The Talkies / Innocents and Broads

...I couldn't have gotten $500 for my girlfriend—not that I would do that...

...In the nineties nobody—but nobody!—says, as Billie is made to say, "Even if I am stupid, it hasn't hurt me...

...W hen he was, for a week or so in March, the owner of the New York Post, Abraham Hirschfeld was represented by his enemies (i.e., the entire staff of the Post) as unfit to own a newspaper partly on the basis of the following "insensitive" or "sexist" joke he was said to have told: A man sees an attractive woman in a bar and, favoring the direct approach—no doubt like Mr...

...Also, the theme of power over sexwas repeated in Demi Moore's boss's forcing her to meet her billionaire again for his own economic benefit: "I would never dream of forcing you to do anything against your will—except this one time...

...As between the handsome and chivalrous billionaire and the jerk who gambled away what little money they had and so got them into this mess in the first place, there's not much doubt in my mind which one most women would think is the better man...

...Rosetta never made a million dollars a trick, like Demi Moore's character in Indecent Proposal, but she knows a lot better what innocence is worth...

...Most people, in fact, have two—one public and one very private...

...I liked the interesting reversal by which it was the husband who felt the more violated by the transaction, ostensibly contracted for his benefit, while the wife, otherwise a very nineties-type working woman, found herself gravitating back, willy-nilly, to the man who could fulfill the role of masculine protector when her husband had made such a botch of it...

...Even such things as these, however, cannot be more improbable than making Miss Fonda so innocent of the ways of the world that she has to learn how to shop...

...When the children's home in Bologna refuses them because of Rosetta's past, he takes it upon himself to escort them to another home in Sicily...

...Or, as the ghost of Babe Ruth says in The Sandlot: "Follow your heart, kid, and you'll never go wrong...

...The intrinsic interest of the question is such that you almost forget the absurdity of Robert Redford as a subtle and sensitive and romantic (to say nothing of handsome...

...It was typical of the French bureaucratic mind and of French cynicism to make her also the tool of a government routinely engaged in assassination and political murder, but Americans are likely to wonder just what government agency, apparently headquartered beneath the Federal Triangle metro station in Washington, is responsible for blowing up hotel rooms full of people in California or assassinating well-heeled ladies on the streets of New Orleans at Mardi Gras...

...T his issue is treated with a certain hard-eyed realism by Adrian Lyne up until the point at which, I presume, the money men told him he had to tack on a soppy, love-over-lucre ending...

...In this context, the ending is shattering...

...The injured innocence of the film is now his, and he finds himself on a level with the children whom he has tried to help...

...But we don't know he's not...

...She and Woody patch it up...

...That may be one reason why it is so regularly transformed into mere cuteness, as in such movies recently doing the rounds as The Sandlot, Cop and a Half, Jack the Bear, and the latest truly repellent and Disneyfied version of Huckleberry Finn called, way over-familiarly, The Adventures of Huck Finn...

...Their lost Eden really is lost, and the three of them are left in the end in a desolate urban landscape with the prospect of their own isolation from the world of work and love and family...

...With typical obtuseness, Hollywood didn't realize it was being sent up and cast Bridget Fonda as the beautiful young killer for whom are repealed not only the laws of biology but also those of physics, as she regularly takes out men twice her size with a single blow of her deadly fist...

...Like her French prototype Nikita, played by Anne Parillaud, she is a feminist version of Frankenstein's monster: humanity re-created, but from a more rational pattern...

...I've got what I want, and as long as I can get what I want that's all that matters...

...For that you usually have to go abroad, and the Movie of the Month is an amazing Italian depiction of innocence and experience by Gianni Amelio called Il Ladro di Bambini...

...Hollywood can never believe that innocence is lost for good...

...I thought he was the better man...

...Antonio's partner slopes off to visit a girlfriend and leaves him to escort the children alone...

...I know now he's not...

...The oafish Harrelson says to Demi: "I was afraid you wanted him...

...Its premise can be summed up in the question: Would you consent to your wife's sleeping with another man for one night for $1 million...

...That hypocrisy is amusingly caught by the film's sleazy lawyer (Oliver Platt), who tries to cheer up Woody Harrelson for having sold Demi Moore for a night to Robert Redford by saying: "You're lucky...

...It is part of the great American mythology of youth and the fresh start...

...There are a lot of laughs, and Johnny Depp does a terrific job as Sam, the subliterate clown with a passion for Buster Keaton...

...A s we have seen, Hollywood does not do the real world very well these days...

...We truly are on alien territory here...

...Everybody has an opinion...

...I am more kindly disposed towards the innocence portrayed in Benny and Joon...

...replies the woman...

...Instead of putting such an impossible line in the mouth of Melanie Griffith, Douglas McGrath, the screenwriter, should have made her say: "Even if I am educationally disadvantaged, I can still feel compassion for all mankind...

...In reality, thekind of guy likely to make such an offer would have the subtlety, sensitivity, and romantic good looks of Ross Perot—or Abe Hirschfeld...

...This is a remake of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, which was itself a parody of American girl-cop flicks that was half-funny and half-serious...

...The film utterly catches you up in the developing relationship between the street-smart city kids and their protector, who is fresh from the Calabrian campagna and much less versed in the ways of the world he is supposed to be protecting them from...

...Fascination with it is even what lies behind the story of the amoral waif who gets a government-sponsored makeover as an assassin in Point of No Return...

...Hirschfeld himself—asks her if she would like to sleep with him...

...Maybe not in Lyne's either...

...So much innocence and gentleness in all its characters makes it look too much like the product of a hippie commune of the Woodstock era...

...But it tries too hard for its whimsical effects—and a little bit of this kind of whimsy goes a long way, anyway...

...The real world has got to get a look-in somewhere or else the gentle souls who have been protected from it will appear as merely insipid inhabitants of a dream landscape—a danger that Benny and Joon does too little to skirt...

...For once you start with your fantasy of the New Woman, you might as well reinvent the rest of the world while you are at it...

...Now move your ass or you're fired...

...0 ne reason to hate cuteness is that real innocence needs to be taken seriously...

...What is crass in the mouth of Honest Abe Hirschfeld comes out looking almost like class at the hands of Adrian Lyne in Indecent Proposal...

...Good," replies the man, "we're already talking price...

...The girl, Rosetta, is played by Valentina Scalici, a miraculous young performer with no acting experience, and her younger brother, Luciano, is portrayed with scarcely less skill by another inexperienced child, Giuseppe Ieracitano...

...The difference between Judy Holliday's Billie and Miss Griffith's is the difference between innocence and stupidity...

...I was afraid you were right to want him...

...It isthe story of a young carabiniere or national guard soldier named Antonio, played by Enrico Lo Verso, who is rather improbably ordered to escort two children to a children's home after their mother is arrested for making a prostitute of the little girl, aged 11...

...Or, if you are a woman, would you do it if your husband consented...

...Not for a million dollars...

...Now that sounds like something that a bubble-headed tomato of our own times would actually say, though I'm afraid that McGrath and the director, Luis Mandoki, mean it to be a moment of epiphany...

...It will be a long time before I forget the look on Lo Verso's face as his superior officer suggests that the situation he has allowed himself to get into with the two children smacks of impropriety and that he has compromised himself and his future in the carabinieri...

...Like Lyne's earlier success, Fatal Attraction, this is what they call in Hollywood a "high-concept" movie...

...billionaire...

...It is predictable that the children develop an affection for him and he for them during the course of their journey from Milan to Bologna to Sicily, but what is less predictable is that he is able to give them back some of their lost innocence by introducing them, perhaps for the first time in their lives, to a real family—his own...

...But we can forgive the movie this implausibility as well as the superficiality of its characters because it raises an issue that Hollywood would not dare to raise otherwise, which is the issue of how far, in spite of the sexual revolution, sex and fidelity are still bound up with money and power and traditional male/female roles...

...It's okay, though...

...I liked that he made Demi Moore pretend that she was doing it for her husband—and that he put that together with Redford's paradoxical assurance that "nothing's going to happen you don't choose...

...he's just got more money...

...They're all awful, but the combination of Elijah Wood as a too young, too clean, too goody-goody, suburban-soft Huck and Courtney B. Vance as a moralizing Jim ("Just because you're taught something's right and everybody believes it's right don't make it right") gives Disney the prize once again for crass sentimentalizing...

...In fact, he does give charming Billie the line: "Books only take you so far: you can't go on what you know, you have to go on whatyou feel...

...It can be as much a male as a female fantasy, and there is more than a touch of Pygmalion and Galatea in the relationship between Gabriel Byrne and Miss Fonda in Point of No Return just as there is in that between Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith in an appalling remake of Born Yesterday that reminds us of the genuine innocence it took to create the original Billie Dawn, the brassy dame portrayed by Judy Holliday in the 1950 original...