The Talkies /Can You Believe It?
Bowman, James
/ s it just me, or is the stuff coming out of Hollywood getting more and more far-fetched and unbelievable? If art (and that means movies, too) has a conscience, its guiding principle is not...
...But if you think that idea strains credulity, you should try A Few Good Men, which manages to make the lawyers the good guys and the men of honor the bad guys...
...We are never told, but must take it on faith (a new meaning for the title) that it makes enough of a difference that the man would give up his business on discovering that, in some sense, he has been selling the genuine article after all...
...The scorpion replies: "Why would I sting you if it meant I would drown myself...
...he suddenly realizes that the job has grown, and replies that "it makes a lot of difference...
...Look at some of the movies that have, amazingly enough, attracted millions of viewers in recent weeks...
...Unfortunately, so much depends on the surprise in the middle of it—which is almost as unbelievable as Tom Cruise as a brilliant courtroom lawyer or Whitney Houston as important enough to be worth assassinating—that to reveal it would spoil a lot of people's enjoyment of the film...
...The movie is worth watching for Martin's performance as the con man, which redeems these flaws, and that brings up another point about verisimilitude: that a compelling dramatic situation or a highlycharged performance brings with it so much good artistic karma that it can make up for almost anything that the piece is lacking in believability in other areas...
...He teaches morally improving lessons, but he's too good to be true, as is Macaulay Culkin's wisdom beyond his years in persuading an old bag lady to clean herself up...
...Talk about decadence...
...CI...
...Rob Reiner, the director, and Aaron Sorkin, the writer, are not leftists and pacifists...
...Tell it to the Marines...
...Just what difference does it make...
...But when for once a miracle that hasn't been stage-managed by him takes place at one of his shows and its beneficiary repeats back to him his own words on fakery—"What difference does it make so long as you get the job done...
...I give my people a good show: plenty of music, worthy sentiments, for whatever they feel like paying...
...If art (and that means movies, too) has a conscience, its guiding principle is not morality but truth-to-life, which is all that prevents it from collapsing into a farrago of fantasy and nonsense like Toys, a flick so far removed from reality that it is hardly worth criticizing...
...The scorpion wants to cross a river and asks the frog to ferry him across...
...L eap of Faith, by Richard Pearce, comes close to saying something interesting about the problems of belief and believability but isn't itself quite believable in the end...
...On top of that we have to believe that Tom Cruise is smart, Demi Moore is a tough career soldier, and Jack Nicholson is a right-wing nut...
...And if this isn't unbelievable enough, the sophisticated British aristocrat has managed to collect around himself a terrorist gang (have they all killed their fathers...
...The world to the soldier is a terrifying place and he feels himself more or less helpless in the face of its arbitrary power to act according to its nature and crush little people like him...
...Interestingly, I am readier to believe that the miracle in Leap of Faith is truer to reality than the miracle in Crying Game, but the latter is the one that works artistically...
...And they leave feeling a little hope that wasn't there before...
...In Passenger 57, the original premise is that a "sophisticated British aristocrat" (Bruce Payne) goes around killing people and hijacking airliners because of an unhappy childhood (his life of crime startJames Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Yet even if you can believe that the by James Bowman kid's parents are stupid enough to have left him behind at the airport, I defy you to believe that they left their money and credit cards behind with him...
...Paradoxically, the film manages to demonstrate the untruth of a contention—"Politics and show business, it's the same thing these days"—that we would otherwise be disposed to believe...
...Neil Jordan disagrees, and the rest of the film attempts to prove the point—not by any facile means, as I say, but by making us believe in a truly stupefying turning aside of nature's juggernaut...
...Of course they are readier to accept things like the magic lamp and the genie in Aladdin, Disney's latest homogenized and pasteurized fairy tale...
...Ejut I wonder if even children are quite indifferent to the matter of believability...
...In the end we have to agree with Jack Nicholson's crazy colonel that "You f----ing people have no idea how to defend a country...
...And we may add to the film's sins against verisimilitude the dangerous, anti-military nonsense that it has in common with Toys and that also arises out of detachment from reality...
...n two-and-a-half years of pretty industrious movie-watching, I have only once gone to an evening showing where I was the only person in the audience...
...So far as he is concerned, it is only entertainment—entertainment, like the kind that Hollywood increasingly purveys, that has no obligation of fidelity to anything outside itself...
...If so, the trouble lies with entertainment overload...
...Maybe they even like it before they are told by their parents that they are supposed to like it...
...The soldier's point is that the IRA gunman will kill him because it is his nature...
...who are as ruthless and violent as he is...
...W hat can be said is that here the incredible, is not just incidental—a little cheating on the way to some other end—but the very basis of everything that the film is about...
...Why does no one protest at such implausibility...
...On Broadway you've got to pay $65 just to get in the door and you may not like what you see...
...Hollywood may have forgotten how to make a thriller, but it certainly remembers its own self-importance—as if anyone sane enough to hire a killer would consider this chanteuse important enough to go to so much trouble to kill...
...Just goes to show you what a great work of art can accomplish if it lets its conscience be its guide...
...Children, whose experience of reality outside such secondhand sources is even more limited, are particularly ill-equipped to judge, which allows them to be fobbed off with rubbish like Aladdin and Home Alone 2, which in turn puts them even further out of touch with reality...
...In other words, it does what Leap of Faith is finally unable to do and makes us accept the miracle in the middle as part of a serious statement about what the world is really like...
...It takes as its text the story about the frog and the scorpion that a British soldier (Forest Whitaker) kidnapped by the IRA tells the most sympathetic of his captors, played by Stephen Rae...
...ed with the murder of his father) but for no discernible political reason, until he is stopped by a black street kid turned security agent (Wesley Snipes...
...And it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Hollywood is losing its artistic conscience (its moral conscience, of course, went long ago...
...There is a good example of how the artistic conscience differs from the moral...
...That kind of thing is even more unbelievable than sophisticated British aristocrats hijacking airliners, but the assumption is that kids will swallow anything...
...If one sophisticated British aristocrat/terrorist is a good idea, how about a gang of sophisticated British aristocrat/terrorists...
...Steve Martin plays an itinerant preacher who is engagingly frank, at least in private, about the kinds of fakery he uses to rope the suckers in...
...Some hope...
...I guess it depends on what the job is...
...That was during the second week of Home Alone 2, and it gave me the wild hope that the brat Macaulay Culkin may this time have fallen as flat on his face as the burglars played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are constantly doing in this idiotic cartoon...
...But I'll bet they would like it better if Aladdin were, as he was originally, a real thief instead of a goody-goody who shares with the poor the crust of bread that is the only thing we see him steal...
...A heroic ex–Secret Service agent (Costner) stops the bullet intended for her...
...Why did you do it...
...Aladdin is a better person for sharing and for giving up his last wish to free the genie...
...The scorpion replies: "Because it is my nature...
...All the way through, the film has been so sympathetic to his argument—that the people come to hear his preaching and the singing of the "Angels of Mercy" because he gives them a good show—that it is difficult for it to turn around at this late stage and say that it makes a difference after all that it is all a fake...
...The frog says no, the scorpion will sting him and he will drown...
...One answer, I suppose, is that it is supposed to be a kiddies' fantasy—you might as well expect verisimilitude of Bugs Bunny or the Three Stooges, both of which it resembles...
...A case in point is the movie of the month, The Crying Game, by Neil Jordan...
...In The Bodyguard, with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, we are asked to believe that a self-absorbed, Madonna-like pop star (Miss Houston) could be the target of a contract killing meant to take place on the night of the Academy Awards ceremony just as she receives the Oscar for best actress...
...When reality for most people consists in large part of watching television and movies, then what standard of reality do they have by which to judge television and movies...
...As he is sinking beneath the water, the frog asks: "Why...
...If he's a fake, he adds, "what difference does it make, so long as I get the job done...
...Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him anyway...
...This statement is that nature is not fixed and immutable...
...they only take a left-pacifist line because they don't know any better...
...If so, it is not easy for us to see why...
...The logic seems good to the frog, so he lets him get on his back...
Vol. 26 • February 1993 • No. 2
