The Talkies/ The Summer of Our Discontent

...B ut, of course, it's a lot more complicated than that...

...At the same time, we see again and again why the fortress has been built and the integrity with which it is maintained...

...Camille (Emmanuelle Béart) is a brilliant young violinist for whom Maxime leaves his wife...

...I remember hearing once an interview with an elderly bachelor who explained why he never married by saying that he would rather go through life wishing to have what he didn't have than wishing not to have what he did...

...y ou will have realized by now that I am setting up for a real grown-up picture as Movie of the Month...

...Ostensible grown-up films like What's Love Got To Do With It are as much wedded to currently fashionable mythic patterns as any children's movie...

...He can go on living in his enclosed and exclusive world...

...Like all myth, such children's stories deserve a respected place in the culture, even though anyone not a child ought to be capable of recognizing that real life is a lot more complicated...

...Jurassic Park is the latest example of his craft, and it shows that he has not lost his touch...

...it takes a truly grown-up temperament...

...He tells her that she is "talking of feelings that don't exist for me...

...That note of wistfulness at the end is typically Larkinian but also typical of the heart in winter...

...But she decides that it is really Stéphane whom she loves...

...71...

...Béart falls so far victim to her passion that she descends to begging Stéphane for his love...

...You may say that that is a cynical view of marriage, but for a certain kind of wintry-hearted temperament the wear and tear upon one's emotional vulnerabilities that even the best of marriages involves can be endured only at the cost of alienating an essential part ofthemselves...

...Best of all is watching the wiggling legs of a victim sticking out of a dinosaur's mouth...

...Just to make things perfect, Neill, a dinosaur expert, is dubious about having children until the aforementioned girl and boy can convince him by their irresistible charm of what every movie-goer—or at least every movie-maker—knows: that kids are great...

...t is a particularly grouchy way to greet the season of children's movies, I agree, but I can't help noticing how the American entertainment industry so rarely produces anything but children's movies...

...You can see it in his easy, affectionate contempt for the smooth, shallow, charming but duplicitous Maxime, just as his cowardice is apparent in the denial of the feelings he quite obviously does have for Camille—feelings that he so effectively conjures away that he is not untruthful in saying that he can't feel them...

...Like the real world this emotional quandary is a lot harder to figure out than life reduced to mythic simplicities...

...The truth is that the summer blockbusters are just the top of the line: there is more money, more hype, more marketing tie-ins, more high-tech effects, but in all artistically interesting ways they are the same as the rest of the year's product...

...Maxime accepts this with a truly Gallic philosophicality until it becomes clear that Stéphane cannot return her love...

...Such an idea requires a child's insane self-confidence—the sort of thing that makes him try to fly off the roof because he has seen Superman do it on TV...

...Like Woody, Spielberg should stick to what he does best...

...The theme park's founder (Richard Attenborough) has overstepped the bounds and must be taught a lesson, but it is a lesson that the children understand as soon as they hear the nutty professor say that a "severe lack of humility before nature is being shown here...

...There is for such people a bittersweet poignancy to wishing for what they don't have as well as the terror of the prospect of wishing not to have what they do...

...What's Love Got To Do With It is actually one of the best versions of this myth, and Laurence Fishburne as Ike and Angela Bassett as Tina Turner both turn in outstanding performances...

...And what he does best is the kiddie flick par James Bowman is the Times Literary Supplement's American editor and TAS 's regular movie critic...

...Of course it is foreign...

...But never let it be said that Spielberg is merely a maker of B-movie creature features...

...excellence...

...Our greatest director is Steven Spielberg because he makes children's movies better than anyone else...

...I just can't walk out"), but we are never made to feel the force of this emotional tether on her, or any sympathy for poor old wife-beating, cocaine-sniffing Ike...

...Un Cceur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter), by Claude Sautet, is the story of a violin maker called Stéphane (Daniel Auteuil) and his partner Maxime (André Dussollier) and the woman who comes between them...

...It is as if he has shut them out of his inner fortress so effectively that even when he can hear them battering at the door he can confidently pronounce them to be still and forever excluded...

...There is also a caricature villain (Wayne Knight), a cool, wise-cracking professor (Jeff Goldblum) and a handsome couple of the sort that every kid would want for a mom and dad (Sam Neill and Laura Dern...

...One of them, a girl made fun of for being a computer nerd, saves the dinosaur-park human beings from extinction by hacking into the security system at a critical moment...

...But it never rises much further above the mythic level than Jurassic Park does...

...And the fact that Mrs...

...The problems of real life, unlike those of mythology, rarely lend themselves to simple moral solutions...

...Being true to oneself and one's honest, unmediated, uncompromised understanding of the world is by its very nature not only to alienate others but also to celebrate one's own nobility...

...Maybe in this jolly summer season we could all do with the exercise in maturity of the Heart in Winter...

...Sautet allows us to see Stephane's flaws not in any moralistic way but as the natural outgrowths of the person he has chosen to be...

...life breaks through" all man's feeble attempts to control it...

...I tremble for the man to think that his next project purports to be a real adult movie about the Holocaust, of all things...

...Turner claimed it happened to her doesn't mean it didn't happen this way...

...One victim, a not very likable lawyer, is gobbled up while seated on the toilet...

...Life finds a way," says the professor...

...To it has been added a couple of cute dino babies and a couple of even cuter kids who have the most exciting adventures...

...But that is what Hollywood treats America as if it is not capable of recognizing...

...At feeding time in the dinosaur park, a large ox is consumed whole in seconds by a beast that remains scarily out of sight...

...This seemed to be the biggest crowd pleaser...

...The combination of dinosaurs and an awesome theme park is in itself a beautifully high concept for a kids' movie...

...To those who fight it out in the trenches of the sex war, however,and who have continually to make compromises in order to keep any relationship at all, this nobility looks like either arrogance or cowardice, both of which Stéphane is accused of...

...So he and I are the same, Only I'm a better hand At knowing what I can stand Without them sending a van—Or I suppose I can...

...There is on offer a psychological explanation of Tina's long persistence in unhappiness (because she had been abandoned by her mother in childhood, she says, "I know what it's like to have your own'blood walk out on you...

...And if it was such a mistake He still did it for his own sake, Playing his own game...

...As in a fairy tale or a Greek myth—or the Frankenstein story, with which Jurassic Park has been compared—there is here a clearly defined limit beyond which the hubris of man cannot go without incurring the nemesis of God's or nature's judgment...

...He was out for his own ends Not just pleasing his friends...

...The myth is that of so many straightforwardly fictional movies these days which celebrate the "empowerment" of an abused, neglected, or unhappy woman whose self-realization depends on booting out the man who has messed up her life...

...Part Deux, The Last Action Hero, and the others that are released to coincide with school vacations: But their audience is quite obviously not limited to the kids...

...Never is Hollywood more itself than in films like Jurassic Park, Cliffhanger, Hot Shots...

...Why else should Spielberg imagine he'll be not only the first kiddie flick director but the first director of any sort to make an artistic success out of the Holocaust...

...Maybe the myth...

...With the infuriating sangfroid of the man who prides himself on his honesty, he acknowledges that there is justice in both charges...

...He is arrogant...

...Anyone might think that America is culturally a nation of children...

...0 f course children, like all students of fairy tales, do see it, but the obtuse adults, blinded by their typically grown-up lust for money ("We're going to make a fortune" cackles the lawyer shortly before he is eaten), have missed it...

...The great British poet Philip Larkin continually harped on the same theme, acknowledging in his poem "Self's the Man," for instance, that he had chosen to live more selfishly than a friend who had married and found that he had no time to pursue his own interests: But wait, not so fast: Is there such a contrast...

...But his unwillingness to sacrifice honesty and integrity involves him in arrogance and cowardice and cruelty to Camille...

...Jurassic Park is by far the best of the summer blockbusters because it does exactly what it sets out to do...

...Cliffhanger is even rated "R" (for language...

...A huge pile of dinosaur doodoo can only be bettered by watching Laura Dern stick her arms into it up to the elbow: "You will remember to wash your hands before you eat...

...It's all right, she says, she resn't want to change him...

...don't you see the danger of what you are doing...

...But she made her life a commercially viable property on the silver screen by cutting it to fit a pattern the constant reiteration of which amounts to a myth for our times...

...This so upsets Camille that she makes at't appalling scene in a restaurant, and Maxime, taking her part, strikes him...

...Perhaps he suffers from another kind of infantile fantasy—the sort that long ago seized Woody Allen with the desire to be Ingmar Bergman...

...No, he also has worthy sentiments, moral ideas of a particularly high-toned kind that appeal to a child's sense of the mysterious and the elemental...

...The partners then split up, Camille recovers from her infatuation, and Stéphane is left to reflect on what he has lost...

...asks the professor...

...Love is full of such contradictions, which a man of Stéphane's honesty will not allow to compromise his self-possession...

...The myth in this life of Tina Turner is no less mythical for being based on Tina's own cleaned-up version of her real-life story...

...Sometimes, it is true, men do mess up women's lives...

...Then, in the next breath, she tells him he should be less enclosed and that she can help, him to relax...

...There is a wonderful and heart-wrenching moment when the beautiful and hitherto icily selfcontained Mlle...

...Above all, there is the neat gross stuff...

...In some sense they choose to live without love because the sacrifice of their desire is more delicious to them than its fulfillment would be...