The Talkies/Lies We Live

...I have since read critics who have taken this view of the film...

...In each case there is a reversal of expectations which leads to an exchange of confidences between strangers...

...Alone in an empty universe, that well-scrutinized character has only fleeting contacts with others in taxicabs...

...Unfortunately, it turns out that he can only walk on water for five or six steps before sinking out of sight for good...

...Augustine says about faith in God: that we must believe in order to know, rather than expecting to base our belief upon our knowledge...

...Well, yes and no...

...So is the role-playing we have to engage in in order to learn good behavior...

...It is significant that the story Goldie Hawn makes up to account for her imaginary romance makes the same point: she claims that she had met Martin after a car accident that resulted in her face being swathed in bandages...

...And that much is true, even if the rest is lies...

...T here are, it seems, limitations on our ability to become what we impersonate...

...In Paris the West African driver tries to undercharge a blind girl who has satisfied some of his shy curiosity about what it is like to be blind, but she briskly puts him right...

...she replies: "Of course...

...It's too bad the film itself is too busy—too busy being wacky in the Monty Python vein—to pursue the subject any further...

...When she asked, "Why would I do that...

...Have some pity on the rest of us...

...It is then reinforced by a freak accident which makes him think he has restored a blind boy's sight...

...Ultimately, to the central question of Martin's life—"How can I know that you are telling me the truth...

...He is Jarmusch's hero and he is mine...

...He is the man for our times...

...Art itself is a lie—which is why Plato, who makes Jesse Helms look like Andy Warhol, objected to it—but, paradoxically, it is a lie in the service of truth...

...Goldie Hawn's moving into Steve Martin's dream house and telling everybody that she is his wife is not meant to glorify lying but to make the point that pretending to be something we're not is a way of becoming what we want to be...

...Now, I like to think of myself as rather unfashionably attached to the idea of objective truth, but I can't help thinking that these people have rather missed the point about Housesitter (whose title is itself a lie, the picture having nothing whatever to do with housesitters...

...Blindness here is a metaphor for the darkness in which we must all make our leap of faith, and the blind man is the man who refuses to make it, who insists on verifying everything and trusting no one...

...This is a collection of five vignettes of Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki as seen from five different taxicabs on the same night...

...What could be worse than that...

...It does have its funny moments, but the collection of gags, which seem to promise some overarching meaning really don't have very much to do with one another—any more than the favor, the watch and the very big fish do...

...the street people she persuades to masquerade as her parents begin to treat her like parents, James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...More successful is the Australian film, Proof, by Jocelyn Moorhouse, which concentrates on doubt rather than faith...

...This is New York...

...That Martin learns to trust after all in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that Andy has deceived him is too neat and easy an ending, however...

...they ask, so he tells them his own sad story about an inability to love until it was too late...

...And that image of the night is just the local name for the vast night of space, which is where Jarmusch starts from as he gradually zeroes in on the blue ball of earth over the opening credits...

...The lie becomes a kind of retroactive truth...

...In love you have to believe it is true before it can become true...

...You tell the truth, Martin...

...There is a sadness, an incompleteness about each, as if intimacy is to be forever reduced to such occasional intense moments shining out of the vast sea of night on earth—as perhaps it is...

...That's what happens here, however, when Whoopi teaches her night-club shtick, a pastiche of the girl groups of the sixties, to the choir...

...And that this power is not necessarily a bad thing...

...We can go crazy, for instance...

...Goldberg not only how to boogie but also how to break out of their cloister into "the community...

...For me the film's power resides in its image of the man without trust...

...The character played by Jeff Goldblum in The Favor, the Watch and the Very Big Fish believes at various times that he is Chopin, Schubert, Johann Strauss, and Jesus...

...As a child he believed that his mother was lying to him when she described the world he was so curious to see...

...Poor Aki, sitting in the snow and wondering where friends, family, home, all intimacy have got to, is as alone as it is possible to be...

...It's not allowed," says the East German cabbie (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who has not yet mastered the difficulties of an automatic transmission...

...he replied, "Because you can...

...Proof of the truth...

...Is that lying...

...Whoopi Goldberg plays a lounge singer who witnesses a murder and, in order to avoid being killed before she can testify against its perpetrator, goes to hide out in a convent...

...By pretending to be a nun she acquires some of the faith of the real nuns, and, this being Hollywood, the real nuns are depicted as having learned from Ms...

...Likewise, the girl who jilted Martin (Dana Delany) only realizes that he is lovable after someone else has taken the risk of loving him, when she can see him, as she says, through her eyes...

...He had proposed, she says, and actually married her before seeing what she looked like...

...Later, when she died, he came to believe that they had buried an empty coffin, and that she had simply gone away because she was embarrassed by him...

...That, at any rate, is the premise of the Movie of the Month, Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth...

...And so he does...

...Why not have a try...

...Nobody really believes that stuff, says Sister Act, but it's great to get together, in the presence of the Pope if possible, clap our hands to the old tunes, and try to remember what it was like to believe...

...Obviously, the guy's got problems...

...In the hilarious Roman episode the driver, played by Robert Benigni, decides that it is time to make the confession of his life when he picks up a priest—who promptly dies as he recites his hilarious tale of sex with pumpkins, sheep, and his sister-in-law...

...the only answer is Andy's: "You can't...

...t is the climactic Helsinki episode which I think makes his point best...

...Each is wry, funny, and poignant, yet each is also brought carefully to an end by Jarmusch as the transaction is completed, and the fare steps back into the night...

...He had to take the risk of believing before he could know...

...All this is rather like what St...

...The only thing binding the five stories together thematically is that a moment of human contact takes place where it is unexpected, but the subtext is that the contact can take place at all because of the confessional-like anonymity of the setting—and Jarmusch's Roman cab literally becomes a confessional...

...At a crucial moment, when Martin is insisting on the importance of truth to him, Andy says, "Everybody lies...

...The story concerns a blind photographer called Martin (Hugo Weaving), whose photos are to him evidence that the world really is as he imagines it...

...As an adult he cruelly spurns his housekeeper, Celia (Genevieve Picot), who is in love with him, on the grounds that "I know if I never give her what she wants she can never pity me...

...Beside such loneliness, even the imaginary intimacy of Goldie Hawn looks pretty good...

...The drunks are so affected by it that they are forced to agree that Aki, whom they have been comforting, is a miserable whiner, crying over nothing, and they put him out on the street...

...It's been tried before—and with results that do not include the transformation of run-down urban neighborhoods into hotbeds of devotion...

...Martin and Hawn become husband and wife through pretending to be husband and wife...

...They too have become, at least in one sense, what they only pretended to be...

...But overstatement, especially in comedy, can help to make the point...

...Having failed to win his trust, however, Celia becomes as cruel as he is and as untrustworthy as he imagines everyone to be...

...Housesitter, of course, goes way over the top and makes virtually every lie freely convertible into truth...

...Bob Hoskins, who plays a Parisian photographer of devotional subjects, is responsible for the last delusion by casting him as Jesus in his tableaux...

...One way to make intimacy trust-free (and therefore risk-free) is to engage in it with people you know you will never see again...

...To his friend, Andy (Russell Crowe), who describes the photographs to him, he says that they are "proof that what I sensed is what you saw, through your eyes...

...instead I can pity her...

...My Guy" (rendered as "My God") and "I Will Follow Him" (about guess Who) are done affectingly, it is true, but their power for me is based upon the innocence and wholesomeness of such devotion, whether to a teenage boy or to God Almighty, which thirty years later has become mere camp...

...Unfortunately, Hollywood is not so good with faith as it can be, from time to time, with love...

...At one point, a 48 The American Spectator August 1992 woman Goldblum meets on the Paris metro says: "Now there's a man who could really save the world...

...From Hamlet's injunction to his mother to "assume a virtue if you have it not" to "Whistle a happy tune" ("for when I fool the people I fear I fool myself as well") it has been widely recognized that the mask you put on, whether for good reasons or bad, tends to stick to your face...

...01 The American Spectator August 1992 49...

...I'm too busy, but you could do it...

...Somebody ought to tell the director, Emile Ardolino, that he is not the first person to have thought of bringing popmusic into church or turning nuns into hip, happening gals and social workers...

...When he asks, "Do you really think so...

...Of course it's allowed," says Esposito...

...your whole life is the truth...

...The point is that there is a kind of power in his madness, just as there is in Goldie Hawn's lies, to make the world seem in fact, at least for a moment, what we know someone is only pretending that it is...

...In New York it is the fare (Giancarlo Esposito) who endsup driving the cab...

...In the Los Angeles story a casting agent (Gena Rowlands) offers her cabbie (Winona Ryder) the chance to be a movie star and is told no thanks, she would rather be a mechanic...

...Sister Act also has as its central idea someone learning to believe by pretending to be a believer...

...and in the end their own house is being built adjacent to that of the newlyweds...

...Only Andy does he learn to trust, and Andy, who describes himself as "a black sheep," is only averagely trustworthy...

...Two drunks tell their driver (Matti Pellonpaa) of the bad luck of their companion, Aki, asleep in the corner, who has just lost his job, found out that his unmarried daughter is pregnant, and been told by his wife that she is leaving him...