The Talkies / Lost and Profound

...And while that trick may be acceptable in an action/adventure movie, it cheapens and trivializes the enormity of the Holocaust...

...B ut it is another way in which Hollywood's ersatz profundity mocks moral seriousness...

...0 for a film that would hymn the delights of duty...

...When her two small boys are greeted by a giantess of an aunt saying that she could just eat them up, they flee in terror...

...When the man she buys the flat from asks her what she does she replies: "Absolutely nothing...

...D. says, and, with love, "you will be together in your hearts...

...But she is unable, finally, to achieve it...

...Unfortunately, as Hollywood is a place almost devoid of serious-mindedness, the trick rarely fools the more discerning critics—unless, that is, it is done with some connection to either the Holocaust or the Kennedy assassination...

...And by the fifth time we see an utterly unfeeling Nazi officer shoot a helpless Jew in the head at close range and watch the blood stain the snow, we can assume that even they have got the message...

...Kieslowski deals not with duty but with its converse, freedom, in a way which reveals its limits...

...She throws the unfinished manuscript of her husband's concerto in the garbage and gives away everything she owns, except for enough money to live comfortably in a flat in Paris...

...The nearest we are likely to get is Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue—the latest in our long succession of relatively obscure European Movies of the Month...

...Freedom for her is safety—freedom from ties to life and other people in all their heartbreaking perishability...

...And "if you see a chance to be happy, you grab it with both hands...

...I have nothing against motiveless benignity any more than I do motiveless malignity, but it must be a curiosity...

...W ith Schindler's List, Spielberg has gone from making children's movies for adults to making an adults' movie for children...

...Not surprisingly, he blows his brains out...

...The success story is a true one—or a basically true one: that of Le Ly Hayslip (Hiep Thi Le), who has written two volumes of memoirs purporting to show how the life of an innocent and happy Vietnamese peasant girl was shattered by war...

...He portrays amusingly the romance of con84 The American Spectator February 1994 sumerism in Le Ly's first, wide-eyed encounters, to the accompaniment of a Beethoven minuet and the Strauss waltz, "Voices of Spring," with huge Americans and their huge, well-stocked refrigerators and supermarkets...

...I have the whole world") of bungee jumping—an image of freedom-not-quite...

...Large-scale action sequences, such as the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto or the herding of people into what may or may not be a gas chamber at Auschwitz, are done with great skill and suspense, but they depend on the reduction of those involved to units in an ensemble motivated only by the most elemental of passions...

...In other words, there is almost nothing from ordinary experience to cling to, and in art as in life that is a nightmare, not a rational experience...

...She can't resist making tentative attachments with new people, as she helps her neighbor, a prostitute, and visits her senile mother in a nursing home...

...These are the ties that bind," Mrs...

...My first wife taught me a real lesson in life," poor Steve tells Le Ly early on in their relationship: "I need a good oriental woman...

...Itzak Stern, his Jewish accountant (Ben Kingsley), and the sadistic Nazi commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes)—who have as many as two dimensions, and all of them remain opaque in the end...

...Maybe (I doubt it) there could be a work of dramatic fiction which would make living characters out of the participants in this historical drama and so lend immediacy to it, as the stories of Prince Andrei and Natasha and Pierre in War and Peace do to the Napoleonic wars...

...Doubtfire...

...These are the two subjects whose moral import is beyond question even to the most cynical...

...Schindler, were really very bad guys indeed...

...There, her mother watches pictures on television ("I have television," she says proudly...

...But the parents certainly do...

...Admittedly, the all-American success story is fraught with irony and the religion is Buddhism, but you can't have everything, can you...

...The Nazis are evil personified, the Jews are reduced to the level of animals, and Schindler himself goes from a caricature of greed and corruption to a caricature of compassion and humanity, with no stops in between...

...We have no more clue why Amon Goeth slaughters Jews at random with a high powered rifle from the balcony of his house than we have why Oskar Schindler saves them at considerable risk to himself...

...That, perhaps, would be asking for too much, although the children's animatedfeature, Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm, does at least raise the issue in a sympathetic way...

...She has to endure a lecture from her surviving brother, full of the same self-pity that is the keynote of Born on the Fourth of July, about how much her family has suffered on account of the Americans (apparently they had, among other things, used their own excrement to grow vegetables, which is suffering from stupidity, not Americans), but her mother speaks for the film's quasi-Buddhist sensibility when she tells her that by coming back "you have completed a cycle of growth...

...The climax of the film comes with Le Ly's return to Vietnam as a prosperous American businesswoman and mother of two strapping sons...

...The sequence in which she first encounters the USA is the best thing in the film and it points up Stone's own ambivalence about his native land...

...Having borne an illegitimate child to a South Vietnamese grandee, she meets and marries an American marine sergeant named Steve (Tommy Lee Jones) and comes with him from the political collapse of Vietnam to live in San Diego...

...The only survivor is his wife, Julie (Juliette Bincoche), who attempts to come to terms with her grief at the loss of husband and child by liberating herself from all human entanglements...

...They are all traps...

...A French composer whose concerto in celebration of this festival is, rather improbably, eagerly awaited by all Europe is killed, along with his daughter, in a car crash...

...Just look at the pious yuppie clichés that festoon the ending of Mrs...

...Spielberg's claim was entered at Christmastime with Schindler's List, a film that shares with the Indiana Jones sagas a certain glibness in identifying evil by dressing it in a Nazi uniform...

...and the expectation is, as it is with Stone, that we are to get something political...

...From his simple-minded treatment of the Kennedy assassination, Stone has now returned to his simple-minded treatments of Vietnam with Heaven and Earth, the third in what he rather grandly refers to as a "trilogy" begun by Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July...

...But Spielberg does not do character...

...I doubt it...

...But somehow, to Stone, this does not prevent Le Ly from being a noble representative of her suffering people, who wins through to personal and spiritual fulfillment in spite of the awful things done to her by men, including her violent and abusive husband—who at least can blame his behavior on the USMC and right-wing anti-Communists...

...In Schindler's List there are only three characters—Schindler (Liam Neeson), James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Even Robin Williams's ever-amusing antics are scarcely enough to make up to us for having to sit through his character's assurances, more to the adults than to the ostensible audience of children, that there are all kinds of families and that it's all right if mummies and daddies split up so long as there is LOVE...

...We knew that...

...We'll have you and the kids back to normal in no time," she is told, as if "normal" meant to her what it does to Steve's family in suburban San Diego...

...Like Oliver Stone he advertises it as part of a trilogy—one to be based on the colors of the French flag...

...her sister became a prostitute, and she herself claims to have endured some pretty improbable torture at the hands of the Americans and rape by the Vietcong...

...It is an appalling sight...

...But instead of a submissive and adoring little lotus blossom he finds that he has got one tough cookie, who demands her own career, makes a packet in real estate and spends her spare time nagging him about his drinking, his business failures, and his interest in guns...

...It is therefore not surprising that Hollywood's two slightest but most pretentious directors, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone, have made those two subjects, respectively, their own...

...This is definitely Oliver Stone territory...

...Such religiose sentimentalism slathered over the ending like lard is themark, it seems, of Oliver Stone's middle-aged mellowing...

...But the film has really nothing more to say to us than that the Nazis, all except Mr...

...Spielberg might claim that the film is beyond criticism for that reason, but then we may ask why it was made at all...

...But Heaven and Earth reveals two new aspects to Stone's work that we have not seen heretofore: he celebrates an all-American success story, and he has got religion...

...She tells a friend that she wants no possessions, no belongings, no friends, no lovers...

...It may not be the most profound of statements, but it is a genuinely serious one...

...When someone asks to see her because "it's important," she replies: "Nothing's important...

...When both the bad and the good are equally motiveless, you get the feeling that the dramatist has not done his work properly...

...Do kids really fall for such guff...

...Moreover, there is no sense whatever here of the political realities that allowed such things to happen...

...This leads Le Ly herself to conclude that "it is wrong to resist fate" and that it is "the role of suffering to bring us closer to God" and that "lasting victories are won in the heart and not in this land or that...

...She had two brothers in the Vietcong, one of them killed, her father was killed by government forces, and her mother very nearly killed by the VC...

...It is the children, who don't have much use for subtleties of character anyway, who need to be told...

...It is thus a delicious, if perhaps unintended, irony, when the American consumerist paradise really does become normal for her...

...But politics is present only by its ironic absence—and by frequent reference to a forthcoming festival of European Union which takes on almost a comic irrelevance...

...0 The American Spectator February 1994 85...

...Ultimately, Olivier (Benoit Regent), a former collaborator of her husband's, persuades her to help him, because of his great love for her, to complete the concerto—which thus becomes the symbol both of an impossible ideal of political unity and, on the personal level, of all that ties people together in spite of themselves...

...A lot of conservatives are no doubt prepared to hate this picture just because of the earlier two, and it's true that there is more than a little residue herein of the pretentious, anti-American, self-pitying, boring, leftie tosh to be found in those earlier films...

...Some people in Greater Los Angeles apparently believe this to be both wise and profound...

...Yet who in the rest of the world does not know that we are at least as likely to regret the risks we do take, and that no one in the culture out of which this film comes ever does anything but grab for happiness with both hands...

...Similarly, the fine acting of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in Grumpy Old Men is not enough to compensate for the would-be profundity of its message of self-fulfillment: "The only things in life that you regret are the risks that you don't take," it tells us...