The Talkies: Bad Verse Conditions
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Bad Verse Conditions" by James Bowman BadVerse Conditions 0 n the release of The Crossing Guard, Sean Penn, who wrote, directed, and co-produced the film, was profiled in the Sunday New York Times as the...
...I need you...
...The French are revolutionaries: dangerous, unconventional, violent, provocative...
...I very much doubt it...
...He replies: "Or killing myself is a way to drink...
...he asks...
...Heavy...
...Sera tries to romanticize a little by asking: "Are you saying that drinking is a way to kill yourself...
...The English are, by comparison, polite, sophisticated, and admirably unwilling to call too much attention to themselves...
...What are you...
...nowadays he goes all too gently into that good night...
...I really do...
...with which she keeps up the narrative thread, Sera speaks of her natural aptitude for prostitution —how she can meet a man, know what he likes, and instantly become his fantasy...
...I don't remember," he says, "whether I started drinking because my wife left me, or my wife left me because I started drinking, but f— it anyway...
...Ben (Nicolas Cage) is a Hollywood screenwriter who quite deliberately decides to go to Las Vegas and drink himself to death...
...You're so good...
...This development may be welcome from a hygienic and socially responsible point of view, but artistically it is unsatisfying and anticlimactic...
...It's just that I trust your judgment...
...It cannot be said that Ben is a romantic figure, nor does he claim to be a poet...
...As the film opens, the man who killed the child, John Booth (David Morse), is just getting out of prison, where he has served a sentence for manslaughter...
...victim and would-be killer is...
...She replies: "I do...
...I thought at first that The Doom Generation by Gregg Araki might be the definitive send-up of the teen-angst flicks that have made surliness and moodiness into virtues...
...Of course, it helps that Nicholson has built his career on the portrayal of characters in whom boorish or thuggish behavior is meant to betoken sensitivity and a poetic nature...
...Sexual love is implicit in their relationship, but it never quite emerges from the shadows cast by the drink and her profession...
...The nastiness and grossness of nearly everything in this film eventually becomes an end in itself rather than a means of making fun of the nasty and the gross...
...That should do it," says Sera (Elisabeth Shue), the high-priced prostitute he picks up on his first night in town and whom he impulsively decides to tell of his resolution...
...Carrington's reply — "What's wrong with that...
...I think he felt the same way...
...Yet they speak of the idea of sex as if they were a chaste couple looking forward to marriage...
...abandon rhetoric...
...Do you understand...
...Far from it...
...And he needed me...
...You've got to be a little pessimist...
...There is a larger truth unaffected by the tacit agreement by which his sin excuses hers and vice versa...
...There's a certain male mythology about him, a mixture of tenderness and pugnaciousness that's prevalent in the Irish and causes them to stay up late drinking whisky, writing poetry, getting into fights and falling in love with cool, blond women who'll drive them crazy...
...reject romanticism...
...I don't know what you're talking about," she replies...
...The American Spectator • January 1996 65...
...scarcely begins to grasp the possibilities of our late twentieth-century media world, in which living is writing...
...The film takes up the theme of self-destruction redeemed by authenticity but without some of the offensive romanticizing of the other films...
...or at least in which living for one's appetites in an embarrassingly authentic way qualifies one as a poet and an artist...
...Here is a poet...
...Through a nightmarishly infernal landscape in which every number adds up to 666, these ultimate slackers take everything for granted...
...Or so it looks to me...
...The rest of the film is a fairly clear-eyed look at his slide toward self-destruction...
...get it right...
...A pair of mixed-up kids, Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) and Jordan White (James Duval), pick up another mixed-up kid, Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech), and more or less inadvertently go on a spree of murder and three-way sex as American, I guess, as apple pie...
...But all this poetry, both of the carousing and the non-carousing kind, finally achieves a merely therapeutic resolution...
...Jack Nicholson plays a jeweler called Freddy whose daughter was hit and killed by a drunk driver six years before...
...Perhaps because the poetry is in French and the film is in English, she thought it more diplomatic to confine herself to the lives and let the works remain as closed a book as they already are to the average film-goer...
...But Booth is also a sensitive and poetic soul, although no longer the hell-raiser that his one-time JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...If Holland is interested in the poetry as poetry, she does not convey her interest to the viewer...
...They have spent so much of their lives in front of the television that nothing seems inconveniently real...
...In Total Eclipse, Agnieszka Holland tries to recapture the spirit of those days by re-telling the story of Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio)— a story that, in English-speaking countries anyway, is far better known than the poetry of either of them...
...But the romance of authenticity is just as much the story of their lives...
...True, we are given brief snatches of poetic-sounding language and Rimbaud's poetic credo: "Harden up...
...Everything is going to be fine," says Xavier when he accidentally kills a convenience store clerk...
...Having written Total Eclipse he slipped into the director's chair for Carrington, whose version of British artistes contrasts interestingly with the French of Holland's film...
...I'm using you...
...Some sort of angel visiting me from one of my drunk fantasies...
...Ever since the mythography of the sensitive and troubled teenager emerged in the 1950's, Hollywood has been hard at work establishing the right of every exponent of authentically awful behavior to admiration and emulation, irrespective of poetic or artistic output...
...Back when the romantic myth of the dissolute, the violent, the rebellious, the hard-living and early-dying poet was young, it was a very different story...
...But the poetic quotations are too brief to do more than establish an ambiance, and the credo is laughably inaccurate...
...This "poetry" is just a makeweight— something to be assumed along with the drinking and fighting and lovemaking and craziness that are traditionally associated with being a poet...
...Not that I am indifferent...
...It has ever been his aim, he says at the end of his life, to help deliver the world from a "fog of superstition," but he feels that "I have always been much better at living than at writing...
...With the severance pay from his job and the money he gets from selling his BMW and Rolex, he reckons he has enough money to last him several weeks at the rate of $200 to $30o a day for booze...
...That never seems to be the case with our Movie of the Month, Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis...
...Penn makes the same assumption in the film...
...In any case, this is what she does...
...What do you mean...
...Once again, boorish, violent, and self-destructive behavior stands as a synecdoche for poetry that we must take on faith...
...It is the remarkable achievement of the American cinema to have completed and democratized this process...
...Nowadays, I guess, the poet does not so often drink or fight or rhyme himself to death as he used to...
...There's not much to admire here, but what's there is at least genuine...
...He's just a guy who is lucky enough to find someone to hold his hand on his way out of his broken life...
...But Hampton is not yet finished with us...
...Such creative criticism is meant, like Jack Nicholson's drinking and ill-treatment of women, as a hallmark of that ultimate romantic value, personal authenticity: Here is a man whose feelings are too powerful to be masked by the conventions of politeness or consideration...
...Moreover, the strange relationship 64 January 1996 • The American Spectator between the homosexual Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson) is genuinely touching in its portrayal, even though its insistent separation of love and sex becomes a part of Strachey's project to destroy forever Victorian values...
...And it is hilariously if only sporadically funny as—if you can imagine such a thing—a comic version of Natural Born Killers...
...He is now only able to express his grief by drinking and fighting and womanizing on a truly poetic scale...
...There is less of the theatrical about their defiance of convention, more of the clubbish and self-indulgent...
...I'm totally at ease with that...
...What else is there to say...
...He in turn recognizes a certain symmetry in her continuing to function as a prostitute: "I'm a drunk and you're a hooker," he says...
...What is impressive about the film is its relative lack of any merely theatrical or self-pitying element...
...But, as we have so often had occasion to notice before, Hollywood satire is almost invariably too close to the things it satirizes to be very successful...
...And I loved him...
...At least these poets, whose words we owe to the playwright Christopher Hampton, come to satisfyingly poetic ends: Rimbaud dies young in the Ethiopian desert, and Verlaine is well on the way to death by absinthe when we bid him a fond farewell...
...But later she says that with Ben she suddenly "felt like I was me: not like I was pretending to be somebody else...
...It has to be said that the film is worth seeing just for the performance of Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey, whose bon mots ("Ottoline is like the Eiffel Tower: she's very silly but she affords excellent views") have long been preserved against the day when he should be resurrected on film by such a skillful actor...
...This from the man we see urinating on a fellow poet whose verses he thinks too "bourgeois" and conventional...
...He hangs out with a crowd of artists and folk-singers who look as if they have arrived through a time-warp from the 1960's...
...Sera finds herself becoming more and more attached to him...
...Freddy is determined to kill him...
...I loved his drama...
...You don't need the excuse of being a genius—or even a moderately talented author of expository prose—to become a Hollywood hero these days...
...Reject romanticism, indeed...
...I accepted him the way he was," says Sera to the invisible therapist, "and I didn't expect him to change...
...She invites him to move in with her, and the two of them set up a relationship based on mutual acceptance: "You can never, never ask me to stop drinking," he tells her...
...The film will not change this regrettable fact...
...Anjelica Huston, one of its co-stars, was quoted as saying: "Look, Sean is a poet and not a simple person...
...I don't care about all that," he tells her on the first night together...
...he scolds her...
...screams the perpetually ill-natured Amy...
...Do you understand?' 44 someone's head off...
...You just blew44 'You can never, never ask me to stop drinking,' he tells her...
...Now, is Sean Penn actually counting syllables over the whisky bottle of an evening...
...THE TALKIES by James Bowman BadVerse Conditions 0 n the release of The Crossing Guard, Sean Penn, who wrote, directed, and co-produced the film, was profiled in the Sunday New York Times as the kind of enfant terrible whose temper tantrums and bad behavior are supposed to betoken sensitivity and artistic greatness...
...Quiet, intense, and guilt-ridden, he is given to saying philosophical things like "I think we all know something about confinement...
...There are moments of jealousy and backsliding from their splendid acceptance of each other, but they finally achieve a kind of triumph of love...
...In the quasi—documentary-style monologues (addressed to a therapist...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
