The Talkies/Someday Her Prints Will Come
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES SOMEDAY HER PRINTS WILL COME by James Bowman H ollywood routinely elevates cliche ment? Ah, yes, because it is inherently lywood ideology without Hollywood tected from the very...
...Or larly bad film is Joseph Ruben's Sleep- every woman's nightmare of The Mar- having been sufficiently underscored...
...Also, a terrific jazz score sporadically succeeds in imparting real magic even to such trite bits as a visit from the ghost of love affairs past...
...I don't normally riage Enforcer...
...But if she doesn't know Ben any better than to feel threatened by him, she must have been kicked in the head a few times too many...
...It is this kind of thing that Aristotle was thinking...
...tator's movie critic...
...Indeed, the successful scientist is seen as an emotional and spiritual failure until he is "awakened" to what most of us know already about the need for other people...
...After a variation on a very old theme, she is staging an elaborate drowning hoax in the most recent of these mythic stock order to discourage pursuit, she lights figures and the one about which we are out for the territory—that is, Iowa, least secure Her story replaces the do- which, since Field of Dreams, seems to mestic idyll that was still going strong have become what Kansas was to The all the way through the sixties and that Wizard of Oz: the all-purpose symbol we are still not completely sure we want of American wholesomeness, complete to jettison...
...As always in Allen's films, the gags punctuate and to some extent redeem the more serious story line when it lapses into the profound...
...Nor did they greet with derision the idea of Berlioz as the herald of fanatical domesticity...
...It is the very model of the well-made movie, but it is dead inside...
...If they were relatively commonplace, like cancer or car accidents, they wouldn't be so scary, or scary in the same ways...
...The pictures are just a sort of program for the score, rather like, to take an example at random, Berlioz's crazy program for the Symphonie Fantastique...
...A t least Frears's film is only tedious and depressing and not, like Silence of the Lambs, voyeurism justified by a childlike faith in the special, if not superior, reality of apsychiatrist who eats human flesh or a transsexual who makes clothes for himself out of murdered women's skins...
...Their like to review movies about which I (Julia Roberts) like a mannequin and their "quarrel...
...The New York Times, for instance, says of the grifters that "their methods and ambitions are really not so different from those of the straight world...
...It is also a measure of Woody Allen's wit, since his stock in trade is the ridiculous and he does not labor under the necessity, as Joseph Ruben does, of taking himself too seriously...
...Of course it is a good drug, and it indirectly awakens the nerdy doctor (Robin Williams) who administers it and needs to learn from his patients "how to live," but it is hard for me to believe in chemistry —or even Science—as hero...
...You don't have to believe in the phantasmagoria in order to experience the emotional power it has inspired...
...But the paradox obtains: If he is so extraordinary, what has he got to do with us...
...Freud said that the id was "true psychic reality," and his principle has had far greater influence on twentieth-century art and literature than Aristotle's about improbable possibilities...
...A whole hospital full of postencephalitic patients is awakened neither by handsome saxophone players nor by the need to escape from domestic tyranny but by L-Dopa, a drug...
...Only they an arrangement of convenience for the put him in potentially threatening conpartners rather than a lifetime commit- texts, see, where he unintentionally surprises and scares her, in order to show James Bowman is The American Spec- how spooked she is by men in general...
...The pith and the life of it are rotten at the core because its characters, small-time crooks and con-artists, are so impoverished in spirit that we cannot bring ourselves to care very much what happens to them...
...He has done it again with Alice, a film about a Park Avenue housewife (Mia Farrow) whose sexual awakening at the hands of a jazz saxophonist (Joe Mantegna) leads her to Mother Teresa...
...I am trying to explain my residual unease with having found the film rather moving, an unease that has to do with the movie's failure to attach itself to universal experience...
...Get it...
...Prehistoric monsters or creatures from outer space do just as well...
...As the mass murderer Dr...
...Neither the pathetic creatures to whom a drug almost accidentally gives a few weeks of life as an interruption in their perpetual sleep nor the pathologically shy doctor who learns from them "how to live" is part of the world that most of us know...
...For each time the agony of with flags and parades and carnivals and divorce rends a family there are some acres and acres of corn...
...She is up less resentful of the beatings than of his same story with the same moral argues but this is a special case: this is Hol- on a pedestal, see, where she can be pro- compulsive neatness and the fact that powerfully that they are providing not he performs the act of sexual congress just a hackneyed theme but a sustaining with background music by a composer myth...
...What doesn't work on a merely literary level takes artistic shape as part of what Richard Wagner usedto call "the total work of art"—music drama as music video...
...We need our Sleeping Beauty— she rather comically identifies as "Burjust as, to a lesser extent, we need our ly-ohs"—to wit, the Dream of the WitchNoble Savage, our Faustian (and fus- es' Sabbath from the Symphonie Fantian) Gangster, our Suburban Monster, tastique, just in case something like the our Lonely Cop and others from the Danse Macabre or the 1812 Overture gallery of acetate archetypes...
...There are people like that in the world, just as there are brutalizers of women, and one of the reasons why people have always gone to movies is to scare themselves with stories about them...
...Yes, I know...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTA1DR APRIL 1991...
...W oody Allen returns regularly to the image of Sleeping Beauty, who is usually portrayed in his films by his main squeeze of the moment...
...Even when Suburban Monster and Lonely Cop team up, it seems, Sleeping Beauty is never far away...
...This she has in common with Julia Roberts's character in Sleeping with the Enemy: she is awakened not by a handsome prince but by a loathsome monster...
...It is precisely because the latter is a true story that it is weak as art...
...Here she meets of us who will ask ourselves: Why was a young man (Kevin Anderson) who is it again that we decided marriage was positively puke-makingly nice...
...The same is true of Stephen Frears's movie, The Grifters, which is truly impressive for the performances of Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Bening and for its clever plotting and nicely ironic touches...
...else that the studios would simply grow ing with the Enemy...
...I don't and I didn't...
...In other words, Alice rendered invisible by a Chinese herbal physician or flying in the arms of her ghost-boyfriend above Manhattan works better on the screen than a moment of lucidity vouchsafed to the sufferers of an extremely rare vegetative syndrome...
...would have seen our latter-day redac- cotic of traditional wedlock, to awake...
...Don't you feel men's eyes moving over your body...
...He is merely a monster: there be any danger of the point's not news of yet another version of it...
...Even a deus ex machina like Mother Teresa is inoffensive if Louis Malle's images of her shade into Mia Farrow as "Alice Blue Gown...
...Well, that's real life for you...
...The mass murderer and the sex criminal, we see, are only extreme forms of maleness, and it is the psychiatrist-cannibal who calls attention to the more ordinary forms of that sickness which afflicts half the human race...
...Robert De Niro does a wonderful job portraying Leonard, the most attractive of the patients, but in the end he is a grotesque, outlandish creature whom we can admire from afar but who has not much to do with us...
...he says, and it is creepy, because he is in effect claiming that kinship to the rest of mankind that our experience would deny him—a kinship, nevertheless, that we are only too ready...
...A series of memorable images of the pretty and nubile FBI trainee in the midst of crowds of men presses home the point that benign masculinity (if there is such a thing) is as psychically as the other kind is physically threatening...
...Although our new Sleeping Beauty is Well, of course, she runs away...
...Here the wickedness working as a librarian...
...to grant...
...With all the portentousness of the shower scene in Psycho, Ruben has her open her kitchen cupboards to find that—shock...
...This Sleeping Beauty is also the Lonely Cop (Jodie Foster) who must come to terms with her fears, rather as farmboys from Kansas (or possibly Iowa) had to do in the old time war movies—by confronting a particularly disgusting manifestation of them...
...Perhaps they were stunned by the sheer inappropriateness of it...
...can an The same c be said of Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs...
...She, poor thing, seems shamelessness in continuing to retell the can't think of a single good thing to say, calls her "Princess...
...In fact, maybe we need to look at Alice the other way around: it is the music rather than the narrative that jolts the audience into sympathy with the heroine...
...Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, he has a sharpness of observation and intellect that sets him as much apart from the workaday world as the revolting crimes he has committed or the antiseptic cell in which they have landed him...
...If you look closely at the critical praise that Silence of the Lambs has received, you will see that it is based on the assumption that the picture gives us not escapist fantasy but real life...
...You cruel and exploitative...
...For, as in Sleeping with the Enemy, it is male sex-violence which provides the ideological content and hence the contact with real life...
...of the wicked husband (Patrick Bergin) Needless to say, he also beats hertion of the Sleeping Beauty legend so A particularly clear example of the is unrelieved by any glimmer of ordi- and kicks her when she is down, lest many times that they would riot at the myth and, therefore perhaps, a particu- nary humanity...
...If people were really like that, they wouldn't go to the movies...
...If you find that being frightened, horrified, scandalized by the most appalling sort of human bestiality is an aesthetic experience, you should like this film...
...There is an answer buried in the subtext of this and many another film these days: it is that, deep down, we suspect that reality is like that, even if we have never seen anything like it in our lives...
...It may be that Randy Newman's score for Awakenings tries to do the same thing and doesn't quite succeed, or else that the stronger narrative line in that film and an even higher concentration of sentimental moral uplift overwhelm him...
...I have no quarrel with the pleasure of people who enjoy being scared by such things, but I do object when the fright merchants, often for political or ideological reasons, dress up their melodramas as serious art on the specious grounds that life is like this...
...might have been thought too subtle...
...because we want- magic, this is the new consensus with craves (an extra couple of days a week would think that by now audiences ed Sleeping Beauty, groggy with the nar- its trousers down...
...horror!—the cans have been neatly arranged on the shelves...
...We do not go to the theatre, as Aristotle's contemporaries did, to be purged of pity and terror at the sight of unfortunate people like ourselves but to gawk at the pitiable and the terrible in a gallery of grotesques that are as unlike ourselves as it is possible for the wit of man to make them...
...yet, by an act of faith, movie-makers and critics believe that this arid selfishness and greed is merely heightened reality...
...Our heroine must fight against it in order to solve the crimes by brilliant detective work and so establish an independent existence...
...Here the Suburban Monster archetype meets the Lonely Cop archetype and—not improbably enough—the two form A Bond, which results in the capture of another Suburban Monster...
...Maybe there are a lot of single-member households for whom that truly is a scary image, since the audience, when I saw the film at any rate, didn't simply hoot with laughter at it...
...Domestic discipline is back...
...He dresses his wife Then he brings her flowers to patch up tired of reworking it...
...of when he said that, in dramatic art, probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities...
...Not so...
...Here is a politically neutralized Sleeping Beauty flick...
...And although that sounds quite ridiculous, it is one measure of the success of twenty years of Sleeping Beauty movies that it does not look completely so on the screen...
...People never really know each other, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 33 Ben," she says...
...Add truly haunting arrangements of "I Remember You" and "Moonlight Becomes You" and you get closer to believing than you ever will with the Righteous Brothers in Ghost...
...The terror of the ending is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the harbingers of the wicked husband's return are mysteriously arranged towels and Berlioz on the cassette player...
...Like De Niro, Anthony Hopkins is a brilliant gargoyle, mugging to the camera to convince us of an inner and unimaginable moral squalor...
...Ah, yes, because it is inherently lywood ideology without Hollywood tected from the very freedoms that she to the level of archetype...
Vol. 24 • April 1991 • No. 4
