The Talkies / Same Old, Same Old

...But now that that wave has broken and left the Lindsays of the world looking rather bedraggled on the sand, that seems a merely piffling conclusion...

...It is a strange, quirky film by that strange, quirky director, Lasse HallstrOm, whose delightful movie, My Life as a Dog, got him a ticket to Hollywood from his native Sweden a few years back...

...inhibition-ridden bourgeois couple (a vicar and his wife, forsooth...

...Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould by Francois Girard is a fascinating account of the life of the late steel-fingered Canadian pianist and eccentric...

...She means that she wants her marriage to be unlike those that she actually knows...

...Gilbert works in the grocery store in the center of the old town as a bag and delivery and stock boy—a general dogsbody...

...He asks: "Why did you...

...He appears to take no joy in the relationship, and she is too neurotic to do so, yet they cling to each other with a kind of desperation...

...China Moon by John Bailey is a rare contemporary example of an old-fashioned, film noir–style thriller that is played straight...

...But it is her memory of her mother, who left the family The American Spectator April/May 1994 67 when she was a child, which becomes the key to understanding that private romance...

...that you would never leave...

...In a moment of panic she leaves the baby with her stepmother and runs off to Texas to find her real mother...

...and Angie...

...But he is as much wedged in as she is, which is why it becomes a great liberation for him, after she dies, to burn the house down with her body in it, in order to spare her the final humiliation of being removed with a crane...

...What is interesting and well observed here is that, to Angie (and to many another besides), "normal" doesn't mean "usual" or "average" or "commonplace" but something like their opposite...

...T he Movie of the Month, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, is a bit more sophisticated...

...Vinnie is happy about the pregnancy, and they make plans to marry...

...We might as well have reticence back again...

...Leonardo DiCaprio, who did a fine job as the hero of This Boy's Life, turns in a stunning performance as Arnie, fully worthy of the Academy Award for which it was nominated...

...Grab for the Gusto...

...Her ideas of normality and of the world outside her own neighborhood are based on a kind of private romance that she is only half aware of herself...

...Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald play the James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...But everybody shops at Food Land, a big new supermarket outside of town, and the store and the downtown are going rapidly down hill...

...For one thing, she has before her eyes as a kind of marital memento mori the marriage of her best friend, Tina (Aida Turturro), and her husband, Jerry, an unemployed lout who verbally abuses and belittles his wife in public...

...it was as if he was already dead...

...who must maneuver through images of naked women and burgeoning nature only to arrive at what looks like a compromise between old-fashioned reticence and modesty and the great wave of boldness, immodesty, and self-exposure that the likes of Lindsay rode into the twentieth century...

...Flight of the Innocent is a visually stunning first feature from the Italian director Carlo Carlei...

...And modesty...

...This Angie realizes most unexpectedly...

...He was just sort of there...

...And he manages to make duty look more romantic than self-indulgence...

...Yet even after her death he stays...

...Angie (Geena Davis) is an Italian working-class girl from Brooklyn who is working in Manhattan for a computer magazine—seemingly on the lower rungs of the ladder of social mobility, but nevertheless on her way (slowly) upward...

...and she has to think a moment before answering: "Because I knew that you would always be here...

...Gilbert is rather in awe of this self-proclaimed"worldly kind of girl" who has been to more places than he even knew existed...

...This is the moment of Angie's epiphany, as she looks into those dead eyes and says: "I always thought you left us for something better, and I was going to do the same...

...Gilbert now shares'Arnie's delighted expectation of the procession of the silver sausages with which the film begins...

...People do things they regret doing, but they go on doing them anyway...

...My view is that anyone lucky enough to be making movies out of Hollywood should jolly well stay out of Hollywood, but HallstrOm's compromise has produced something that, if not quite of the first rank, bears comparison with any of the European films he could have been making instead...

...Gilbert has a younger brother, about to turn 18, called Arnie, who is an imbecile and has to be watched at every moment lest he put himself in mortal peril...

...Promise me that we're going to be normal...

...When Vinnie asks Angie to marry him, she says, "Promise me we're not going to turn out like Tina and Jerry...

...When he compliments her on the way she looks, she replies: "I'm not into that, the whole external beauty thing...

...And, by Jove, perhaps we might if the myth is as dead as this movie makes it appear...

...Follow Your Bliss...

...1J 68 The American Spectator April/May 1994...

...You can see that kind of lumpish passivity in him too, but somehow harsh necessity has filled up the moral vacancy with a kind of solidity that catches you by surprise...

...On the contrary, it is an exercise in titillation that takes the prototypical twentieth-century myth as a mere pretext, to lend itself the completely false appearance of seriousness...

...One definition of the word "myth" is a story that people don't get tired' of telling—or hearing...

...In fact, it is apparent that even Duigan doesn't really believe in this story anymore, not as his hero, Norman Lindsay (Sam Neill), believes in it...

...The former is a lot better than the latter, but some credit should be given to Angie, by Martha Coolidge, for at least looking seriously at issues of moral responsibility and critically at the creed of self-fulfillment...

...Instead, she goes back to the baby, who is now desperately ill, nurses him back to health, and resolves in the final frames, to the accompaniment of a great many uplifting thoughts, to reject the romantic "normality" of fantasy in favor of the real normality of motherhood...

...Gilbert is having an affair with Betty Carver (Mary Steenburgen), the wife of the local insurance agent, who is bored to distraction with her husband and her children and her life...

...Arnie still needs looking after, and Gilbert is still the only one who can do the job...

...The town is grim, tacky, and dying, a place "like dancing tono music...

...and The Ref by Ted Demme is a hilarious look at modern marriage and the therapeutic culture...

...But Angie is pushing 30, and, still living in the old neighborhood near her father and stepmother, she has a hankering for something else, something more than her prospective life with Vinnie...

...It's very true to life...

...I n Hollywood, the great myth of the century usually gets reduced to something a lot simpler, something that can be summed up in the Rabelaisian motto, Do as thou wilt...

...It is nice to hear such a relatively grown-up message from the Hollywood message-machine for a change, but it is the kind of thing that fifty or a hundred years ago would have seemed so ordinary—so normal, in fact—that it could hardly have served as the theme for anything more artistically elevated than a women's magazine...

...And pat here it comes—here two of them come, in fact: What's Eating Gilbert Grape...

...Gilbert is dumbstruck...

...He replies: "It is big," and she tries to explain to him why you need a bigger word than big for the bigness of the sky...

...Into his life comes Becky (Juliette Lewis) and her grandmother, an Airstream caravaneer who is passing through the town when her truck breaks down...

...The story is of Gilbert (Johnny Depp), aged about 20, who lives with his mother, two sisters, and brother in a little town called Endora, Iowa...

...Two months ago, in disgust with the Hollywood gospel of self-fulfillment as preached yet again in Grumpy Old Men, I cried out in these pages: "Oh for a film that would hymn the delights of duty...

...The baby is born with a club arm and related birth defects...

...Arnie's favorite sport is to climb the town's water tower and thus cause the police to be called...

...Gilbert knows he has to stay because of his mother and because of Arnie and because, maybe, he doesn't know anywhere else to go...

...Part of this consists of an unfulfilled interest in art, which leads her into an affair with a worldly-wise (and married) Irishman (Stephen Rea), whom she meets in the Metropolitan Museum...

...On another occasion they are watching the sunset together, and she says to him: "I love the sky...

...To make matters worse, Gilbert's mother (Darlene Cates, discovered on the Sally Jessy Raphael show) is enormously fat-500 pounds or more—and sits in front of the TV all day...

...He says, in shame at his mother's fatness, that she is "attached" to the house and then, correcting himself, says, more like "wedged in" to it...

...Gilbert keeps promising that it won't happen again...

...It's what you do that really matters...

...But for those of us who remain skeptics about this myth, there may be reason to take heart from the perfunctoriness of Duigan's retelling of it...

...But in her mother she finds, instead of the romantic figure who used to do crazy things like dancing in the snow, a genuinely crazy person: a schizophrenic...

...The point of the movie, as so often these days, seems to be the photography, the acting, and the costuming, and the loving re-creation of another time and place...

...Angie is convinced that it does not like her...

...But there is a new hope associated with the return of the Airstream caravaneers and Becky and her grandmother the next year...

...But in Endora everything happens again, seemingly endlessly...

...She gets pregnant by Vinnie (James Gandolfmi), a plumber and very Bensonhurst type who has, been her boyfriend since the ninth grade...

...For, let's face it, Women in Love this movie isn't...

...Lindsay also believes in Atlantis and reincarnation and socialism and other fantastical superstitions that were the natural concomitants of sexual liberation in the 1930s, but the only one of his beliefs that Duigan enthusiastically shares is his belief in the admittedly abundant charms of Elle McPherson, Tara Fitzgerald, Kate Fischer, and Portia de Rossi, whose naked bodies Lindsay represents in a series of leering, kitschy paintings...

...The police naturally do not appreciate this and keep threatening to arrest the boy...

...Gilbert seems such a nonentity only until you get to know him, when in fact he is enormously "there...

...Once, in discussing his father, Gilbert says: "He didn't give anything...

...0 ther recommended films this month are Where the Rivers Flow North by Jay Cravin, if you're lucky enough to find a place where it is playing...

...More seriously, it does not want to suckle...

...His father hanged himself in 1978 in the basement of the house he had, rather badly, built and in which the rest of the family still lives...

...And Sirens recycles the greatest, most potent myth of the twentieth century, which is the story of the "repressed" or "inhibited" person who makes a delighted, liberating self-discovery as soon as he—or, more usually, she—gets rid of her repressions and drops her inhibitions along with her drawers...

...He never steps out of character as the retarded boy, yet at the same time he generates an enormous charm that makes the love he inspires in Gilbert utterly believable...

...And that's the trouble...

...At one point when Gilbert disappoints her she says to him: "I could have had any guy, but I chose you...

...it's so limitless...

...Sitting in complete silence in the back room of a sister's house, she is a sad, bedraggled remnant of humanity, trapped inside her own head as only the mad can be, and radiating malevolence to all the world outside...