The Talkies / The Fall of the Family
Bowman, James
The Fail of the Family by James Bowman T wo films out this month begin with discussions between fathers and sons about loyalty. In Striking Distance, a policeman (Bruce Willis) laments the fact...
...The Remains of the Day by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory...
...The authors are understandably ambivalent about him and balance him with DeNiro's character, a decent but rather stiff bus driver given to spouting solemn platitudes about the superiority of "the working man" to guys like Sonny...
...And so too, if we didn't have this peculiar system of lies and loyalties that is the family, humanity would become extinct...
...Because the lovers' dilemma is not really a live issue either to Scorsese or to most of his audience, this is basically a designer movie...
...Out of hearing of his son, the old father comments: "If I didn't let them lie to me, I would never have gotten my grandchild...
...The Good Son by Joseph Ruben (director) and Ian McEwan (writer...
...Root for: The Stepford husbands...
...Unwilling to tell them so, he arranges to fob them off with a marriage of convenience to a Chinese acquaintance (the beautiful May Chin) who is in need of a green card...
...Root for: Medical science...
...They have set their drama on some other planet that looks exactly like this one but where there isno presumption of the existence of family loyalty, where it is plausible to depict a 10-year-old boy (Macaulay Culkin) from a loving home willfully murdering or attempting to murder his siblings and parents...
...Striking Distance by Rowdy Herrington...
...In fact, he is gay...
...In fact, what that sense most often comes into conflict with is our equally natural urge to pursue our own, individual happiness...
...But we don't believe it any more than the boy does...
...A Bronx Tale by Robert DeNiro (director) and Chazz Palminteri (writer...
...But if you take the more traditional view of honor—as articulated by, say, General Douglas MacArthur, whose guiding principle in a famous West Point hazing case was "never lie, never tattle"—the second father is right...
...Into the West by Mike Newell...
...Root for: Stevens, the buttoned-up butler played by Anthony Hopkins, to remain a bachelor and a butler...
...The guy is too stupid to realize that he can't get away with keeping the money, and of course he does everything wrong in the attempt to keep it...
...Call me, old-fashioned, but I don't believe that any but a bad political cause would require a son to humiliate his father in public and put his life and career at risk...
...Root for: The two Irish gypsy boys played by Ciaran Fitzgerald and Ruaidhri Conroy and their magic horse (as if it were possible to root for anyone else...
...Oh, all right, root for his brother and his mother, who know that he's found $1.2 million in the street and ask him to give it back but who don't turn hill' in when he doesn't...
...The Ballad of Little Jo by Maggie Greenwald...
...Money for Nothing by Ramon Menendez...
...Those blo6kheaded, smiling young men at the family dinners need to speak up instead of standing around beaming at their newly empowered wives...
...Root for: Micah, the South African policeman played by Danny Glover...
...Root for: Miss Lynch (daughter of David) to get married, settle down, give birth to quintuplets, and never, ever make another movie...
...An utterly charming family film about families...
...She takes Betty (Marie Trintignant) under her wing when the latter's husband, having caught her with a saxophone player on the living room sofa, throws her out...
...Honor means ratting when someone has broken the rules of the community...
...The parents of a Chinese-American yuppie, Wai Tung (Winston Chao), arrive in New York from Taiwan to attend his wedding...
...Root for: Whatever spaceship Ruben and McEwan are traveling on to go the way of the Mars probe...
...Palminteri...
...A sex-change operation is obviously the only thing for Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis), who for thirty years or so passes for a man in the Old West...
...But what I wonder is why she decided to leave the East, where there were places and situations, however arduous or insalubrious, to which she could have retreated in safety, and go instead to a bubbling cauldron of testosterone like a mining camp...
...The old ways is dead," he tells his father-in-law, but, by bringing him back to the ties of family and community that he has forsaken, his sons unwittingly show him that they are not...
...In A Bronx Tale, a boy who witnesses a murder committed by a neighbor refuses to identify the culprit to the police, then says to his father (Robert DeNiro): "I didn't rat...
...Boxing Helena by Jennifer Chambers Lynch...
...Certainly the film stacks the deck in favor of this answer, for the guy Bruce ratted on turns out to be, like so many policemen in their spare time, a psychopathic killer...
...Here the boys' defiance of their father (Gabriel Byrne) extracts him from the soulless isolation and drunkenness into which he has sunk...
...This is another film that explores the subject of family loyalties by creating a clash between modern, secular American culture and a traditional culture, only this time the traditional culture and its values are shown some respect...
...Bopha...
...Root for: The parents, played by Sihung Lung and Ah-Leh Gua...
...Films in which they are to be found are awarded the coveted Bowman Bullet (thus: •): The Age of Innocence by Martin Scorsese...
...Then he cuts the ground from under us by making her 68 The American Spectator November 1993 betray her benefactress too...
...Good thing he ratted on him, huh...
...DeNiro's coming to pay his respects to him in the final scene suggests that the authors recognize this...
...Although the parents soon divine their son's secret, they allow him to proceed with the charade...
...If you take the view of honor promulgated by the so-called "honor codes" on certain college campuses, then the first father is...
...Unfortunately, Scorsese only pities them, which is not the same thing at all...
...To his own people, and especially to DeNiro's young son who didn't rat on him, he is wise, generous, and compassionate, a natural leader whom the boy would be a fool not to look up to...
...I did a good thing, right...
...Doesn't work...
...There can be no disjunction between honor and loyalty...
...It's true that unmarried girls who got pregnant in the nineteenth century were sometimes thrown out into the streets and that life in a western mining camp would have been extremely hazardous, at the least, for an unprotected young woman...
...This is like the cop who is a serial killer in Striking Distance: a deliberately far-fetched (not to say preposterous) situation designed to undermine our natural sense of loyalty and family...
...Maybe women in old country not know own worth, but they knew a lot more important things...
...It is not as bad as FGT, but its emphasis on personal happiness over family, tradition, and the old Chinese ways makes it deeply subversive of family values...
...To Wang and Amy Tan, the author of the book and coauthor of the screenplay, men who are not bastards are not interesting, whereas the women are all paragons of suffering virtue with nothing more to reproach themselves with than lack of self-esteem...
...I love Chabrol, but he has a fatal weakness for psychologizing...
...We should defy the determined attempts of Merchant and Ivory to make Stevens's loyalty to his employer seem merely quaint, if not tragic, and to wring our hearts over the poor man's inability to show his feelings for Emma Thompson...
...I think there must have been something funny about this gal from the start...
...CI 70 The American Spectator November 1993...
...But his foolhardiness in taking his best (and probably only) shot at worldly riches for himself and his family makes him a hero of a sort...
...Freeman pushes a good story too far when he tries to enlist our sympathies on behalf of Micah's son, Zweli (Maynard Eziashi), simply because he demonstrates against apartheid...
...Thus do we strike a blow against designer movies and promote the worthy cause of getting and keeping good servants...
...Root for: Laure, the widow played by Stephane Audran...
...T hrough this tangle of new and familiar dilemmas, a guide of the sort that William Safire used to provide to world politics might be useful: a guide to Whom to Root for...
...The Joy Luck Club by Wayne Wang...
...It was war—or as good as...
...Besides, I don't believe that these women could have gone through all they did in China only to resurface in California mouthing a pidjin version of California therapy-speak...
...Having delved into her childhood and found the trauma at the root of her sexual promiscuity, he thinks he can make us root for Betty...
...We don't forget as easily as he does what the creature is capable of...
...Their sense of loyalty and family is unimpeachable and they do the best acting in the film...
...You did a good thing for a bad man...
...In Striking Distance, a policeman (Bruce Willis) laments the fact that the entire department thinks him a rat because he turned in his partner, who is also his cousin, for police brutality...
...Root for: The corpses...
...But where that is the case, Hollywood rarely has any doubt as to which impulse to side with, so film-makers are driven to dream up more exotic conflicts such as that in The Good Son...
...So what if he killed a guy...
...The very title suggests a backward look—from an even greaterdistance than Edith Wharton's original backward look—at primitives too naive to share our modern, sophisticated understanding of the importance of personal fulfillment...
...To us earthlings this is just absurd...
...to one arm and a nephew—who has tried to save her—hanging to the other...
...This is a chick flick to leave Sleepless in Seattle in the dust and to give even Fried Green Tomatoes a run for its money...
...Their old-fashioned ideas are re-created in the same spirit as the lavish costumes and sets (and meals...
...after his wife's death...
...After a hilarious series of misadventures at the traditional wedding banquet, Wai Tung actually impregnates his new wife...
...by Morgan Freeman...
...The father reassures him by saying: "Yeah...
...Come on, Maggie: What's her motivation...
...Root for: Joey Coyle (John Cusack...
...The final scene in which Zweli shouts slogans about his so-called brothers and sisters being killed by the evil system while his real father is being killed by his so-called brothers and sisters is hair-raising in its monstrousness, but the dynamics of Freeman's direction work against the irony and in favor of the slogans...
...any more than the bus driver himself does...
...But you've got to love Joey Coyle, as Menendez does...
...Whom does she let drop...
...Root for: Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), for putting family loyalty, for once, ahead of personal happiness...
...The family should come first in such a case, and the mother and brother are the admirable family members...
...Root for: Sonny, the gangster, played by Mr...
...In one (The Good Son), a mother finds herself cantilevered over a cliff edge with a son—who has tried to kill her—hanging James Bowman, The American Spectator's film critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Herewith, then, my alphabetical tour of the multiplexes in search of true family values...
...This is another designer movie (see The Age of Innocence above) that patronizes the past—and, incidentally, badly oversimplifies its politics...
...Betty by Claude Chabrol...
...His father, another policeman, reassures him by quoting the family motto: "Loyalty above all else except honor...
...The Wedding Banquet by Ang Lee...
...Which of these two fathers is right...
...Paradoxically, the unmarried, unchilded Sonny more than anyone else in the film stands for the loyalties that sustain families and communities...
...of the 1870s—that is, as museum pieces...
...That is a very hard fact to face for devout believers in the yuppie ethos of personal autonomy, but it is heartening to know that from time to time, even in Hollywood, it is faced...
...I bring the matter up because so many of the autumn' spate of movies take as their theme divided loyalties and the family...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
