The Talkies/Who Am I?
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES WHO AM I? by James Bowman D uring my freshman year in college fully sympathetic character in the movie. of us who have grown out of that sort and worshipper of various assassins and I...
...For although the identity of the characters is both problematical and crucial to the outcome, it becomes an issue only on the assumption that two of them, Branagh and his real-life wife, Emma Thompson, are not only themselves—an amnesiac artist and a boyish private detective—but reincarnations of some-body else...
...The director himself directs a all, as it turns out...
...The Fabulous Baker Boys...
...Wankers' poetry maybe...
...of us who have grown out of that sort and worshipper of various assassins and I had a friend who took to wear- Unless, that is, you are 19 and into of thing, or who were mercifully spared terrorists who obviously wouldn't harm ing a heavy wool scarf looped through profundity...
...But the chase stuff here is second-rate, and a bland assurance that we are all human underneath the skin is not the stuff of which great art is made...
...You're acting weird, Jack," says Parry, or "Who are you talking to...
...Now they're back, and we are led to expect an appropriately bloody sequel to the drama of their earlier life...
...Richard Linklater's cult film, reasonable protest timidly given voice Slacker, is full of such profundities...
...Mention the word "reincarnation" to me and I react as I do to "aliens"—the words are charms to dissolve the counterweights on my suspension of disbelief, which then falls like a final curtain...
...To those in the middle where an aged anarchist ist at all, are themselves opposed to actity crises supposed to be quite so self- tion, he is just another in a parade of conscious...
...If you don't know along by wearing scarves in unexpected 1 what that means you may well be places...
...Love, for instance, which involves a couple in becoming "two halves of the same person," seems to have the power to render sexual identity irrelevant—as the politically correct will be pleased but not surprised to hear...
...The true identity crisis proves to have an ageless dimension and is not to be confused with adolescent experimentation...
...this is a seemingly impossible wedding of the two genres, neither of which by itself looks very promising...
...The thing is still fun, even though you can't believe in it...
...Music like this, which is actually performed by the actors—including the remarkable Andrew Strong as the lead singer whom the film cleverly makes into a butt for the rest of the band—has that effect...
...Williams's recital of a streamlined version of the story of the Fisher-King, whose agonizing wound could only be healed by a Holy Fool, is the centerpiece of the film and hardly suffers from the fact that Williams and Bridges are both Holy Fool and Fisher-King to each other...
...But I was prepared to The Commitments...
...But such occasional heavy-handedness seems to matter less, somehow, when healing is not simply the product of human ingenuity and determination but is bound up, as it is in the medieval legend, with the grace of God and atonement for sin...
...In the asked him "Why the scarf...
...he replied: right up there with the sixties band ever made...
...Jack must obtain forgiveness in order to go back to disc-jockeying...
...The cab driver is the only The picture is in a way an updating of the old Mickey Rooney-Judy GarJames Bowman, The American Spec- land, c'mon-kids-let's-put-on-a-show tator's movie critic, is American editor type of thing...
...A t one point Robin Williams, who plays a defrocked psychiatrist turned grocery stock-boy, notices Branagh's inability to quit smoking and tells him that, as between smokers and nonsmokers, "the trick is to know which one you are and be that"—words that have an ironic application to the larger question of identity in the film...
...Branagh, an emigre German composer in Hollywood, had apparently murdered his wife and then been executed...
...Forget the political monologue at an impassive and unre- self-consciousness of their manager, sponding cab-driver about how "every Jimmy (Robert Arkins), who imagines thought you have creates its own reali- an instinctive proletarian solidarity bety"—so that there must be other dimen- tween the black ghetto and the Irish sions in which the things you didn't say working classes, whom he calls "the or do were said or done and led to blacks of Europe...
...There he lives among sad homeless people and other social misfits whom he persists in seeing as happy, as he himself is with his past submerged in madness...
...If Lenny Henry's character's obsession with Othello had itself been more than skin-deep he might have seen in that play evidence that the accidentals of our identity are sometimes momentous in their importance...
...this way it's poetry...
...A film within the film, shot as a forties-vintage black-and-white melodrama, tells the story of their previous life, in which they were married to one another...
...As in the medieval legend, they must fail first...
...T he Wunderkind Kenneth Branagh's new film, Dead Again, is at once more serious and more frivolous as a meditation on the question of identity...
...He knows enough to know that the virtue of the Grail is "to heal the hearts of men" but not enough to know that it is his own heart that needs healing...
...Perhaps this is the point: that the black-white switch ultimately has little meaning when put beside the generic human desire to stay alive and thwart an evil killer, well played here by Frank Langella as the mafia boss who himself has managed to efface his own outward identity with plastic surgery...
...context created by the film of scores of "It's part of my identity crisis...
...The jokes are necessary to keep us as well as the characters at a certain emotional distance from the horror at the center of things, and they help us to face it along with them in the end...
...But a bubble of the old medievalist rises up to the surface as he imagines himself also to be a knight in quest of the Holy Grail—identified by himself through who knows what insane logic with a loving cup on the wall of a millionaire's house featured in an architectural magazine...
...they must take the long way round to healing...
...able to figure it out from the salty diaThat did not strike me as the act of logue of Alan Parker's new film called a man in crisis...
...all the way over into cliche by having the 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 band "discovered" and made stars of...
...to by one of them: "Don't you think From the first scene you know what's we're, like, a little too white...
...But I'm not sure that it is all that much better to have a quasi-authorial voice saying to Jimmy: "You raised their expectations of life, you lifted their horizons...
...Here too the idenlet it go as one of those heavy-silly im- tity crisis is of the most benign sort: a ponderables to which, in adolescence, bunch of Dublin teenagers get together we attach the catch-all label: "pro- to form a soul band in spite of the very found...
...At least it does not flip of the Times Literary Supplement...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 41...
...If not for the fact that this is one of several things that you think about only after you've left the movie, I would say that it was spoiled by it...
...Yet the plotting is so skillfully done, the characters so engagingly acted that Branagh could have thrown in a couple of aliens to boot and still have made an enjoyably suspenseful picture...
...Robin Williams is as fond of inspirational therapy movies (The World According to Gar, Awakenings) as Jeff Bridges is of defiant failure ones (Wicket...
...It is the music alone other, parallel realities that remain un- that ratifies their assumed identity...
...It is also a very funny picture...
...Once again, the mixed-identity jokes inherent in the situation wear pretty thin pretty quickly, and the pay-off—Lenny learns that "there's black, there's white, and there are meaningful shades of gray"—seems pretty gratuitous...
...this is just one of the a fly himself says: "There was a time his belt and hanging down like a loin- plies to an apology for lateness by say- most boring movies since Two Lime when people acted on their beliefs...
...A lot of good jokes arise out of the contrast between Parry's moments of lucidity and the sort of half-mad things that the sanest of us will do in moments of stress and preoccupation...
...But when healing comes in the modern version it means for both men acquiring the courage to go back to being who they are: Parry must remember his wife's death to recover his self...
...They might also apply to the situation Williams finds himself in in this month's film of the month, The Fisher King...
...The true nature of both characters shines through their irrelevant disguises...
...Sure we could have been good and made albums and been famous...
...cloth—only slightly to the left of where ing "That's all right, time doesn't exist" Blacktop, the 1971 James Taylor vehicle But it is hard to detect any irony in a loincloth would have hung...
...Nor does the inevitability of The Fisher King's setup stop there...
...It doesn't matter very much that the joke of having a pasty-faced Irish youth say "I'm black and I'm proud" does not have a lot of staying power, and that the point of the identity crisis, if there was one, is pretty much forgotten by the end...
...Not at coming...
...Robin Williams is as clearly in his element as the manic quester, Parry, as Jeff Bridges is as the louche disc jockey, Jack, whose hip and flip comments over the air on the awfulness of yuppies provoked the shootings in the night-club and saddled him with a seemingly unshruggable burden of guilt...
...To be sure, a little too much of the odor of inspirational therapy hangs about it, and I could have done with a less emphatic pointing out of the moral in the final scenes...
...Nevertheless, the songs, which are beautifully done and given as much play as they are in the old musicals, impart an undeniable excitement to the film which, together with a genuine feel for the life of gritty, north-side Dublin, carries it through all such petty doubts...
...experienced...
...This is a film that shows what you can do with typecasting...
...There he plays a medieval historian in contemporary New York who, having witnessed the murder of his beloved wife by a mad gunman in a fashionable nightclub, flips out and takes to the streets with a new identity as Parry, "the janitor of God...
...He leads them in choruses of "I like New York in June, how about y-o-o-ou...
...How it comes out is that we are convinced, first, that identity is soul-deep and repeatable in successive incarnations and then that it may easily be garbled in transmission...
...In which case a girl who re- it in adolescence...
...When I will sound to you like a philosopher— that has got to be the most boring movie Linklater's presentation of him...
...I "Chicago," who sang: "Does anybody Slacker has one promising moment kids whose beliefs, insofar as they exremember thinking to myself: Are iden- really know what time it is...
...Here a black actor, played by the British comedian Lenny Henry, tries to avoid a mob hit by disguising himself as a white man...
...Add to that fundamental implausibility lesser ones to do with an all-but-incomprehensible plot by an antique-dealer and hypnotist, played by Derek Jacobi, to foil trans-mortal justice for the 40year-old murder and you would expect to have a dramatic Irish stew...
...The same thing happens, but with less happy results, in Charles Lane's high-concept film called True Identity...
...Aren't they more like Oedi- narcissistic jerks, playing with his own pus complexes—things you have with- schtick...
...out knowing you've got them or, if you know, without wanting them...
...Isn't it sort of against the rules to nurse them n short, a wanker...
Vol. 24 • November 1991 • No. 11
