The Talkies: Love Isn't the Way

Bowman, James

"The Talkies: Love Isn't the Way" Love Isn't the Way Hollywood always looks for it in all the wrong places. Is love primarily a feeling or an action? The pretty nearly unanimous opinion of cheap entertainment throughout...

...Psychically wounded, he limps back to his little Swede, only to be stood up...
...He leaves her at the museum with a promise to meet later and pursues another young woman (Benedicte Loyen) he sees in the street...
...Like Gremlins or Independence Day it longs for some subhumans to slaughter, so it cooks some up...
...There is, naturally, a certain relief in surrendering to mere sensualism-at least so long as we are temporarily insulated from the consequences...
...Is this a bit of typecasting for the man whom the production notes call "America's greatest actor...
...In it, a devoted young wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) whose boneheaded husband (Dermot Mulroney) has fallen foul of a black gangster (Harry Belafonte) kidnaps the dopeheaded wife (Miranda Richardson) of a local politico (Michael Murphy) in a vain attempt to get her beloved Johnny back...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226@compuserve.com...
...65 The American Spectator . October r 9 9 6...
...Her decision as to whether or not to trust Horace or to go see for herself at the cafe is comically complicated by an encounter with an attractive young man (Mathias Megard) who may or may not be a pickpocket and an attractive young woman who returns her lost (stolen...
...All three stories teeter on the edge of farce (as Rohmer films often do), but they end up being richly comic in much more subtle ways...
...But what begins as an attempt to pick up a stranger, an obviously well-polished attempt to show off intellectually, ends with a thoroughly polite but comprehensive and brutal critique both of his art and of his life...
...The first, "Le Rendez-vous de 7 heures," begins with the dawn-song of two lovebirds (Clara Bellar and Antoine Basler) that is thrown into disharmony by the sinister suggestion of a would-be rival to the young man, Horace, that the latter has a floozy on the side...
...That myth is taken for granted in The Island of Dr...
...Poor old Moreau too, one 44 Come see MarlonBrando, flabby and infantastical get-ups,imitating Robert Morley...
...These have been calling attention to themselves in a recent rash of movies involving kidnapping and hostage-taking for love...
...wallet...
...In House Arrest two children (Kyle Howard and Amy Sakasitz), whose parents (Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Pollak) are separating, keep them confined in the base...
...In Manny and Lo two sisters (Scarlett Johansson and Aleksa Palladino) on the run from foster care kidnap a rather forlorn old maid (Mary Kay Place) and find with her the beginnings of a real family...
...Even House Arrest is more interested in the quasi-family formed by the children of its several sets of trou by James Bowman bled parents than it is in the repair of the parents' relationships...
...the burlesque of the Prometheus/Faustus myth marks its ending, yet it co-exists with an uncritical assumption of the inventedfamily myth...
...Brando's camping it up as the effete British aristocrat is designed to ridicule not only "civilization" but science...
...And then it ends as an old-fashioned but still potent exercise in imperialist pessimism and Eurocentric gloom...
...In all three of these short films, love is, as it is in real life, not the dream of sentimental ballads "still promising," as Philip Larkin wrote, "to solve and satisfy and set unchangeably in order," but the part of our lives that is most mysterious and intractable, most bound up with what is most ourselves, for both good and ill...
...Nowadays, anyone not a moron must know the absurdity of proposing that children suffer more from excessively strict discipline than from lack of discipline, from being made to work too hard at school than from not being made to work hard enough, from being made to watch TV when they want to read rather than from not being made to read when they want to watch TV But Hollywood is on the side of the morons...
...A painter (Michael Kraft) escorts a young Swedish interior design student (Veronika Johansson) to the Picasso museum...
...We know he's a bad guy because "animal rights activists drove him out of the States" and into his jungle hideaway...
...He is the classic mad scientist-the Faustus, the Frankenstein, the Over-reacher-but here rendered as a joke...
...Come see Val Kilmer imitating Marlon Brando imitating Robert Morley...
...If I were a little girl, I think I would rather belong to the raffish Wormwoods than to the goody-goody Miss Honey anyway, but then I'm not as clever as Matilda...
...11 supposes, only defies the laws of God and man because he wants to be loved...
...After that, even so fine an actor as David Thewlis cannot bring off his own campy line to Moreau: "This is the most outrageous spectacle I have ever witnessed...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Of even more concern than the promulgation of the myth of the designer-family, however, is the myth of Rousseau's Emile-that is, of natural, laissez-faire education...
...Beneath our thin veneer of civilization, as Marlon Brando would no doubt point out, what cave men we remain...
...Moreau by John Frankenheimer...
...The serious folk with whom we were wont to entrust our moral leadership used to have another view of the matter, but lately they have largely abandoned the party of actions and duties...
...In 2 Days in the Valley a superannuated hitman (Danny Aiello) on the run from his chillingly ruthless young accomplice (James Spader) takes a bunch of hostages, among whom he not only finds his own dream mate (Glenne Headly) and soonto-be co-proprietor of a Brooklyn pizzeria, but also brings together another couple of lonely lovebirds (Paul Mazursky and Marsha Mason), one of whom had been on the point of suicide...
...She suddenly realizes that the two were a package deal: without one she had no need of the other...
...Another kidnap drama, Kansas City, is of a slightly different stripe...
...In this it resembles another racist classic of the i89o's, Heart of Darkness, whose cinematic offspring, Apocalypse Now, also featured Marlon Brando as a portly but crazed genius and megalomaniac holed up in the jungle...
...And yet none of them ever quite makes that point effectively...
...It also popped up this month in Matilda, in which a little girl (Mara Wilson) fed up with her neglectful and vulgar parents, the Wormwoods (Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman), decides to adopt for herself a new family in the form of her first grade teacher, a lady called Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz...
...As usual, if you want to find a film that deals with love not as a childish treat but as a grown up task, you have to turn to the French, and above all to the greatest of French directors, Eric Rohmer...
...Here a family is literally invented by a mad doctor who operates on beasts, gives them human characteristics, and calls them his "children...
...The pretty nearly unanimous opinion of cheap entertainment throughout the ages has been in favor of unabashed emotion: you get shot with Cupid's bolt and the actions of love follow naturally...
...In the end, on the point of yielding but before she can decide whether or not to have an affair, she finds the boyfriend having one and rejects both him and her own hopeful lover...
...Kansas City has its own Altmanian problems (principally, a terminal, paralyzing hipness), but the problem with the rest of them is that they get hung up on that well-entrenched Hollywood myth that we can or should invent families to our own taste...
...The charming young woman, Esther, naturally refuses to believe it, but her informant tells her where and when they meet, at the Cafe Dame Tartine at seven o'clock...
...We later see him performing a piano duet with one of his grotesque, bestial offspring (Nelson de la Rosa...
...It is comic even before Brando responds as if he is talking about the makeup: "I have an allergy to the sun...
...I s love primarily a feeling or an action...
...She consults with a more cynical friend, who further alarms her...
...The Movie of the Month is his latest meditation on love, Rendezvous in Paris, which tells three unrelated stories of love and infidelity and self-deception, the great Rohmerian emotional triad, linked together with a comically cliched couple of Parisian buskers, singing to the accordion...
...One way of looking at this film is as a form of dis 64 October r 9 9 6 - The American Spectator placed racism...
...I suppose it's not surprising that the entertainment industry sympathizes with children's desire to be entertained rather than to work, and invents cruel, Dickensian parents and teachers to justify it...
...So one myth yields to another...
...The second story, "Les Bancs de Paris," shows an unnamed couple (Aurore Rauscher and Serge Renko) meeting in parks all over Paris as he attempts to woo her away from a more suitable but duller boyfriend, and she tries to decide whether or not to let herself be wooed...
...We first see Moreau listening to a Brandenberg Concerto in a classic civilization-in-the-jungle setting...
...Nobody is going to get too excited by this film's cheesy, Planet o f the Apes-style prosthetic monsters, but that is not to say that there are no thrills in store...
...Our own feelings under the circumstances are ambivalent...
...This is an imperialist cliche that has now become an anti-imperialist cliche...
...In his Popemobile, his whiteface makeup and flowing caftan, pronouncing solemn judgments on the beast-men, Brando is as grotesque as any of them are...
...Why not...
...In the end love is scattered but not replaced with moral certainty...
...Who can blame him for that...
...None of these films is very good, although Manny and Lo is close to it and Kansas City, like any Robert Altman film, has its moments...
...Love is not part of the solution but part of the problem...
...You can understand why the childish sensibility of Hollywood would respond to even a glimpse of the real thing by retreating into kidnap fantasies...
...But such inventions also further the myth of the invented family...
...In the thick of the fight against moral chaos, our generals have abandoned the field and slipped off to their tents to talk to some shrink about their precious feelings...
...But inevitably there are also innocent victims of emotional unrestraint...
...Well, it may not be a thrill, but it is certainly a laugh...
...Come see Marlon Brando, flabby and in fantastical get-ups, imitating Robert Morley...
...All of them are struggling in their very different ways towards the insight that "love" is at least as often an action followed by a feeling as it is (in the classic Hollywood paradigm) a feeling followed by an action...
...By far the most serious and profound of the three stories is the third, called "Mere et Enfant, 1907" after the Picasso painting that is its centerpiece...
...That capitulation to the feel-good imperative shows up in the rates of divorce and illegitimacy...
...JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement ment until they sort out their problems...
...This myth of the do-it-yourself family is really the antithesis of love-asduty...
...He fancies himself as cutting quite a figure as the romantic young artist, but she is not so full of admiration as he expects her to be...

Vol. 29 • October 1996 • No. 10


 
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