The Talkies/Family Value
Bowman, James
Family Value by James Bowman ollywood always looks its worst H Like so many others of its genre, at election time. This year we South Central suffers from being too have to endure not only...
...They 64 The American Spectator November 1992...
...The irony is that it turns out to be a positive step for them because it brings them back together, while it precipitates for Gabe and Judy the events that end in tragedy for their own marriage...
...At the beginning of the film Jack and Sally, trying to be cool and sophisticated about their breakup, tell Gabe and Judy: "Don't turn this into a tragedy: it's a very positive step for both of us...
...She destroys the marriage almost single-handedly while Gabe is if anything rather too good and noble...
...they make it all seem funny...
...4 The American Spectator November 1992 63 Gabe and his wife, Judy (Mia Farrow), do not have that consolation...
...Sally is amusingly impossible, but Judy is deadly because she masks her iron resolution to get what she wants with placidity and complaisance...
...It is here that Allen's clear-sightedness deserts him...
...Their compromise with the dissatisfactions of middle age for the sake of "companionship" has something of the inevitability of aging and dissatisfaction themselves...
...He is wiser, too, than his but I guess that this is liberal condescen- friend Jack (Sydney Pollock), a man sion...
...I hope you will not Allen, it seems, is wiser in art than think me uncharitable for thinking so, he is in life...
...The philanderer is back with the old battle-axe, and we must pretend to believe that all will now be well...
...Family Value by James Bowman ollywood always looks its worst H Like so many others of its genre, at election time...
...This smacks of self-justification and rather spoils the ending of what is, nevertheless, Allen's best film in a decade...
...I am afraid that A Tale of Springtime, Rohmer's latest film to reach the U.S., may already have vacated your local Multiplex—it was in and out of mine in the second week of September—but it is worth a lot of seeking out if you can find it...
...This year we South Central suffers from being too have to endure not only the nau- preachy...
...The games are part of the courtship ritual, which does not happen without them...
...Yet it is precisely because it's about black people and so because Jack cannot see that far ahead doesn't count...
...Just as the infatuation James Bowman, The American Specta- that he thought was love could evapotor's movie critic, is the American editor rate, so the love that he thought dead of the Times Literary Supplement...
...And of course she is right...
...But on his first meeting with Miss Sedgwick, when he tries out his pretentious schtick about having an act or being himself, she memorably puts him in his place by say-ing: "I think not having an act is your act...
...Although its title and its narrative style both suggest a large cast of social units -in search of dates or mates, it is really about two couples—Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda—and their trials and vicissitudes on the road to holy matrimony...
...success in years...
...Anderson's film effectively illus- who is, like most people in love, too trates Dan Quayle's thesis about absent thick-witted and self-deceiving to see fathers, but it can scarcely expect to how his infatuation with an airheaded interrupt the general mirth over Murphy aerobics instructor (Lynette Anthony) is Brown's clever rejoinders to Quayle— going to come out...
...that his marriage to Sally (Judy Davis) is salvageable...
...pletely straight face...
...Cameron Crowe, the director, recognizes this in his funniest vignettes as well as his conception of the film as a whole...
...Like all farces, Jack's and Sally's has the kind of happy ending that is not really happy at all but that convention demands we see as such...
...Sort of...
...And it is because sexual reality, like economic or physical reality, is so inexorable that all our attempts to soften or evade it have such a huge potential for comedy...
...I guess that depends, Gene, on whether you're watching the paint or what is painted...
...Gray revealed to the world his Anatomy...
...could be revived...
...Shakespeare never wrote about a King Leo"), the horror is intensified by the humor that surrounds it...
...Jack and Sally are decoys...
...she says, "They should all have their d---s cut off...
...Of course this makes her more interesting, which increases her value to Dillon which gets her back into the game...
...It's like watching the operation of the laws of supply and demand—or gravity...
...He retires, abashed, and says, "Thank you...
...The women in the film are all predatory, the men allvictims...
...Nobody produces such comic epiphanies more reliably or more movingly than the director of my Movie of the Month, Eric Rohmer...
...It is on the right side, but its seating spectacle of rich movie stars con- being on any side robs it of subtlety and gratulating themselves for rallying a needful artistic detachment...
...Singles purports to be about dating, but dating is the backdrop rather than the theme of the film...
...In it Jeanne (Anne Teyssedre), a young philosophy teacher, meets Natasha (Florence Darel), a girl of 18, at a party...
...Getting everybody over the delusion that there is a simpler, less undignified way to live is an affirmation of our common humanity by means of comedy...
...Gene Hackman, representing the so-called "elite" that can't imagine why anyone would want to go to a movie in which no heads explode and no flesh is exposed, remarks in some forgettable shoot-'em-up or other that watching a Rohmer film is like watching paint dry...
...It is a horrible thing to watch and, as in Shakespearean tragedy ("Trust me, it's Lear," says Pollock to the aerobics instructor...
...Allen plays Gabe Roth, Interestingly, it is only black films, a creative writing teacher at Columbia, like South Central by Steve Anderson, who refuses an affair with a young girl that are allowed to stand out from the of 21 (Juliette Lewis)—because, as he "cultural elite" and stand up for tradition- says, he knows how it is going to come al families and their values with a com- out...
...who would get married...
...And what is painted on a Rohmer canvas is the most incredibly intricate and delicate dissection of the human heart since Mr...
...It is worth the price of admission just to see Judy Davis's first date after the breakup—when she transfers all her rage at her husband to a poor, inoffensive man from work who proposes to take her to Don Giovanni: "F--ing Don Juans...
...Like life itself, the film seems to be about looking for a good time when it is really about forming commitments...
...They kill their marriage deliberately, clear-sightedly, and in cold blood...
...Who isn't...
...Woody around the people's party and ludicrous Allen, on the other hand, is on the wrong caricatures of the right in films like Bob side (we have no less an authority than Roberts or Sneakers, but also shrill, self- Newt Gingrich to tell us so), but his new righteous cries of outrage from those picture, Husbands and Wives, is the whose "values" have been criticized by nearest thing he has had to an artistic the Vice President...
...The oldest game of all is to stop playing, which is ultimately what Miss Fonda tries...
...Their split-up, their disastrous attempts at "starting over" and, finally, their lapse into reunion are pure farce, and Allen's comic talent has not been so well-displayed in years...
...But it is not a compromise available to Gabe, who has a kind of emotional death wish, or Judy, who decides that she wants someone else (Liam Neeson) and ruthlessly sets out to get him...
...This is what seems to dawn on Campbell Scott when he announces at the outset that he is "tired of all the games...
Vol. 25 • November 1992 • No. 11
