The Talkies / Clueless

...Although all the characters are clearly...

...Of course that, too, is a dangerous act, tempting to the lightning bolts of the Almighty...

...Ho (Haing S. Ngor), when he tells the dying Keaton that he has to "listen to your heart" and "forgive," which means making peace with the family he has long been ashamed of and quarreling with...

...Is this not a curious thing for a man who calls his headquarters "the War Room" to say...

...Altman would have profited by a little more focus, but it is also true that his strength is in the diversity of his vignettes, whose cumulative effect is an almost Dickensian portrait of a society...

...Nor, for that matter, is the yuppie metaphysics of Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplays for Ghost and Jacob's Ladder and now directs My Life, starring Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman...

...Where is God...

...Instead it is a driving, minimalist, Baraka-like sound that reeks of Windham Hill and the New Age...

...There is no reason to love...

...He must overcome it by learning to love Rosie and help her over her post-traumatic illness...

...Likewise, the music, by Michael Steams, is typical New Age stuff that sounds like a distant echo of traditional tonality and whose Reichian minimalism provides an accompaniment to the visual imagery that suggests distance, mystery, other-worldliness: the kind of thing they broadcast in a show I used to hear occasionally on my local Public Radio station called "Music from the Hearts of Space...

...It eliminates language and drama, James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...The whole damn family...

...In Family of Man style, they provide a wordless tour of evocative places and people around the world in a big, 70mm knockout show designed to create the illusion of escape from human limitations with the help of big nature (mountains, sky, waterfalls) and geometric patterns...

...Like Nashville, it involves a huge cast of characters (and the list of fine performances he gets out of his actors is too lengthy to enumerate) whose stories are intricately interwoven...

...Keaton discovers that he has terminal cancer just as his wife has become pregnant with his first and (presumably) only child and decides to make a videotape of his life story while he is still able to get around, so that his son will know something of him after he is gone...

...Ho's New Age message to look into "the light of self, source of all healing...

...It is a pleasant conceit, but it turns out to be incidental to the film's real concern, which is feel-good spirituality...

...individualized, they are united by the fact that they have no direction in their lives and feel vaguely threatened and apprehensive all the time...

...Unfortunately, it is slamming shut on all hippies and New Agers whose momentary buzz of Olympian detachment is not to be confused with the real world sub specie aetemitatis...

...Where are the Last Things...

...This film itself, by portraying Carville and George Stephanopoulos as the Hindenburg and Ludendorff of the campaign, is itself the proof, if proof were needed, that this was no hippie crusade...

...Like Jeff Bridges at his most alienated, the people in this film have no idea why things happen, but, unlike him, they all carry on anyway just as if they did...

...Because it is so obviously out of place, the conceit of the repressed woman liberated (like her music) by sex (adulterous sex, of course...

...Also contributing to this impression is a curious sort of unity of character...

...And we are interested in the fate of every one of them...

...But only Altman could express it with the lightness and humor—bland, flip, cynical—that saves Short Cuts from becoming oppressive or despairing...

...The favorite angle is the aerial photo of frenetic or massive movement a long way away and reduced to a kind of screen-saver ballet of abstract motion...

...A part from the rhetoric, which fitfully troubles—or inspires—the dreams of power of Bill Clinton or James Carville, the great New Age contribution to national life has been the cult of self-fulfillment, which the film industry has fallen for with even more enthusiasm and dedication than Pennebaker has fallen for the Clinton campaign...

...and its long, slow pans along a panoramic vista, or zooming into and out of a shot of a face with natural framing (e.g., a door or a window), emphasize the relationship between movement and stasis...

...j eff and Rosie do not get laid but they do get well, which is much better among those inclined, like Peter Weir, to trumpet forth the twin triumphs of normality and mental hygiene...

...He gets all choked up telling them that they have changed the way that modern political campaigns are run: instead of a rigid hierarchical structure in which the orders came down from on high, they "showed that you could be trusted," he tells them, to do it in their own, New Age way, with everybody doing her or his own thing and everything just sort of working out...

...Every one...

...One of this kind of music's little tricks is to introduce in the midst of its eerie-sounding chords an occasional synthesized boom that sounds like a door slamming in heaven...

...Here, much more than in the New Age Baraka—or, indeed, than in any American film you are likely to see these days—here really is the world sub specie aeternitatis...

...Far be it from me to quarrel with the words of the Chinese healer, Mr...

...Clueless by James Bowman B ack in the sixties there was a pic- ture book that appealed to college students who were, like me, of a sensitive disposition It was called The Family of Man and consisted of candid photographs of mostly poor and ethnic people from around the world whose combination of exoticism and pathos made you feel warmly sympathetic and superior all at the same time...

...There is a tired, skeptical, almost nihilistic sensibility behind such a film, which is that of Raymond Carver, on several of whose short stories the film was based, less than it is of Robert Altman...

...The danger is that it all begins to look rather soap-operaish and melodramatic by the time of the fourth fatality among the film's most pathos-ridden women and children (the slaughter of women, together with the nudity, has contributed to the charge of misogyny against the film...

...Passion will make enough demands on us without our seeking it out...

...His New Democratic crocodile tears are merely eye-service, the tribute that all Clintonites pay to their old dream of love and equality on their way to a ruthless seizure of power...

...It is what lies behind Bridges's extreme emotional detachment and the seemingly insuperable barrier that his near-death experience has erected between himself and his wife, played by Isabella Rossellini, and his small son...

...All we have of them is the triviality of Michael Keaton in a roller coaster, riding no hands into the bright light of eternity, and Mr...

...Life, that is, has about it the arbitrariness of the earthquake, which is both climax and anti-climax in the film, so it seems equally pointless to pursue any end passionately—even love...

...Very good advice...

...But Jeff doesn't really believe in the Almighty...

...The American Spectator January 1994 55...

...But there seems no limit to the credulity of the apparently sober New Ager, as the election of Bill Clinton attests...

...social constraint, especially that imposed by families or old-fashioned, authoritarian governments, is bad...

...Another antipodean director, Peter Weir, does rather better with Fearless, a frequently brilliant and moving film which only begins to go wrong when it chooses from among the range of issues it raises to make its main concern the therapeutic indications involved in post-traumatic stress syndrome...

...Even very well-made films like Steve Kloves's Flesh and Bone or Jane Campion's The Piano, although they can be admired for the skill with which they say what they have to say, have in the end nothing else to say but that: Personal happiness is good...

...Carville may have got what he wanted by energy, wit, charisma, and powers of persuasion rather than an authoritarian person54 The American Spectator January 1994 ality or habits of deference in those he led, but he was obviously as much in charge of that campaign as anyone could have been and led it in the direction he knew would take Bill Clinton to the White House...

...As the title suggests, the book was designed to boost the one-world ideal that was becoming so disastrously influential at the time, but it could also be considered as a founding document of the New Age consciousness, an early exercise in putting as much psychic space as possible between one's endlessly fascinating self and other people so that it becomes possible to "love" them all...

...He does absurd and dangerousthings in the belief that he is invulnerable—or perhaps that he doesn't care what happens to him, since his revelation in the crash was that the hour of his death had arrived and he wasn't afraid...

...It is especially distressing that Miss Campion's beautiful succession of images done in rich Victorian sepia tones is ultimately in the service of nothing more interesting or original than condemnation of the repression of Victorian sexuality and men's treatment of women and white men's treatment of the aboriginal Maoris of New Zealand...

...Jeff Bridges plays an architect who, having survived a plane crash that kills a large number of people, including his business partner, becomes Fearless...

...The best they can hope for is an occasional moment of humor or love or connection, a reaffirmation of a relationship in spite of the incomprehension that engulfs it...

...But it leaves gaping open certain obvious questions about the mysteries of human life and death and the hereafter...

...This is a point of view that deserves to be taken seriously, but Weir treats it as a sickness...

...Pennebaker's adulatory cinema verite documentary about the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, when James Carville stands up on election eve, once they know they are going to win, to address the campaign workers...

...Nowadays, a quarter of a century on, our love has been stretched even further, to encompass the whole "planet"—which word is frequently used to describe the entirety of our experience of the external world in order to diminish it, to pretend to the sort of godlike perspective that the more notorious hallucinogenic drugs are supposed to produce...

...y ou would think that, whatever other impossibilities of faith we might be able to swallow, we would have to be stoned out of our minds to believe that the secrets of eternity are to be found in "the light of self...

...Where is Judgment...

...I prefer the wry, the witty, the cynical vision of the Movie of the Month, Short Cuts—which isthe best thing Robert Altman has done since Nashville but without Nashville's political tendentiousness...

...There is a moment in The War Room, D.A...

...The film aspires to emulate an abstract painting...

...Moreover, in a film where everything Victorian is carefully re-created in every detail, there is no effort to disguise the music, which is so important to the film's central characters, as Victorian...

...Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson, the makers of Baraka (the title is a Sufi word meaning either "spirit" or "blessing"), are among those who are addicted to the sense of power that comes from being patronizing toward the universe...

...looks equally anachronistic...

...And, as he tells his fellow crash survivor, played by Rosie Perez, "If it makes no sense, there is no reason to do anything...

...Their fears have to do with the big world outside—the world of crime and accidents and earthquakes and Malathion spray—but also with inexplicable discontinuities and disasters in their personal relationships...

...Having first experienced at age 13, when his father died, the randomness with which death may strike, the crash confirms him in a kind of super-fatalism, a resolute refusal to believe that anyone has any control over his destiny...

...At one point he crosses a busy street without looking and, having got to the other side, shouts with a laugh to the heavens: "You want to kill me but you can't...