The Talkies/Dogs and Groundhogs
Bowman, James
N ear the end of Joe Dante's new film, Matinee, a couple of beatnik types coming out of a 1962 vintage horror flick about a man who turns into a giant ant are heard saying in exasperated tones:...
...This man is no peasant but a progressive hero who is living the American dream by making a new start...
...This is a film that was made quite cheaply a few years ago by the Dutch director, George Sluizer...
...It is a genuinely religious insight and it ought to make us proud that the movie that illustrates it could only have been made in America...
...Cute but deadly...
...Just to try something new...
...It was a surprise success and 20th Century Fox bought the property...
...Apart from the absurd literalism with which this film treats the idea of inarticulate passion—Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche simply fall into each other's arms without saying a word—the most laughable thing about it is its pretense of fathoming what it calls "the unknowable...
...Sluizer came to Hollywood to make the same picture with an American cast...
...R emakes like these two would be almost enough to give an American an inferiority complex if it were not for Eurotrash like Damage by Louis Malle and Indochine by Regis Wargnier—pictures which demonstrate that we Americans have no monopoly on crassness and triviality...
...He'can only really see and therefore only really know Punxsutawney—together with all the hicks and yokels he once despised—by having his face rubbed in the place...
...The American version pretties him up...
...Look at the case of The Vanishing...
...He also had to introduce a love interest (apart from the disappeared girl) for Kiefer Sutherland who, as I suppose a foreigner might not have known, is about as convincing as a haunted, obsessive personality as Al Gore would be...
...She puts on her Wonder Woman outfit and rescues Kiefer at the last gasp from the coffin in which the amusingly understated villain, played by Jeff Bridges, has buried him...
...But I am an immortal...
...Of course, it is not the real Martin Guerre...
...It therefore seems natural that God, or the Universe, or the Way Things Are should punish him by making him wake up every morning for eternity—or near enough—on the morning of the same Groundhog Day festival in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, an event that he loathes and despises...
...It is not the old B-movie, science-fiction stuff that I mind but would-be serious films like Matinee...
...Bridges's foreign accent, otherwise unexplained and almost as bad as Nick Nolte's in Lorenzo's Oil, must have been adopted as a kind of mockery of the bland Americanization and therefore trivialization of an interesting foreign film...
...There is a kind of film that Hollywood does from time to time that is neither pretentious nor crass and that turns both American moralism and the fatally fantastical temptations of the medium to good account...
...his death is not the hammer blow of fate but his chosen alternative to going back to that old, bad self...
...You can imagine the story conference...
...So far from being unknowable, this mystery of passion here is overburdened with knowledge—in the form of soap opera psychology applied to the characters' lurid pasts to explain and thus render banal and predictable even the most heart-rending emotions...
...The final scene is unforgettable...
...Add to such moral simple-mindedness exotic Asian locations, gorgeous scenery, Catherine Deneuve, and a tall, dark, mysterious naval officer (Vincent Perez) whose eyes smoulder with a passionate intensity that causes beautiful women in expensive clothes to fall in love with him and you have—trash...
...Jordan than in that of such recent and unsatisfactory examples of the genre as Ghost, Jacob's Ladder, or Saving Your Life...
...Our kids' movies lead the world, but our grown-up ones rarely bear comparison with the best foreign films...
...He tries to prove it by playing tricks until it dawns on him: "Maybe the real God uses tricks...
...It is an exercise in Hollywood metaphysics, but in a comic, not a portentous, Twilight Zone sort of way...
...It is based on The Return of Martin Guerre, a French film of 1982 by Daniel Vigne and starring Gerard Depardieu...
...Designer trash...
...Several times...
...This is one of the few good jokes in a film that tries too hard to do too many things...
...N ear the end of Joe Dante's new film, Matinee, a couple of beatnik types coming out of a 1962 vintage horror flick about a man who turns into a giant ant are heard saying in exasperated tones: "American movies...
...he asks a drunken companion after having relived the same day for the first three or four times: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was the same...
...I'm a god," he says to his producer, played by Andie MacDowell...
...But he must have drunk the water, because he ended up making a mess...
...Zhivago or Gone With the Wind, but it makes Dr...
...It aspires to be a sort of French Dr...
...You would have thought that this kind of Communist chic would have died out even in France, but no, the French colonialists still wear the black hats and the commies the white ones...
...It is a nicely post-modern touch to make the character aware that he is living in a metaphor for lives of quiet desperation everywhere, but it is old-fashioned moralism that determines what he does about it...
...Like so many of us, he always wants to be somewhere else, doing something else with different people from the "morons" and "hicks" with whom hefinds himself surrounded...
...You mean the bad guy wins...
...It is rather in the old-fashioned class of It's a Wonderful Life or Here Comes Mr...
...Gere is no hunk of dead meat but a great spirit whose legacy lives on...
...I don't think...
...Zhivago look like a model of subtlety and understatement and Gone With the Wind like an exercise in political realism...
...You mean the hero dies...
...It has some retrospectively politically correct things to say about the Cuban missile crisis and a message about people's reactions to fear which, unfortunately, I cannot relay to you because I didn't understand it...
...I mean I'm not the God...
...As a patriotic American, I can't help wondering why some of the tens of millions of dollars that Hollywood now invariably spends on a movie can't be put toward artistic or dramatic quality...
...Bill Murray plays a weatherman for a television station in Pittsburgh who thinks he is too good for what the prayer book used to call the station of life into which God has called him...
...Yessir, we think as we come out of this film, that was a fine man...
...His obsession drives him mad, and he suffers a madman's fate, while the terrifyingly normal man who abducted the girl is left to get on with his terrifyingly normal life...
...The cost of all those California millions to poor Mr...
...But always he wakes up the morning before in the Punxsutawney guest house to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You, Babe" on the clock radio...
...But when he does he finally comes to love it—rather, perhaps, as God loves the world...
...The drunk looks at him with true fellow feeling and says, "Yep, that about sums it up for me...
...To its credit and unlike The Vanishing it does not flinch at the ending, but it does not allow us to see it either...
...In it the bulky Depardieu, seen dangling on the end of a rope like a side of beef, represents grim fatality's mocking answer to the question of identity which the film has so delicately broached...
...Such a film is our Movie of the Month, proudly made in the USA, Groundhog Day by Harold Ramis...
...First he decides to live it up and take advantage of his situation...
...Richard Gere is Southern gentry at the end of the Civil War, a landowner returned to revolutionize agriculture as well as race relations in his little Tennessee valley community...
...It even bought the director, for Pete's sake...
...To be sure they are high-class trash, both of them, but trash nevertheless...
...But I have a guilty sympathy with the proto-hippies' disgust at American movies...
...He assumes another man's identity for only the purest and most noble of reasons, to redeem the sins of an earlier self...
...Gere and Jodie Foster act their little hearts out to make a brooding meditation on human destiny into a decent but lightweight psychological drama...
...He's just been around so long He knows everything...
...Here I must reveal the endings to make my point, so skip the next twoparagraphs if you don't mean to take my advice and skip the film...
...Girl number two turns out to be a feisty, tough-talking waitress (Nancy Travis) of the recently fashionable Hollywood Amazon type...
...End of story...
...The ne'er-do-well Martin Guerre deserts his wife and family and then appears to return yearslater and much changed as an ideal husband and father...
...Maybe He's not omnipotent...
...In the original version, the hero's determination to find out what happened to the girl gets him buried alive...
...At any rate, this kind of God-like knowledge, which is a function of love, is what Murray has to learn...
...Or not the original one anyway...
...What would you do...
...Jon Amiel's production of Sommersby is not so bad as this, but it is another example of how we domesticate foreign products...
...then, in despair, he kills himself...
...Indochine is in a way even worse...
...The man whose identity he assumes is dead...
...But Martin Guerre was Everyman, and his death had terror as well as pity...
...There is a kind of tragic dignity to this story of a simple peasant who merely wanted, as any of us might want, to live another man's life—and did it better than the other man did—before being caught...
...That character, as nasty a piece of work as ever, returns to claim his own, and the imposter is executed—much to the regret of the gorgeous Nathalie Baye, whose true husband he has paradoxically become...
...It can be but small consolation to Americans to reflect that other countries' trash is just as trashy as our trash, but we may be able to go further...
...Sluizer was the reversal of those two predicates for a start: bad guy dies, hero wins...
...Their sumptuous photography and skillful editing, together with the very sophisticated and worldly characters whose lives they treat, give them a European cachet, but even that doesn't stop audiences from laughing—especially at Damage...
...It was exciting, moving, scary—a well-crafted tale of a young man's obsession with his girlfriend's disappearance...
...Pity he had to die...
Vol. 26 • April 1993 • No. 4
