The Talkies / Pitt Bull

...But those who have it easy often like to pass the time by conjuring up a world of sorrows-or of wickedness, corruption, and violence to fright themselves with...

...Death is the silence of death...

...Derville, although he is a representative of the sleazy commercial world that has succeeded the heroic Napoleonic era, is a more noble figure than Count Ferraud, who is weak and greedy and inclined to divorce his wife because her Napoleonic connections are making it difficult for him to obtain advancement at the restored Bourbon court...

...He is engaged to the beauteous Susannah (Julia Ormond), a woman whom both of his brothers and his father also fall in love with...

...The old ones say that when a man and an animal spill each other's blood, they become one," the Indian narrator tells us...

...Like Bernard Rose, he is going to an awful lot of trouble to extract from history just so much as will serve to reinforce his own prejudices and predilections...

...Then he locks it against her...

...The tale is narrated by an Indian who is to all appearances ancient when the story begins, sometime in the first James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...But at length he redeems himself by killing the agents of the damn government himself, and he and his father and brother are all reconciled...

...There it is less yuppie angst than left-wing politics that makes everybody associated with the Valois court of the late sixteenth century into a moral monster...

...What, then, is the point of burdening the music with irrelevant and rather laughable images of the young Beethoven floating in a lake under a starry sky as a kind of visual analogue...

...Poor things...

...He will take nothing from her...

...Conservatives, I suppose, should be sympathetic to the notion that the damn government is the enemy of romance, but the mindlessness of its demonization in Legends of the Fall or two others of this month's films, Bad Company and Murder in the First, ought to worry us...

...Death is silence," he has told Derville, remembering the battlefield...

...This film, too, seems at times a weird survival...

...How they moan and complain about how "life is tough" for them...

...Bad Company offers us a world where government and big business meet that is exclusively populated by moral slimebags and where the one left standing at the end is a civilian bimbo and the least morally loathsome of the lot...

...So when Tristan, for no discernible reason, develops itchy feet and abandons his incipient relationship with Susannah in order to do romantic things like sail the Pacific single-handed or hunt big game in Africa, it is "the Bear's voice growling in him...

...Of course, if it were really tough, they wouldn't have the leisure to complain about it so...

...He tells us that Tristan as a boy tangled with a grizzly bear (played by Bart the Bear, who does the best acting in the film) and was raked with its claws before getting a bit of his own back by cutting off one of the claws with his knife...

...And so he retreats to the madhouse, which is, after all, the only place for him in a world where "my fate is not to be dead...

...You love him for it...

...Is not the last movement of the Ninth symphony a compelling work...

...As Colonel Chabert has it, what went before was a heroic age and what came after was an age of pettiness, greed, corruption, and dishonor...

...It was the way of the modem world...

...If her husband should ever find out that he is alive, he will have the perfect excuse to divorce her and marry again into a more suitable noble family...

...But what else can you expect of a film whose idea of historical sophistication is Isabella Rossellini as the Countess Erdody explaining: "But then Napoleon showed that he was no different from any aristocrat...

...The film opens with gruesome scenes of the aftermath of battle-naked corpses being piled up in a pit in the snow after the battle of Eylau in 1807-followed immediately by the bustle of life in a Parisian lawyer's office in 1817 when the eponymous colonel (Gerard Depardieu), supposedly killed at Eylau, suddenly reappears...

...and so can now claim the distinction of having starred in two of the worst films ever made before the age of 21...

...Here is the life that should be his, which he is resurrected to enjoy for a day before realizing that it is not for him...

...Alfred joins the damn by James Bowman government as a congressman and becomes corrupt, naturally...

...Well, that's romance for you...

...These are the wicked aristocrats denounced by the Countess Erdody, after all...

...A much more convincing view of the past is to be found in the Movie of the Month, Colonel Chabert by Yves Angelo...

...It rather reminds me of Michael Apted's Nell, which can find in that perennially fascinating §ubject, the feral human being, nothing of more interest than the balm that the wild woman played by Jodie Foster can be imagined as applying to the yuppie soul...

...Derville is a wonderfully Balzacian character-a man who never sleeps and who is capable of doing ten things at once...

...Not only the most skillful, we might add, but one who has played the unexpectedly returned soldier before in The Return of Martin Guerre-only in that case he had been a fraud...

...57 The American Spectator March 1995 Actually, the more offensive thing about this film is that it treats Beethoven's works as program music-a mere narrative accompaniment to an account of his personal life, especially his supposed sexual adventures and the supposed childhood trauma of being beaten by his drunken father...

...Does it not engage and move us...

...We see him in his bedroom late at night, looking at his reflection in the mirror, intercut with shots of the Countess sitting on her bed expectantly...

...This he does with the realization, arrived at through a subtle psychological dance over a dinner a deux, that the Countess, the woman he has loved, will do anything to preserve her money and social position...

...The power of innocence" advertised on the posters is really the power to make spoilt rich people feel better, like some new and exotic drug...

...Rose uses both history and music not for their own beauties but to tell us something, invariably uninteresting, about himself...

...Tristan's wanderings are accompanied by big sky shots and big sea shots...

...But Oldman shows that he hasn't lost his touch in Immortal Beloved, by Bernard Rose, another costume drama whose claims to historical authenticity, such as they are, are as laughable as the overheated romance that it attributes to the life of Beethoven...

...The Indian maiden whom Tristan does marry (of course, he still loves Susannah) is killed by the damn government, which has killed so many of her race before her...

...His children are all that restrain him from being rid of her, so she sets out to make her position firmer by paying off the resurrected Chabert...

...Such an obviously 1990s point of view looks even sillier transported into the 1940s than it otherwise would...

...Played straight like this in our postmodem age, it puts one a little in awe of its sheer bare-faced chutzpah...

...Having been rescued from a mass grave by some Prussian peasants, he has been nursed back to health and then spent most of the interim in jails or madhouses for claiming to be the dead colonel...

...I don't propose to address these latter two pictures in detail...

...Susannah can't bear that she has married the wrong brother and kills herself...

...So all ends happily, apart from the fact that all the women are dead...

...For once it is Kevin Bacon who is doing the overacting here and not Gary Oldman, who plays the sadistic warden...

...Everybody was betrayed...

...The three boys go off to fight the First World War, slogging through the trenches in their dress uniforms, but only two come back, the brooding and saturnine Alfred (Quinn) and the romantic nature boy with the flowing mane of golden hair, Tristan (Pitt...

...The Colonel knows that his wife no longer loves him, but he resists the dishonor of having "sold my girl"-even to get part of his own fortune back...

...This is crass and philistine as well as historically suspect, and it imposes late twentieth-century attitudes on early nineteenth-century people...

...The Colonel goes to the door of his room, lingering for a moment...

...Murder in the First goes back into the past in order to confirm yet again the only two things that the devoted American moviegoer knows about prisons: that all the convicts who are not innocent are guilty only of the most triv-ial and justified crimes, and that the guards and wardens are psychopaths and sadists who routinely torture prisoners and abuse their authority...

...He explains (in one of the film's two or three lightly postmodern touches) that it will have been worth it to him even if the man turns out to be a fraud, since, if he is, he is "the most skillful actor of our time...

...She will even sleep with him in order to get what she wants-his silence...

...Besides Pitt, the film stars Anthony Hopkins as the pioneer patriarch and former Indian fighter who has come to loathe "the government" and all it stands for, Aidan Quinn as the jealous older brother, and Henry Thomas as the adorable but doomed younger brother...

...He continues to have flashbacks of the battlefield at Eylau, including a gorgeous cavalry charge in the snow, done in slow motion and in silence except for the contrasting sounds of Schubert's Piano Sonata D. 959...

...But nowadays, costume dramas often get the costumes right while getting everything else ludicrously wrong...

...Thomas was once the little boy in E.T...

...Throughout the film the battlefield is white, Paris is gray, and the fully polychromatic world only appears at the Countess's country estate, where she and the Colonel retreat to negotiate a settlement...

...Legends of the Fall by Edward Zwick is a Harlequin Romance brought to the screen as a vehicle for the teen heartthrob, Brad Pitt, apparently without irony or any sense of its own absurdity...

...When Chabert finally returns to find that his wife (Fanny Ardant) has remarried and is using his fortune to forward the career of her new husband, the Count Ferraud (Andre Dussollier), Derville immediately believes his improbable story and agrees to represent him...

...decade of this century, yet who outlives Tristan, who dies in 1963...

...For him the past is a quaint old junk shop crammed with new possibilities for artistic tackiness...

...Tristan's always been wild," Alfred tells Susannah, who doesn't love him but marries him anyway...

...That is, around the great divide of 1815 and the final defeat of Napoleon...

...But it still seems very strange to me that even a lefty like Chereau could expect anyone to care what happens to this crowd, who are just rats fighting in a barrel-or that he cares himself...

...How happy an ending this is I leave to those who care...

...I have contracted an incurable illness," he writes the lawyer: "disgust with human nature...

...Not only is it wonderfully true to the spirit of the Balzac novel from which it was adapted, but it also makes us see again the world as Balzac saw it...

...There is something about the fashion-consciousness and the selfabsorption, which are hallmarks of Tinseltown, that makes it particularly difficult to escape from the limitations of the present in order to see the world as our ancestors saw it...

...They think that the worse people are, the more real they are, which is what produces such pictures as Bad Company or the French historical epic, Queen Margot, by Patrice Chdreau...

...O 58 The American Spectator March 1995...

...The madhouse," he informs the lawyer Derville (Fabrice Luchini), "is the worst that can happen to a man...