The Talkies: Hollywood Squares
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Hollywood Squares" by James Bowman Ho11ywood Squares No sooner are we told of the advent of something called "Conservative Cool" than the Nation magazine informs us, in three-inch high letters on its...
...You've got to admire such intellectual and aesthetic purity even as you are repelled by it...
...It is a beautiful film, full of human geometries against an infinity of snowy white-out, and a welcome return to the form of Miller's Crossing after the quirkiness and pretentiousness of the Coens' Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy...
...Her police work, like her broad Midwest-Scandinavian accent (shared with everybody but the two kidnappers in the film), her mannerisms and her comfy relationship with her artist husband, Norm (John Carroll Lynch), is generally comic —almost sitcomic...
...On the contrary, it is almost the precondition for Marge's sturdy and wholly sympathetic moral rectitude as she scolds Grimsrud while taking him in: "All for a little money...
...What is the purpose of our work here...
...Happily, there are some signs even in the movie business—where sophistication was first marketed for a trailer park audience — that the hip may one day look as passé as the hippie...
...Both are rather pitiable junior partners in the shadow of utter ruthlessness, so the horror of what they do is muted—made at times almost comic...
...It's the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner of gay rights...
...7 dent son, Lonnie (Glenn Fitzgerald), is a seething mass of neuroses who attempts to poison his new-found brother with LSD...
...But the protests of my predecessor in these pages, Bruce Bawer, writing in the New York Times, have not elicited much in the way of response from the movie-going public...
...After all, nothing reinforces our commitment to the cool more than an urge to ridicule the things that used to be cool and now are emphatically not...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226 @compuserve.com...
...The Minnesotan setting is the excuse for an orgy of unhipness, banality, and kitsch, from fast food and (large) cafeteria meals to muzak versions of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" or "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," from a Paul Bunyan theme park to the ubiquitous TV, which everyone seems to be watching, with great pleasure, all the time...
...The real world is one in which the bogus sophistication of The Birdcage, a remake of La Cage Aux Folles starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, in its second week beat out even the rootin', tootin,' shootin' Executive Decision for top movie...
...Good question, but not one to which Ross knows the answer...
...It takes us beyond the well-known "banality of evil" to the now rather-forgotten (at least by Hollywood) banality of good...
...Jerry needs money fast...
...If we can't help this boy who is so intelligent and in so much pain," he asks his colleagues, "who can we help...
...Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller) is a young father made obsessed with finding his own natural parents by the recent birth of his child...
...I don't know if I would go so far as to say that—especially since the remarkable Zhang Yimou seems to have traveled a long way along the road from ingenuousness to decadence between To Live JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement and Shanghai Triad...
...His adoptive parents, played by George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore, look on aghast as Mel and his wife, Nancy (Patricia Arquette), their baby, and a young woman from the adoption agency (Tea Leoni) jet around the country looking for them...
...The cozy sort of sophistication of Hollywood looks pretty feeble in comparison...
...Jerry's relationship with Wade mirrors the almost equally pathetic Carl's with his taciturn and terrifying companion, Grimsrud...
...The American Spectator • May 1996 61...
...And not a car chase or a shooting from one end of it to the other...
...If only it were...
...On the contrary, middle America has taken the movie to its heart at least partly as a means of congratulating itself on its tolerance, as well as its sophistication...
...But you don't have to be a "progressive" of their peculiarly regressive stamp to deplore the fact that, in the thirty years or so since "hip" and "cool" escaped from the world of jazz and beat poetry to become mass phenomena, the youth of America have so largely learned to aspire to be knowing rather than to be good...
...You would think that even gays would cringe at the 1970's era attitudes inthis film, and Mike Nichols's patronizing treatment of them in his direction of it...
...Directness and sincerity are like some precious natural resource of which we in the developed world have long since used up our own supplies...
...Into the midst of all this comes the most memorable character you will see on film this year, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the pregnant police chief of Brainerd, Minnesota...
...And it's a beautiful day...
...Throughout the film, car warning chimes—the kind you hear if you leave your keys in or don't buckle your seatbelt— seem to echo as a reminder of the consumer culture's reassurances that risk and casualty can be managed...
...It is hard not to feel that the vulgar, self-righteous stepmother (Ruth Sheen) deserves to die, as do the sour and unpleasant work-mates that Graham poisons later in his career...
...I notice that in a recent appearance at a film retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington, even such an avatar of movie chic as the German director Werner Herzog said that the best films in the world today are being made in China and Iran...
...Now we must import them in films like The White Balloon, by the Iranian Jafar Panahi, which has been showered with honors (albeit in the ghetto classification of "foreign films") for little more than a sweet and almost naïve genuineness...
...One example of it is The Young Poisoner's Handbook by Benjamin Ross, which tells the (more or less) true story of Graham Young (Hugh O'Conor), a kid from suburban London who poisoned his stepmother in the early 1960's...
...But it is certainly true that the only straightforward movie-making in the world anymore seems to be taking place in the Third World...
...Having been sent to an institution, he talked his way out with the help of a psychiatrist, got a job where they didn't know anything about his past, and started poisoning his co-workers until he was finally caught again and put away for good...
...Genuine sophistication is a good deal more hard edged...
...Graham's theme is the magnificent, onceheard-never-to-be-forgotten Funeral Music for Queen Mary by Purcell...
...So he stages the kidnapping of his wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrud), for whose safety he is sure Wade will pay a million dollars...
...But she gets to the right place in the end...
...Zeigler (Anthony Sher), deserves to be fooled and mocked for springing Graham...
...This is typical of his duplicity, which we also see in his everyday life as a car-salesman...
...I just don't understand it...
...Likewise, the soft, silly psy60 May 1996 • The American Spectator chiatrist, Dr...
...Having been adopted by the capitalist establishment and marketed like any other product, hip has become decidedly unhip, in the view of Frank and kind...
...To the two lowlifes he hires to do the kidnapping, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), he pretends that the total ransom involved is only $8o,000, of which they are to receive half plus a new Oldsmobile...
...Into this story Ross has inserted an almost Nietzschean vision of the pure, cold, uncompromising beauty of Graham's intellectual commitment to science in contrast with the moral and aesthetic squalor of his family's lower-middle class existence, with its mind-numbing clichés and barren moralizing, its ambiance of idiot television shows and inane pop music...
...Flirting With Disaster by David 0. Russell (whose Spanking the Monkey of a couple of years ago was at the time the very latest in Generation X chic) is less good than The Young Poisoner's Handbook, but it is one of the funniest films I have seen for a long time...
...Their other, resi44 After all, nothing reinforces our commitment to the cool more than an urge to ridicule the things that used to be cool and now are emphatically not...
...Yet we never sense that that culture is being ridiculed or belittled...
...For the kidnapping goes horribly wrong and several people are killed...
...It's true that when they turn out to be Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin playing the Schlictings (a name invariably and obscenely mispronounced), a pair of aging hippies in the New Mexican desert, they are rather an easy target...
...Razieh's soul-deep longing for a "dancing goldfish" — that is, one with long fluttery fins—for the Persian New Year's celebration, and her setbacks on the way to acquiring one, are reflected in the procession of emotions across her face, itself an image of human aspiration...
...It is hard to hate Jerry,although he is thoroughly despicable, partly for this reason and partly because Wade is even worse and treats his son-in-law with unremitting contempt...
...All the characters in his film are, as one of the more unenlightened doctors in the institution says to Zeigler of its inmates, "moral imbeciles to a man," but they exemplify for us Graham's (and Ross's) view of life as, essentially, "a series of illusions that only the scientist can strip away...
...But that also makes him reassuringly familiar...
...Ah well, back to the real world of Hollywood...
...There's more to life than a little money, you know...
...This is a family which, though adoptive, is genuine-looking and far removed from the Schlictings' easy, accommodating New Age spirit with which Hollywood would once have been so much in sympathy...
...There is only so much you can do with a child's point of view, but Panahi does it, and all credit to him...
...But what is good in it is attributable to its skillful evocation of the point of view of its sevenyear-old heroine, Razieh (Aida Mahammadkhani), who is almost the oldest female that Iranian religious law will allow to be represented on the screen without having a black bag put over her head...
...Disgrace and prison for embezzlement loom...
...Taking the article up hopefully (for presumably even the Nation doesn't get everything wrong), I found that its author, Tom Frank, only meant to say that hip is dead for earnest social reformers such as himself and (presumably) a large segment of the readership of the Nation...
...William H. Macy plays Jerry Lundegaard, a sales manager in an Oldsmobile dealership in Minneapolis owned by his father-in-law, Wade (Harve Presnell...
...It is also one which goes some way toward subverting the conventions of Hollywood hip...
...Her pregnancy is a continual, jarring reminder of her happy domestic life, intruding upon gruesome scenes when we do not expect it...
...But there is in addition a charming squareness to the bickering of the senior Coplins and the sense of family they create as an example to Mel and Nancy...
...If this is unhip, let's have more of it...
...r.,14 James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Ho11 ood Squares No sooner are we told of the advent of something called "Conservative Cool" than the Nation magazine informs us, in three-inch high letters on its cover, that "Hip Is Dead...
...If that sounds like the sneer of the sophisticate, I don't mean to minimize the virtues of this wonderful film...
...Amuch better example of how hip it has suddenly become to be unhip is Fargo by the Coen brothers (directed by Joel, produced by Ethan, written by both), my Movie of the Month...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
