The Talkies/Feel So Bad

...In effect, that addiction is like addiction to sentiment or to heroin: it traps its victim inside himself...

...You want the good people feeding the hungry poor and helping the disabled while they have a wonderful time fighting off racism, sexism, ageism, sizeism, ableism, menopause, false charges of murder and, at last and unsuccessfully, cancer...

...What the hell, make him a Ku Klux Klansman as well, just so that you can be sure that he's really bad...

...Both of them have to cope with their grown twin daughters who still live at home: one (Claire Skinner) has become a plumber and the other (Jane Horrocks) has retreated from the world to shout radical and feminist slogans with comic inappropriateness and to gorge herself on chocolate while the rest of the family is asleep...

...In fact it may be more dangerous, because no shame attaches to it...

...Andy (Jim Broadbent) buys a snack trailer for too much money from a drunken friend, and his wife, Wendy (Alison Steadman), helps another friend open a pseudo-French restaurant that serves such revolting dishes as prune quiche and pork cyst, king prawns in jam and duck au chocolat...

...Fried Green Tomatoes is at the opposite extreme from great art...

...Even such good actresses as Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy look like fakes in this vehicle...

...I could invent characters to prove the thesis that friendship is worthless and that women ought to be chattels, but that does not produce any moral authority for my point of view...

...Both Solveig Dommartin and William Hurt get hooked on watching their own dreams, and the extent to which this "disease of images" resembles an addiction is well brought out...

...Actually, he is quite successful in conveying a sense of the constant menace just below the surface of upper-middle-class urban life, and the portrait of the producer (supposedly based on Joel Silver) of films of exploitative violence, played by Steve Martin, is amusing...

...B ogus uplift is what I object to...

...People don't brand themselves as social misfits by shooting up pure sentiment, and the deforming effect it must James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Fannie Flagg may be right about friendship and the empowerment of women and all the rest of the opinions she holds, but she cannot convince me of that just because she is able to invent characters who illustrate the thesis...

...If you start with the meaning and then work backwards to the characters which will demonstrate it you are creating sermons and not art...

...Wim Wenders, in his extraordinary new film called Until the End of the World, does...

...Most of the best part of the film, which is set in 1999, is taken up with an absurdist chase across the world as a nuclear satellite that may explode at any moment circles the globe...

...But even though you would certainly do no worse to take Lawrence Kasdan than 54 The American Spectator March 1992 Fannie Flagg as your guide to living, both are more concerned with producing such a guide than they are with the lives of their characters, whom a real artist would love for their own sake...

...I confess, however, that if I were dictator I would be much more tempted to ban movies like Fried Green Tomatoes and to lock up the sort of people who go to them in order to feel good about themselves and the world...

...we have to live it with him...

...Yet all but the most dedicated philistines recognize that there is something more to it than that: there are great films that don't make money and there is meretricious trash that enjoys big commercial success...

...It is a kind of drug, and in my darker moods I suspect that it is as dangerous to the social fabric as the kinds of drugs we lock people up for using and selling...

...Just let it go...

...Instead, as he told the New York Times, he wants to raise questions about "what kind of personal values to adhere to in deteriorating cities, and how to cope with constant jeopardy, the fragility of relationships and, for that matter, life...

...What sets it apart from the others, however, is the fact that the good feeling, when it comes, is a small one, justified by the situation...

...If you then proceed, as this film does, to invent characters and a story merely to illustrate that message, you destroy an essential part of the artistic illusion...

...the comedy of a just slightly heightened version of ordinary life is so beautifully rendered that even a little uplift in Wendy's climactic speech to her troglodytic daughter—about what love means, about getting on with and making the best of lives that are far from perfect—seems natural and appropriate...

...If you want to feel good about yourself, this is about as good as you should allow yourself to, feel if you don't want to get hooked on the narcissistic rush...

...Miss Streisand herself, together with her legs, plays the caring psychoanalyst who breaks down the defenses of Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) and then falls in love with him...

...This terrible self-fascination has to be broken cold turkey by Miss Dommartin, who ends the film with the job of watchingthe earth from a space station while Hurt takes to the hills with his dream recorder...

...Pick your feel-good image and, chances are, FGT has got it...

...We are left to wonder whether complete absorption within the self or complete physical detachment from the earth is the worse fate...

...Yet if you take Fried Green Tomatoes in its concentrated, twohour-and-twenty-minute dose, the spiritual devastation it can wreak makes heroin look like Turkish delight...

...For here it is the characters and not the feeling or the message that drive the film and produce all the dramatic energy...

...The childhood trauma that lurks in the background of the Wingo family has hardly any dramatic weight at all except insofar as it is the provocation for the defense mechanisms that the family has developed over the years to cover it up...

...0 The American Spectator March 1992 55...

...You want the bad guy to be a wife-beater...

...This is all the more remarkable because there is virtually no plot...

...When all the characters end up in Australia with the scientist, his wife, and a bunch of aboriginal technicians, things bog down a little, but there is one very striking passage in which the scientist develops his machine a little further so that it can record dreams...

...Sometimes people want things that are not good for them...

...This is called laying it on with a trowel, and we should be grateful to Fannie Flagg, who wrote the story, and Jon Avnet, the director and co-author of the screenplay, for making it so easy to spot the fakery...

...The title suggests that we are dealing here with yet another feel-good movie and to an extent that is true...

...In return for your six dollars, they will give you all the escapist comedy or inspirational drama or simulated sex and violence that you want, and this is as it should be...

...They don't recognize how spiritually dangerous that cheap high is...

...By the end of the film, as they all gather at the Grand Canyon, that symbolic precipice on the edge of which they have been living for years, they decide that life is worth living after all: "I think it's not all bad," says the main puppet...

...It goes on for too long and is too ambitious, it's true, but you've got to love his metaphors...

...By that I mean that its director, Lawrence Kasdan, at least does not feel that he has to persuade us that wife-beating and the KKK are bad and that self-confident women and feeding the starving are good...

...It is the pernicious legacy of psychoanalysis that everybody's feelings about life are worth our listening to just because they exist—or don't exist, as the case may be...

...Add lots of submissive, 1930s-style black folks and cute children and lovable village eccentrics to give you that warm feeling of folksy Southern authenticity and you've got the Acapulco gold of sentimentality...

...Rush, a new film by Lili Fini Zanuck, offers a harrowing portrayal of what drugs can do by contagion, as it were—or, depending on how you look at it, of what happens when you ban them...

...But each character is so perfectly realized that our interest never flags...

...You have so much to cry about, don't you...

...All art is fakery, of course, but great art gives the illusion of reality...

...it bears an ironic relation to the grandiose title—which also recalls Fellini (La Dolce Vita) and one of the main characters' addiction to chocolate...

...He is being pursued by a couple of detectives who are bounty hunters for the U.S...

...That's about it...

...Feel your pain, Tom," she says, "It's OK to feel it...

...Von Sydow's son (William Hurt) has his fake vision machine and is using it to record interviews with relatives, most of whom his mother has never seen...

...Let's admit, for the sake of argument, that the things it celebrates as good really are good and that its message (about how "the most important, thing in life is friendship") is a true message...

...Yet it seems that audiences are shirking their responsibility to demand that kind of artistic integrity because they want to feel themselves feel, and they accept even this schlock, factitious feeling as an excuse to pull out the old hankies...

...have upon their souls is not as obvious as the physical ravages of heroin or cocaine after long use...

...We ban certain drugs because we believe that they have an effect upon the social fabric that goes well beyond an individual's taste for powdered suicide...

...Fictional characters, unlike our loved ones or clients, have to earn their right to a hearing by being interesting in some other way—and being in therapy is not interesting That is the lesson of Barbra Streisand's Prince of Tides...

...He is defensive about the "pretentiousness" of such questions, but the problem is not that they are pretentious...

...No he doesn't, cries my irrepressible disbelief...

...What Eliot called the "objective correlative"—the dramatic justification for that pain—is missing...

...he's only an actor pretending to have a lot to cry about...

...Certainly the two are closely akin...

...In other words, characters beforemeaning...

...Max von Sydow plays a fugitive scientist who has invented a wonderful machine that enables blind people to see by recording in a sighted person the biochemical act of seeing a particular videotaped image, which can then be "seen" by the blind person, in this case his wife (Jeanne Moreau), by reproducing that chemistry in her...

...What is true of Fried Green Tomatoes is also true of Grand Canyon, although the latter is much more subtle about it...

...government, which claims to own the machine because it was developed under its research auspices, and by a pretty woman (Solveig Dommartin) from whom he has stolen some stolen money that she was transporting and who proceeds to fall in love with him...

...You want tough and funny women...

...Telling us what it is is not enough...

...It is that they are allowed to become more important than the dramatic situation or the characters...

...t is a terrific picture that I heartily recommend, but because its two halves really don't have very much to do with one another, I reserve the accolade of Film of the Month for Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet...

...Why should we care what either one of you has to say about a subject as big as this unless you have established through the drama your right to speak of it...

...Correction: Kasdan thinks it's not all bad, and you, chum, are just his pathetic little mouthpiece...

...Maybe, indeed, they are not good for the rest of us either...