based on the fantasy that the guests at top-dollar Beverly Hills hotels, and the shoppers at fancy Rodeo Drive emporia, are all tasteful patricians, socialites of the sort that used to be played by Lucile Watson...

...Well, Joey is given a line that's apparently supposed to smooth over this little inconsistency: America, he reminds us, was discovered by one Italian and named after another...

...business trip, makes a wrong turn on his way to Beverly Hills and asks her for directions...

...The results are—well—mildly amusing...

...This movie pretends to honor great music, but like the character in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors who equates an awareness of Mozart with a knowledge of European hotels, it's merely acknowledging great music as an essential component of a high-class, luxurious life...

...But Vivian's not just any streetwalker: she's improbably beautiful, sweet-natured, wholesome-looking...

...Our Cinderella is Vivian (Julia Roberts), a young L.A...

...and Nadia (Joan Plowright, a.k.a...

...In the black comedy I Love You to Death,however, Kasdan's style largely works against the designs of John Kostmayer's screenplay...

...Lady Olivier), Rosalie's live-in Yugoslavian mother, an inveterate National Enquirer reader who can't stand Joey and is willing to do anything to get him out of her daughter's life...

...Sometimes this style pays off: it made many people take Body Heat and The Big Chill more seriously than they deserved...

...The only word for the script is zany, but rather than start the zaniness off at full throttle, Kostmayer builds up to it adroitly, scene by scene...

...Meanwhile, Vivian gets acquainted with Edward's world...

...Yet even to make such criticisms, I suppose, is to take a film like I Love You to Death more seriously than it deserves...

...Kasdan's job, as director, is to prepare us for the madness to come, to cue us in as to what we're expected to make of the motley collection of characters we've been presented with: Joey (Kevin Kline), a happy-go-lucky Italian pizza man in Tacoma, Washington, who, in the opening church-confessional scene, tries to remember exactly how many times in the past two weeks he's committed adultery...

...Finally, in desperation, Devo brings in Harlan and Marlon to help out...

...and we're supposed to feel sorry for her when she's ordered out of a Rodeo Drive clothing store by a snooty saleslady who recognizes in an instant that she doesn't belong...

...L awrence Kasdan directs with a wit- La less and slightly plodding earnestness, with a hand that's a bit too heavy for his material...

...and despite Martin's abrupt interscene cutting, the cuts within the scenes themselves are rather sluggish: at times the movie looks like a rough cut, and one finds oneself wishing one had an editing machine handy...

...She ends up accompanying him back to his hotel, and the twice-burned Edward, wary of serious entanglements, ends up asking her to serve as his paid escort for the week...

...This hardly takes care of the problem, though...

...Finally, there's Marion's line: "If we're gonna waste the dude, we gotta get paid for it...

...Their liaison begins as a simple commercial arrangement...

...Try to imagine Raising Arizona, say, directed by Arthur Hiller...

...Michael Garfath's camerawork, moreover, is astonishingly drab...

...is Pretty Woman Garry Marshall's homage to Stanley Donen...

...I guess they haven't heard that Rio isn't what it used to be, either...

...T hen there's Vivian's big cultural ex- 1 perience...

...But what about the fact that Joey, Rosalie, and Nadia are all European immigrants...

...In the early eighties, Marshall switched genres and began churning out mildly successful big-screen comedies: Young Doctors in Love, The Flamingo Kid, Nothing in Common...

...One evening, Edwardflies her by private jet to San Francisco, where she sees her first opera—and proves her sensitivity, of course, by weeping all the way through...

...They are drug addicts," Devo replies...