The Talkies / Family Rhapsody
Bowman, James
Family Rhapsody by James Bowman L ike the recent Houseguest, Herbert Ross's Boys on the Side makes use of the welt-worn Hollywood motif of the funky, uninhibited black person who teaches the bland,...
...See what I mean...
...A more unambiguous if less witty and sophisticated treatment of the subject is to be found in the Movie of the Month, which is not a great film but an honestly enjoyable one of an unusually unpretentious sort...
...Rather amazingly, he is a decent guy: as straight-arrow and square as Robin, to be sure, but also fun-loving, tolerant, understanding, and willing to accept Holly'sbaby as his own even when it turns out to be a baby of color...
...When Michael asks him if he never had a few drinks and brought home a girl in his day, the old man replies: "In my day, if a girl drank you didn't bring her home...
...The football player turns out to be a tightwad, and Leslie, a self-confessed "slut" in high school, encounters an old high school sweetheart, now a dentist, with whom she starts an affair...
...Her mother (Mia Farrow) is having an affair with her mother's nursing home attendant (Antonio Banderas), and her father (Paul Mazursky) has had or is having an affair with his travel agent, who turns out to be a major neurotic...
...Now you might think that this is unpromising stuff, but I confess myself charmed by the funniest moment in this clash of sensibilities...
...The man has the personality of a clenched fist," says his fat son-in-law, who is insulted by him...
...Republicans...
...Family Rhapsody by James Bowman L ike the recent Houseguest, Herbert Ross's Boys on the Side makes use of the welt-worn Hollywood motif of the funky, uninhibited black person who teaches the bland, uptight, boring white folks how to loosen up and live a little...
...But superimposed on the feminist ur-text are less typical themes, mostly associated with Holly's new boyfriend (Matthew McConaughey), a policeman ("Cops...
...But it does seem to me remarkable that what goes on in this case is the establishment of a family-like structure...
...Her brother, Jordan (Kevin Pollak), has an affair with his partner's wife (Naomi Campbell) and, for a while, moves in with her...
...hisses the old man defiantly...
...And, although the quasi-male, Thelma and Louise–style road picture yields to a form of domesticity as they settle down in Tucson, all the cliches of Hollywood feminism are here—from abusive husbands to brave single parents, commitment to alternative lifestyles, multicultural diversity, and, above all, reinventing the family as a non- or only partly consanguineous group of fellow carers...
...Everywhere this is stressed, even as he head-butts a beefy fellow at least forty years his junior who tries to take away from his grandson a foul ball hit into the stands at the old Forbes Field...
...but he also has the power of one, even in extreme old age...
...But it was a mistake, I think, to give the film this title, because it implies that sort of quirky, trivial humor when in fact the film is trying to do, not unsuccessfully, quite a lot more...
...There are other good things in this weird palimpsest of a movie, in which a pro-family text is superimposed on an anti-family one...
...There the f.u.b.p...
...So you have some humorous odd-couple situations as the young man and his now 90-plus grandfather cope with being roommates...
...The grandson, Michael, is played by D.B...
...Unmarried Gwyn (Sarah Jessica Parker) shares with her gynecologist her doubts about marriage as they have developed in the midst of what seems like an epidemic of infidelities in all the marriages she knows and finally concludes that "Marriage is like Miami: It is hot and stormy and occasionally a little dangerous, but if it's so bad, why is there so much traffic...
...Rushmoreans is credited with that utterance): "I would be no use to her or to anybody if I broke my oath," he says to her, and "there is no family without the law...
...The story has Jane and Robin driving across the country together and stopping in Pittsburgh (where Houseguest was also set) to see Holly (Drew Barrymore), a sexual omnivore living with a loutish, drug-dealing, abusive thug...
...You get who you end up with," she tells her daughter...
...The final scenes predictably run to schmaltz, but I didn't even mind, so charmed was I by the idea that an American movie could still celebrate the more retrogressive among the "family values...
...That is when the uptight white and the cool black sit side by side watching Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in The Way We Were on television, the former struggling to hold back the tears and the latter struggling to hold back the laughter...
...And it isn't always who you think it's going to be...
...But when they come to the point of consummating their attachment, it seems that Antonio cannot get over her mother...
...says Jane...
...Witty...
...He is completing his residency as a doctor in Columbus, Ohio, when the old man's house is torn down and he comes to live with him...
...But the most important marriage is that of Gwyn's parents...
...Robin and Jane, the lesbian odd couple, confess their passion for one another before the former, regrettably, kicks the bucket...
...He really loves me," says Holly in handcuffs...
...I guess you've got to respect a woman with that sort of grit...
...See what I mean...
...I put it down to nostalgia for stable childhoods as divorced baby boomers hit 50, but it is still better than the slander and the sneering of which families are so often the victims in Hollywood...
...Of course both Beth and the Communists eventually get past the old boy's defenses (we mustn't expect too much of the new pro-family spirit), but he is allowed a general curmudgeonliness, especially toward Beth's mother, Judith (Ellen Burstyn), which serves as a kind of protective sheathing against the moral decay that would otherwise destroy the family...
...End of marriage...
...Whoopi's character, Jane, is not only black, funky, and uninhibited, she is a lesbian whose job it is to show Robin (Mary Louise Parker), "the whitest woman in America," how to live...
...He is not ridiculed for saying this either...
...A nother backhanded compliment to marriage and the family is Miami Rhapsody, a film by David Frankel that smells, as they say, of the lamp...
...The American Spectator April 1995 59...
...This is the woman who cites as evidence of her feminist credentials the fact that "I even voted for Carter—twice...
...Old Rocky (arriving at Ellis Island in 1895, himself an orphan, he had demanded an "American name") lays down the law to his daughter and son-in-law who are trying to dissuade him from bringing up the boy himself: "The kid stays," he says, and the power of patriarchy to preserve fragile family ties gets an unexpected boost from, of all places, Hollywood Pictures...
...Antonio and Mom finally call it quits, and Antonio begins to get sweet on Gwyn herself...
...Finally, at well over 100 and unable to work for the first time in his life, Rocky feels as if "I'm waiting to die" when he gets one last peremptory call to hold the family together...
...Sweeney...
...That is, it tries too hard to 58 The American Spectator April 1995 be more witty and sophisticated than it actually is...
...Roommates by Peter Yates tells the story of Rocky Holeczek, a Polish immigrant in Pittsburgh (the Pittsburgh motif again...
...Sophisticated.B ut at least there can be no gainsaying that Mtami Rhapsody does come down on the side of marriage and families...
...Meanwhile, Mom tells Gwyn that she used to have all kinds of romantic notions about what marriage should be like...
...Then he and Naomi don't get along so well, so he makes a big effort to reconcile with his wife just as she has their second child...
...who is called, of all things, Abraham Lincoln...
...What's next...
...was Sinbad...
...It's just that he takes his name seriously and "cannot tell a lie" (of course he has to be stupid to be a conservative, and Jane has to straighten him out on which of the Mt...
...Most strikingly, when he asks Holly to marry him and she tells him about the dead boyfriend, he promptly arrests her...
...here it is Whoopi Goldberg...
...AIDS is used as tuberculosis or the more decorous forms of cancer used to be: as a sure-fire tear-jerker of a way to kill off the young and attractive...
...Sort of...
...Holly gets off with six months in jail...
...They make it as far as Tucson before they discover that Robin, awkward and shy and bristling with white folks' inhibitions though she may be, is suffering from AIDS, which she has contracted from her sole attempt to be sexually adventurous...
...She and Dad are now able to do that, and Antonio gets a handsome tip from Dad for all that he has done to cheer up Mom...
...Gwyn's sister, Leslie (Carla Gugino), and her boyfriend, a professional football player, get married by our own Ben Stein, who plays a rabbi forced to pronounce their self-composed wedding vows even though these are adapted from Dr...
...There's something that goes on between women," Robin tells the offensive prosecutor in Holly's trial for manslaughter, and the Hollywood feminists who have been in the saddle there for twenty years and more find nothing remarkable in the sentiment...
...Whoever is willing to stick by you when everyone else is gone...
...The old man is, of course, a conservative, and, when he finds that Michael is sharing a house in Columbus with several Chinese students, cries out in dismay: "Communists...
...Reason and family have nothing to do with one another...
...Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham...
...He also does not much like Beth (Julianne Moore), the liberal social worker whom Michael brings home one night...
...But he explains that he still loves Holly and wants to marry her, no matter what she's done...
...It is Robin's incredibly uptight suburban mother who figures out what a family is...
...In a month when Barbra herself, on behalf of all those who cry at The Way We Were, gave vent at Harvard to her infantile political feelings (they do not rise to the dignity of opinions), this was balm to the soul...
...played by Peter Falk, who at age 70 or so in 1963 undertakes to raise single-handedly his orphaned grandson and not only sees him through childhood but well into adulthood, marriage, and great-grandchildren, to whom he becomes as central a figure in their lives as he was to their parents and grandparents...
...Just as the others drop in on her, she accidentally kills this boyfriend, the supposed father of her James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Now I just want some one to hold my hand when I pick out lawn furniture...
...For it is about family too...
...unborn child, and then she leaves with them...
...Be reasonable," says Judith...
...Jane, of course, is furious with him...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
