The Talkies/Alive and Dead

...That may not be true, but it still rings truer than any of the other true-life tales now making the rounds...

...That it is based on fact may add a piquancy to the flavor (people tartare) that the drama cannot supply but is otherwise irrelevant—as it is too in the cases of Chaplin and Hoffa...

...That is why the doctor played by the ex-Soviet apologist Peter Ustinov is allowed to make a gratuitous swipe at "the iron hand of Reaganomics," as if the Gipper were personally responsible for young Lorenzo's transformation into the mute, suffering subject of his parents' amateur medical experiments...

...To be sure, so little is known about the real lives of the film's subjects, two seventeenth-century French composers called Sainte-Colombe and Marin Marais, that a great many gaps have had to be plugged with fiction...

...Unlike Hoffa, this movie has a purpose, which is to persuade people to give money to research on myelin repair—what Lorenzo now needs in order to do anything more than blink his eyes...

...But in the Madonna world the preposterousness of such a premise might have passed almost unnoticed if it had not been for the preposterousness of everything else about the film—especially the leading lady's performance...

...Such aimless nostalgia is another reason—along with instant name recognition, the Hollywood political mythology, and the confusion of mimicry with acting—why bio flicks get made...

...The mystery of his physical disappearance turns out to be much less mysterious than his reappearance eighteen years later in a major motion picture...

...Who cares about Chaplin when we've got Robert Downey, Jr...

...Last month I wrote of Hollywood's neglect, as I see it, of the elementary requirements of verisimilitude in some recent fictional works, and I can only regret that the new Madonna film, Body of Evidence, was released too late for inclusion as an example of that neglect...

...The simulated reality of fiction has to try hard to look real, while real reality often manages to look quite unreal...

...A less common but perhaps more powerful reason is the inspirational quality of true-life stories like Lorenzo's Oil, which, like most inspirational stories, I hated...

...The two obsessions are finally fused in an overwhelming passion for the art that transcends language and so offers "refreshment to the dead, who have run out of words...

...In fact, I found that kind of medical triumphalism (cleverly masked by the parents' struggles against the medical establishment) very off-putting...

...It is sad to reflect that, even in Hollywood, where you would expect Chaplin to be remembered for his films, the story of his life is more an occasion for yet another self-congratulation over the "creative community's" resistance to the McCarthyist terror...

...The story is told in flashback by the aged Marais (Gerard Depardieu), and involves an unhappy love affair between himself and Sainte-Colombe's elder daughter (Anne Brochet) that after her death enables him to understand and finally to share his former teacher's obsession with death and to echo his romantic view of art...

...But a lot of other things happened in Chaplin's life that didn't make it onto the screen, and the audience must be left with the feeling that among those other things was whatever it is that makes Chaplin a great man...

...Or something like it happened...

...But if your interest is in Hoffa rather than Nicholson, the film is so sketchy and inaccurate an account of his life and crimes that its "truth" is dissolved in politics: here was a flawed but colorful champion of the working class about whose demise there remains a mystery, so Danny DeVito thought that his life would be a good subject for a movie...

...This makes it a great fund-raising appeal but not much of a movie—if only because it has the desert-island quality of Alive...

...But although he has so much audience good will to draw on, Sir Richard does not take enough trouble to explain what was so great about him...

...t is scarcely possible to imagine a / greater contrast than that between such vulgarity and the link forged between art and death in the Movie of the Month, Alain Corneau's Tous les Matins du Monde—which is also based on a "true" story...

...And who cares about Jimmy Hoffa when we've got Jack Nicholson...

...Hoffa comes across as a nasty piece of work, with the kind of toughness and single-minded devotion to his union that wins him a certain grudging respect, but that's about all there is to it...

...This is really a yuppie movie committed to the yuppie idea that death is optional...

...Or rather, they would tell us but not show us...

...Sainte-Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is seen as a character obsessed with the death of his wife and with music...

...J. Edgar Hoover has a bigger part than those of Chaplin's first three wives put together...

...We know that, whatever happens to us, we are most unlikely to have to choose between death from starvation and cannibalism...

...As• with Chaplin and Hoffa, the "true" story carefully cut and trimmed to reveal a bogus political and moral message turns out to be very much less true than more responsible fiction...

...his is the stuff of an interesting T television documentary, maybe, but not really a feature film...

...This is another unimpressive film with an impressive leading man, and Nicholson, with the help of the make-up man, also does a bang-up job of mimicry—though his acting is characteristically hammy...

...They transform themselves into biochemists in the space of a few months and manage to invent if not the cure at least a palliative for the disease...

...Oh sure, they eat some guys, but they're very discreet about it...

...Yes, but only because the films wouldn't have been made otherwise...

...A good example is Alive, Frank Marshall's film based on the real-life experience of members of a Uruguayan rugby team who, their airplane having crashed in the Andes, were forced to eat flesh from the bodies of their dead teammates in order to survive...

...A fictional work could never create sucha towering figure, because he would bump his head against history and so call attention to his fictional status...

...N ick Nolte and Susan Sarandon play the parents of a child stricken with a genetically transmitted wasting disease...

...This too is typical of the narcissism of the "creative community": the subject of the film takes a back seat to its star and so is diminished even further in our estimation...

...Real Life," however, from which more and more films these days seem to be taken, is no guarantee of a lifelike quality...

...Given enough "resources"—taken from the things that make life worth living and committed to mere health care—we could perhaps, they seem to say, prolong life indefinitely...

...Are you beginning to get the feeling that the word "true" applied to a story is a singularly unhelpful adjective...

...A man from Mars who saw this film might take away with him the impression that Chaplin's greatest achievement was refusing to shake hands with a Nazi or expressing (obliquely) left-wing views in the presence of J. Edgar...

...f you admire anybody after seeing the film it is Robert Downey, Jr...

...We don't even see their faces, just the meat, which looks like any other meat...

...We see too little of him at work, and even his colorful private life comes off looking sketchy compared with the political material...

...Making our own miracle is not an option available to most of us faced with the death of a loved one...

...We may decide that we want the Struldbrugianlife lusted after by the health fanatics more than we do any amount of art, but at least let us recognize the ghastly tastelessness of our ambitions...

...If we didn't already know why Chaplin and Hoffa are important historical figures, the movies of their lives would not tell us...

...Whether for this reason or because it would have been bad for box office toshow the teen heartthrob, Ethan Hawke, tucking into a plate of man-meat, Marshall downplays the cannibalism and makes his film into a story of survival scarcely distinguishable from any other...

...It is all rather over the top, but I confess that I loved it—partly because of the beauty of the imagery and the music, performed by Jordi Savall, but mostly because I was swept up, while I was watching it, in the film's passionate commitment to music as the bridge between life and death...

...Their being real people turns out to be the filmmakers' apology for the otherwise unjustified claim they make on our attention...

...It isn't...

...He takes as his pupil the young Marin Marais (Guillaume Depardieu), who shares the master's love of music but qualifies it with a worldly ambition that the older man despises...

...for being such a splendid mimic that at times you can scarcely tell him from the real Chaplin...

...Consider the contrast between Charlie Chaplin's reputation and what we see of his life in Sir Richard Attenborough's film...

...For the most part we are kept firmly focused on the physical rather than the moral perils that the survivors must confront, and we have to take it on faith that they'll "never be the same again" once they are forced into cannibalism...

...A hypocritical middle-class establishment's putting "a beautiful young woman" on trial for screwing a man to death is obviously a vehicle for the authoress of Sex...

...The extreme circumstances give rise to an interesting problem in practical morality, but the problem carries with it little dramatic resonance because we can so easily detach ourselves from it...

...The film's one gesture in the direction of history is to remind us of people, places, clothes, cars, furniture, and attitudes that were once familiar, but it supplies no particular reason for us to remember them...

...Indeed, who cares about Jimmy Hoffa even if we didn't have Jack Nicholson...

...As great art is the record of the human spirit's response to its confinement in and limitation by nature, so the denial of the most fundamental such limitation—death—in a film like Lorenzo's Oil is essentially philistine...

...There are a few anonymous stiffs on the ground from whose backs the lads cut their lunch with shards of glass, but it is easy to forget that they were people...

...Of course it all happened...

...Does it matter that the subjects of both of these films really existed...

...We come to it predisposed to believe that here was a great man, a comic genius whose legend still survives...

...Or at least not this feature film...