The Talkies/Post No Billings
Bowman, James
Post No Billings by James Bowman 6 6 I/ n lapidary inscriptions," said Dr. Johnson, "a man is not upon oath." He might have said the same about movie advertising. The poster for Robert Benton's...
...In spite of some arresting shots there seems even less point to this than there is to the other two films...
...he loves it because it doesn't care if he snores or picks his nose...
...Here, however, there are just too many loose ends: the comparison of American with Japanese industry, the fate of the workers, the treachery of the company's president, Peck's concern about living in a country that makes nothing but hamburgers and sells nothing but tax shelters—all are brought up but left unresolved...
...Before long Mantegna finds that he has "caught the case"—to the point of being resentful at being put back on the original one, which had been so important to him...
...The question of which identity he should have chosen, which group he should have belonged to, is left creatively unresolved: now he belongs to neither through having tried to belong to both...
...founded, is equally obviously the hero...
...Another tip-off...
...Dutch's girlfriend (Nicole Kidman) seduces the boy, and at least two of Dutch's henchmen betray him to a rival gangster...
...Maybe greed is good again...
...He is ashamed, and soon he begins to believe that there really may be some kind of neo-Nazi plot...
...Jodie Foster's directing debut, Little Man Tate, by contrast, wallows in meaning...
...The dramatic skill with which this knot is tied, the cleverness of the dialogue, one of the world's great dying lines from Mantegna's partner ("Bobby, remember that girl that time...
...What does a man have to do to enjoy the fruits of his labor...
...The taffy-pull between his two identities—as a Jew and as a policeman—begins...
...By the same token, the Chairman of the Board of New England Wire and Cable, doddery, lovable old Gregory Peck with his cornball reminiscences of Harry Truman and paternalistic concern to keep open the obsolete factory his father (or was it his grandfather...
...We're always making it up, right...
...As does The Butcher's Wife, an unfunny romantic comedy about a nature girl and "clairvoyant" from the North Carolina Outer Banks named Marina (Demi Moore), whose idea of belonging is to find her "split-apart" (that's what her blind grammy calls him), or the other half of the sunderedhermaphrodite of Aristophanes's speech in The Symposium...
...Occasionally, you get the idea that the picture is attempting to make an ironic point about the connection between legitimate business and gangsterdom, as when Dutch complains about taxes and government interference by saying: "It's not fair...
...Larry the Liquidator is a lonely man who has felt excluded (presumably because he was short and fat) since he was in high school, and he doesn't know anything to do about it but make money so that people will have to respect him...
...But he resents being identified as a Jew and still more being given Jewish cases for that reason...
...Or rather, that changes its mind about what it wants to do with them halfway through...
...Maybe that's the problem with My Own Private Idaho by Gus Van Sant, a bizarre film about that lonely trade, male prostitution...
...In other words, the Jews were just being hysterical after all...
...But I liked this touch, because it emphasized the new Jewish patriot's attempt, at the same time, to hang on to a meaningful shred of his police identity—even though he has by now so far forgotten it that he misses a big bust in which his partner (William H. Macy) is shot...
...It may be thought improbable that such a man would participate in terrorist activities on behalf of an organization reminiscent of the Jewish Defense League yet cavil at a request by his new colleagues to obtain evidence from police files illegally...
...He also belongs to them and their fierce camaraderie and makes an extraordinary disavowal of his Jewishness—"There's been so much anti-Semitism in the last 4,000 years, we must be doing something to bring it about"—as a way of affirming his membership in the tribe of the police...
...Do you belong nowhere...
...It lives up to its billing too...
...Only dogs and doughnuts can compare in terms of that kind of unquestioning acceptance, and money doesn't poop on the floor or make you fat...
...That neither of these two films is able to get anywhere may be connected with their almost elegiac quality...
...The other thing the advertising says is "The movie event of the year is here...
...Here we go again, it seems: eighties greed is going to get it in the neck from nineties compassion...
...Probably...
...At least this film knows what it wants to say...
...The only trouble is that whoever decided to cross us up hopelessly entangled the film's emotional energies in the process...
...Well, what about the gunman on the roof by the pigeon-loft...
...There it lies...
...Rich Jews with political clout who believe that there is something more sinister about the murder have asked for Mantegna to be put on the case...
...But that's not the way it happens...
...Got that...
...B ecause belonging is, in my view, a bit trickier proposition than that, I congratulate David Mamet for recognizing the fact and award him the accolade of film of the month for Homicide, a fascinating study of what belonging means to an assimilated Jew...
...It may be that "it's a lonely world without your split-apart," but belonging to some one person, at least, isn't much of a problem...
...He even has a beautiful stepdaughter (Penelope Ann Miller) who is also a crackerjack lawyer clearly destined to save the plant from the clutches of Larry the Liquidator, DeVito's unscrupulous corporate raider...
...We've got to provide the political subtext for ourselves...
...CI The American Spectator January 1992 63...
...Of course it helps to be a clairvoyant...
...Another part of the poster tells us that Billy was looking for a hero and he found Dutch Schultz...
...Maybe Danny D. doesn't like playing bad guys, or maybe Jewison just got bored with such a predictable adventure and changed his mind, but Larry turns out to be a lovable rogue with a secret passion for the violin and charm enough to win over not only New England Wire and Cable's stockholders but the beautiful lawyer as well...
...This film annoyed me because neither of those two worlds is very believable...
...ing what it was all about...
...It pains me to find fault with any Hollywood movie-maker independent enough to recognize that closing down obsolete factories is not necessarily a bad thing, and in another context the juxtaposition of DeVito's and Peck's speeches to the stockholders could have been a real dramatic tour de force...
...So what does the film have to say about power-ambition-seduction-betrayal...
...It's a fine state of affairs when the poster tells you more of what the film is about than the film does...
...What about the piece of paper dropped there, inscribed with the word Grofaz—one of Hitler's obscurer titles...
...Grammy resolutely denies having read Plato...
...Fred Tate (Adam Hann-Byrd), the seven-year-old hero, is someone excluded not by poverty or ugliness but by being incredibly bright, and he seeks for belonging by going to a school for the incredibly bright, then by running away from it back to his tacky and rather dim single parent (played by Miss Foster herself), and fatally by achieving an improbable synthesis of the two worlds...
...Billy Bathgate (Loren Dean) is an ambitious boy...
...Billy's desire to belong in the Dutch Schultz gang is what makes Schultz himself almost sympathetic, and even his eventual expulsion from it comes about because of his mentor's desire to protect him...
...Do you hate yourself that much...
...Miss Foster's low-life, salt-of-the-earth waitress is a little too good to be true, and Dianne Wiest's portrayal of the hoity-toity schoolmarm is an utter caricature...
...But they do exist...
...A heartwarming tale...
...Stand up for the intellect, woman...
...Hysterical Jews...
...says one of the rich Jews who overhears him...
...It starts out with Danny DeVito speaking to the camera about how much he loves money...
...Impressionable youth, it seems, finds a role and a role model with an evil gangster...
...At the perfection of the happy ending, when the superintellectual headmistress brought as a birthday present for her protégé a dump truck (instead of a supercollider or something), I wanted to throw something at her...
...The only thing he loves more than money is other people's money...
...On the other hand, he had destroyed a real neo-Nazi printing shop...
...Francis of Assisi is never made clear...
...It may be (hint, hint) because he is poor and ill-educated and beaten down by a sense of powerlessness, but the film isn't telling...
...But why the youth should have chosen Dutch Schultz as his hero instead of, say, Fiorello LaGuardia or Douglas MacArthur or St...
...It's nice that Larry the Liquidator is a mensch after all, but the dramatic conflict is merely shunted aside by the decision to concentrate on his personal discovery that there is more to life than money...
...This gets him taken off the homicide squad at the same time as his new Jewish friends have abandoned him for refusing to steal evidence...
...Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman) is a powerful man...
...Isn't it time that American art stopped apologizing for our ill-educated youth by pandering to the national romantic myth that learning and intelligence are invariably at odds with "real life...
...But it doesn't insist even on this idea, which was pretty thoroughly explored in The Godfather anyway, and you walk away wonderJames Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...The poster for Robert Benton's Billy Bathgate, however, offers us a menu of "Power, Ambition, Seduction, Betrayal," and proves to be right on the money...
...My people...
...Maybe I just don't get it, though, since the gay portion of the audience when I saw it were obviously amused by things that meant nothing to me...
...He loves it more than he loves what it will buy...
...Ah, now that's a mystery...
...62 The American Spectator January 1992 All the lonely people, where do they all come from...
...The opening soliloquy violates the first rule of soliloquies by being a lie: De-Vito has a soul after all...
...all these things make the film a lot more worth seeing than just another melange of power-ambition-seduction-betrayal...
...And as a final touch he finds that Grofaz is really just six-sevenths of "Gro-fazt"—a brand of pigeon feed...
...The belonging theme here is adapted from the Falstaff scenes of Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V ("additional dialogue by William Shakespeare"), but the Shakespearean political context is gone...
...Above all, it annoyed me by semaphoring its down-home folk wisdom too energetically: kids must be allowed to be kids, we are told, and all that there book-learning is right bad for them, spoils them it does, unless they spend a lot of time with just plain folks doing just plain folksy things...
...As if you didn't know...
...Marina's perfect mate turns out not to be the butcher after all but the psychiatrist across the street ("I understand what it's like to think you know eVerything," he says), but in finding him she also finds perfect matches for everyone else in the neighborhood...
...Now he really does belong nowhere...
...Since Edmund first bounded onto the stage in King Lear to say "Nature thou art my goddess," few villains can have proclaimed themselves so unashamedly...
...One has no wish to be hard on them, but I'm afraid that their just being lonely is not enough of a claim upon the attention of us movie-goers...
...Joe Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a Jewish homicide detective who resents being taken off a big case in order to investigate the murder of an old Jewish shopkeeper, presumably by black kids in the neighborhood of her ghetto shop who believed that she had a fortune stashed away in the basement...
...power-ambition-seduction-betrayal is also the theme of Norman Jewison's Other People's Money, another film that doesn't quite know what it wants to do with them...
...he asks incredulously when someone says that his belonging to them by race and religion is what gothim assigned to it...
...What would seem to be such promising material as power-ambition-seduction-betrayal is in both cases set against nostalgia for a simpler world where these highly individualistic abstractions are somehow contained, if not rolled back, by a sense of community, of belonging...
...Wouldn't that be extraordinary...
...Later he says much harsher things over the telephone about being "stuck here with my Jews" to his pals down at police headquarters...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
