The Talkies/Fashion Plays

...The power games played by the four wives present us with recognizably domestic situations that suggest at the same time a more universal theme of power, exploitation, and rivalry...

...B ut there I go again, trying to judge a designer movie as if it were a work of art...

...For a post-literate culture they are the equivalent of the ornamentation on medieval cathedrals: the only way for ordinary folk to know anything about history...

...If, for example, the photography in Where Angels Fear to Tread or Howard's End is conventionally gorgeous but rather cliched and uninteresting, that in Raise the Red Lantern, as in the director's previous film, Ju Dou, is not only beautiful but full of character and originality...

...Oddly enough, Howard's End is truer to Forster for having left out his main idea...

...Mostly it depends on finding out the other women's secrets and using the information against them where it will do most good...

...Any James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Getting off the hook on a murder charge is just another way in which the boss exercises final script approval on life, which of course is not real life but life as we should all like it to be...

...Like Tom Wolfe's "masters of the universe," these studio executives can only be admired for picking up the option on the screen rights to reality...

...Its purpose is to congratulate Hollywood for being such a completely outrageous place—outrageous as in, "Did you have a good time...

...This period costume drama, set in China in the 1920s, has all the ingredients of a designer movie but transcends them to become artistically engaging, even if it is not of the first rank...

...Although it has a standard plot and a certain amount of character development, although it displays some fresh and inventive camera work, its only real reason for existing is to delight the people who are in it and their admirers...

...For if the direction is stylized, so isthe world that the director presents...

...Designer movies are like fine art reproductions in that the point of them is not to convey a geRinely artistic experience but to make a statement about the taste ofthose who make them and those who consume them...

...The real purpose of The Player, for example, is to be Hollywood's home movie...

...But her power, like that of the other wives, is exercised only minimally through her sexual attractiveness...

...The monstrously respectable upper-middle classes also figure prominently in both, but in Howard's End the escape from respectability takes place in Germany rather than Italy...

...For Sturridge the book's themes simply come with the package...

...Everybody wants to be a part of the brilliant satire on themselves, and the result is not a satire at all but a series of in jokes...

...But The Player is far from being the only recent picture to defy criticism as art...

...For once the point of the costumes and the scenery, the music and the manners, is not to register a designer trademark but to serve a dramatic purpose in a genuine work of art...

...Does that surprise you...

...There is no real point to it, but it can be admired for its skillful re-creation of the period settings and for the skillful acting of John Goodman as Babe Ruth...

...In both, the pictures are pretty—although in Howard's End they are of the English countryside (complete with late-Romantic nature writing by George Meredith) rather than Tuscany—the costumes are very handsome, the music is atmospheric, every detail of the architecture and of interiors is authentic, and the sense of the real past is non-existent...

...Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, tries to impose a feminist interpretation on this situation by describing it as "a fairly hellish vision of life without the option of divorce"—which is a typically obtuse and politically correct comment to make...

...It doesn't matter that Forster's sub-Freudian crusade against inhibition and bourgeois respectability looks today like flogging the deadest of dead horses...

...All art should be entertaining and all entertainment is to some extent artful...

...71 The American Spectator July 1992 53...

...Howard's End treats similar themes with more subtlety and charm, but the differences between the two films are of degree rather than of kind...

...Fashion Plays by James Bowman 4 4 om vies are art, now more than ever," says Tim Robbins as a studio executive addressing a crowd of beautiful people at a charity benefit in Robert Altman's The Player...

...Some of the interior shots of this rich man's house inhabited by four wives, all of whom are plotting against one another, are as carefully composed as Vermeer paintings...

...Yet it cannot be judged as entertainment because its purpose is not to entertain...

...Forster's retreat into civilized preciosity (muttering "only connect" all the way) presages the split between art and the world of politics and business that has characterized our culture ever since...

...But the whole tendency of the book, brought out even more clearly in the film, is really to disconnect, and with all possible dispatch, from having anything to do with the boorish, greedy, vulgar, hypocritical Wilcoxes...

...T he audience for such pictures is growing all the time...

...All the emotion resides in the struggle among the four women to be most favored wife and to wield the power over the others that is the favorite's prerogative...

...But the effect is not imitative or merely tasteful...

...His compositions complement the elaborate formal rituals of the rich man's household, within which an intensely naturalistic drama plays itself out...

...The late Victorian marionettes Sturridge has to work with serve the same purpose as the religious or mythological iconography in classic art: they are the way we know that it is classic art...

...The husband is a shadowy figure whose face we hardly even glimpse and whose ruthless insistence on his own supremacy in the household is simply a given: to the disappointment of feminists, no doubt, it has little dramatic weight...

...Only connect" was the motto thatthe novel was meant to illustrate—by showing that there was some way of connecting the world of art and literature and contemplation, represented by the Schlegels, with the world of action and business, represented by the Wilcoxes...

...Such sermons on celluloid cannot be judged as artistic experiences but only as one would judge a National Geographic documentary...

...time you get a lot of cameo roles it is a bad sign, but this film has more cameo roles than most pictures have roles...

...If not, you may have as hard a time as I did in seeing what is supposed to be a "brilliant satire" of Hollywood in this film...

...If the master of the universe doesn't get brought down to earth you have just another Hollywood fairy tale rather than a satire...

...Helena Bonham-Carter appears in both as a slightly repressed spinster who longs to become even more slightly repressed...

...Each of them offers a whole set of challenges to the filmmaker: not to entertain or thrill or move us but to get right the costumes and the customs, the period detail of dress, decor, manners, and language...

...They have the same static, spacious quality, and they use light and color and contrast in the same evocative way...

...Enough of the jokes are comprehensible and enough of the plot engages our interest that the entertainment is passable...

...When a wealthy British matron, played by Helen Mirren, marries a strapping young Italian lad, the match may have been doomed from the beginning, as her uptight British family all predict, but it is the uptight family, especially Judy Davis, who does a splendid job of portraying a hysterical spinster, whom we are invited to hate...

...This is not because it is entertainment instead...

...T he story is told mainly from the point of view of the fourth wife, played by Gong Li, the beautiful actress who also made such an impression in Ju Dou...

...Where Angels Fear to Tread is the less palatable of the two films...

...If that sounds harsh, it is not meant to imply that many people do not go to films like this in the hope of finding something more like real art...

...Outrageous...

...Even an ostensibly popular film like The Babe seems to me to have more of the designer movie about it than it has anything genuinely entertaining...

...Most of the others are what we might call designer movies, typically "Masterpiece Theatre"–style costume dramas...

...Passion, jealousy, hatred, and ambition are tightly circumscribed by these formal and spatial constraints, but they are all the more forceful for being kept within tight boundaries...

...Lies and treachery and one-upmanship are the stuff of daily life and any attempt to escape from the snakepit is punishable by death...

...The joke, such as it is, is that we know the executive is concerned only with money in the films he makes, not at all with art...

...When Robbins's character gets away with murder, the film offers no shred of moral indignation but something like its opposite...

...For some reason, E.M...

...Yet there is another irony in Robbins's words about "art" that is less obvious...

...If you don't know, or care, that Cher doesn't wear red or that Burt Reynolds had a fight with a director called Dick Richards it means little to you...

...You really have to work at it to de52 The American Spectator July 1992 rive a thrill from the nastiness of the respectable British upper-middle classes of a century ago...

...Guarantee me that ending and you've got a deal" is the last line of—and the last word on—the film...

...Ivory makes Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) very slightly sympathetic, but no one looking at this film could find anything even slightly attractive about his way of life as compared with that of the Schlegels...

...Perhaps it is really a satire on the audience for being suckers enough to watch this stuff...

...In fact, it is a fairly hellish vision of life itself, which it takes the stylized and exotic setting of mandarin China to bring home to us...

...The symbol of the master's choice is the red lantern hung outside the door of the woman he will sleep with each night, and Gong Li, who obviously has no love for the man, finds herself competing tooth and nail with the others to be so chosen...

...the dramatic need for such formal images is immediately apparent...

...That occasionally they will get it is the hopeful message of the film of the month, Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern...

...Once we know that, we are then free to enjoy the film for the pretty pictures of exotic places, the costumes, the music, and the sweetly melancholy ambiance of a past that is safely dead...

...Among many other contemporary consequences of this split—including all the fuss about the NEA—is the designer movie itself, which is a way of conveying a simulacrum of artistic experience to those who are not interested in the real thing but only in having their good taste ratified...

...You could say that these films are really educational—contemporary versions of the old-fashioned costume dramas about Napoleon or Julius Caesar or the Cecil B. DeMille biblical epics...

...It is that The Player itself is an example of a movie that pretends to be art but cannot be judged by artistic standards...

...Charles Sturridge's version of Where Angels Fear to Tread and Ismail Merchant and James Ivory's Howard's End have between them received many column inches in the New York Times's Sunday "Arts and Leisure" section and were written up together in W—two of the natural homes for the audience of designer movies...

...Forster's novels are the in thing for designer movies this year...

...But there is another kind of film that is neither entertainment nor art except in the most superficial sense...

...If that is what it is, it is the first satire in history that is loved more by its ostensible targets, the Hollywood insiders among whom it is so popular, than it is by anyone else...

...Their appeal is to a limited—indeed, a select—audience on the strength of their associations with approved cultural artifacts, especially classic novels...

...And you need that to get the designer's cachet...

...You've got to take them if you want the book, and you need the book just as you need your completion bond: as the work of an undeniably important novelist, it is your guarantee of artistic significance...

...From the critic's point of view the two categories are more or less co-extensive...

...It goes through the motions of trying to look like both, but its real purposes seem to lie elsewhere...