The Talkies: Up On the Roof
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Up On the Roof" A good word for sweatshops, Jim Carrey, and cholera....
...Its problem is a failure to integrate its two major themes...
...he dispenses dime-store romantic and professional advice picked up from Oprah and Jerry Springer...
...Having passed through scenes of death and devastation, in which whole villages have been wiped out- the carrion crows have lost all fear of people, having eaten so many-at length Angelo meets Pauline, Marquise de Theus (Juliette Binoche), a beautiful older woman braving the same dangers to find her missing husband...
...Set in the cholera-infested Provence of the 1830's, it stars Olivier Martinez as Angelo Pardi, a 25-year-old Italian nationalist and colonel in the Piedmontese Hussars who is being hunted down by Austrian agents and at the same time trying to escape from hysterical mobs who see all strangers as plague carriers and poisoners deserving of summary execution...
...Well of course he is...
...The sad thing is that, judging by box office receipts, he is probably right...
...E-mail him at 72o56.3zz6@compuserve.com...
...Nor is there anything frightening or awesome or sublime about the grotesque...
...They are dropped in casually and without any further justification, as if any secrets Hoover had must necessarily have included them...
...But, for both of them, honor is also in some sense easy...
...I n the hope that some among my readers share my indignation at seeing the past remade in the image of the present, I recommend as Movie of the Month The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Paul Rappeneau -a wonderfully old-fashioned romantic drama worthy of the director of Cyrano de Bergerac...
...Hummel and his men slaughter their fellow American soldiers without compunction and are only prevented from wiping out San Francisco by an odd-couple team of the usual misfits, consisting of Nicolas Cage as a nerdy FBI lab technician and Sean Connery as a British agent who has rotted in prison for thirty years for stealing J. Edgar Hoover's secrets...
...T H E T A L K I E S Up On the Roof A good word for sweatshops, Jim Carrey, and cholera...
...Although Claude Frollo (voice of Tony Jay) is transformed from an archdeacon into a judge, don't think that Christians get off easily...
...Even the evil in the film is dull and predictable...
...he cries as she knocks down a couple of heavily armored soldiers...
...We are one being...
...Hugo's romantic and tragic novel becomes an easy morality tale about not being prejudiced against people because of the way they look-unless, of course, you're a hot babe like Esmerelda who prefers the tall, handsome soldier, Phoebus, to the troll-like Quasimodo or an insincere jerk and way old guy like Frollo...
...Some would say that we need to go further, following the example of the sensible Guatemalans, and put them to work in sweatshops...
...65 The American Spectator . August r996...
...The second theme, however, requires him to represent the more sinister and manipulative aspects of technological progress...
...Though clearly fond of one another to the point of passion, neither can admit it or act upon it...
...Blockbuster season shows no sign of letting up...
...In both their passion and their forbearance, these are people who are recognizably real yet obviously not of our own time...
...The latter are represented by Carrey's unnamed cable guy, who calls himself by the names of old TV sitcom heroes...
...Bullitt already did what we might call the real car chase, so Bay is able to take all the real parts of 64 August r996 • The American Spectator it-the parts involving drama and character and verisimilitude-for granted and concentrate on quick cutting from one crash or explosion to the next...
...To the director, Michael Bay, they are a standard cinematic shorthand for the sinister, hidden government that movie people seem so often to assume automatically is lurking somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon or the CIA...
...Either he is pathetic or he is dangerous...
...Instead of confining itself to a parade of unrelated and unbelievable visual thrills, it attempts to raise some serious issues and is, in parts, very funny...
...And, as everyone in Hollywood knows, to be a man of honor is to be a man of no conscience...
...For a while we believe that the cable guy, his brain short-circuited by TV talk shows, doesn't even know that he is being shallow and cynical with his advice, any more than do the equally shallow people for whom it is so effective...
...When his offer of friendship is spurned by Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick), he quickly manages to get the latter fired from his job, dumped by his girlfriend, and sent to jail...
...The first of these concerns the vacuity of television and of those raised on it...
...Likewise, they remain sexually continent, though there is a sad parody of lovemaking when Pauline comes down with the cholera and Angelo is forced to apply the only known method of getting someone through the crisis of the illness, which is a furious rubbing of the naked body to keep the circulation going...
...Their existential doubts never for a moment interfere with their commitment to duty...
...it's my duty to help you...
...This requires quite a lot of social as well as technical skill, and seems contradictory...
...he cannot plausibly be both...
...The guy who can flip a switch and make all our complicated, incomprehensible technology work for us can do the same with relationships that don't involve anything deeper than the neural circuitry of "feelings...
...Still, he is a lot more interesting than anything else in this year's blockbusters which, when they are not boringly predictable, are simply loathsome in their cynicism...
...Apart from anything else, it would mean an unacceptable increase in the amount of cheap merchandise marketed under the names of revolting celebrities who, rendered unemployable by the dearth of blockbusters, would have to turn to telemarketing...
...He takes the same kinds of shortcuts with a San Francisco car chase...
...Angelo writes to his mother: "I try to be honorable, but it is hard...
...Their anachronistic but compelling story is your best bet for an escape from Hollywood's awful moral homogenization...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Because they get away with it, others, such as Pen Densham, the writerdirector of Moll Flanders, have an easier 44 The carrion crows have lost all fear of people, having eaten so many...
...The only thing that would put a brake on the annual production of all this mindless drivelwhich does so much to set the standard for the rest of Hollywood's output-would be keeping children in school year round and taking away most of their pocket money...
...When Angelo absolutely insists in delaying his own urgent mission to take money to his fellow patriots in Italy so as to escort Pauline through danger in search of her husband, he says: "I would never leave a woman alone in all this...
...It's the way I was raised...
...Ultimately, I think, the picture is incoherent and fails to accomplish its ambitious purposes, but it deserves credit for having ambitious purposes...
...Everything is reduced to the bland and the banal...
...These include such laughably Hollywoodish "secrets" as "the alien landing at Roswell" and "who really shot JFK...
...but I am not convinced by their arguments...
...Hitherto I have not been able to appreciate what I am told are the comic talents of Jim Carrey, but his particular brand of offensive excess is just right for the title role in The Cable Guy, directed by Ben Stiller...
...JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...In the face of the plague, honor, like everything else which attempts to make sense of life, is threatened by complete social breakdown...
...The actual title of the film, Le Hussard sur le Toit, makes it clear, as its translation does not, that the man on the roof is not on horseback at the same time...
...It is a stroke of genius to have these precepts actually work...
...His rudimentary social skills, born of being left too long in front of the TV, cause him to push himself on people and become overbearing...
...We realize at once that these are two of a kind: aristocrats in a tangential way (she by marriage, he as the illegitimate son of a Napoleonic officer and an Italian noblewoman) who are both passionately attached to their different but related aristocratic codes of honor...
...There are limits even to a Disney moral, after all...
...But he's a man of honor," says a general feebly...
...In postmodern fashion, he is saying to us: "You know that's what you want to see, so why go to all the trouble of concocting a dramatic justification for it...
...The Rock, for instance, is based on the premise that soldiers and war heroes by James Bowman are virtually indistinguishable from murderers and thugs...
...Pauline is able to confess to Angelo what he can only confess to his mother-the fear that "one day this [the plague] will be over and my life will still be meaningless...
...Does no one but me care that this claptrap is at least two-and-a-half centuries distant from Defoe's profound if idiosyncratic belief in the Christian God and His Providence...
...What he has done is to take the name and title character from Defoe's novel, scoop out the rest of its innards, and fill the empty husk with a combination of Harlequin romance and New Age uplift...
...77 time of it...
...It's all a terrible cliche, and never more so than when the military guys in the Pentagon go over Hummel's battle honors and say: "This man is a hero...
...They understand each other instinctively, but our natural cinema-engendered expectations of a love affair are frustrated by the demands of their code...
...Usually, it's the other way around...
...At the conclusion of the film, Robin Wright's Moll says in voiceover that she and her daughter, Flora (Aisling Corcoran), "celebrated the great truth I had learned from her father: that all men and women are created equal...
...The sinister, violent, grotesque figure of Quasimodo in Victor Hugo's novel is Disneyfied into a cute, hobbit-like figure with the voice of Tom Hulce and three singing and dancing gargoyles as sidekicks...
...Ed Harris plays Francis X. Hummel, a renegade marine general who, with a gang of fellow heroes, takes over Alcatraz and threatens to shoot missiles with poison-gas warheads into San Francisco unless his rather vague grievances are addressed and a lot of money is forthcoming...
...A civilian from the president's office points out acidly that "now we can add kidnapping and extortion to his list of accolades...
...The iniquity of these Disney films is the contempt with which they treat the stories and legends and myths upon which they prey...
...the beautiful gypsymaiden Esmerelda (voice of Demi Moore) has become the green Power Ranger who impresses Phoebus (voice of Kevin Nine) with her martial arts prowess as much as her beauty: "What a woman...
...Actually, this year has been marked by that rare thing, a big-budget movie that most of the critics seem to have hated but which I rather liked...
...Though a complex character in Hugo, here he represents mere prejudice (against gypsies and ugly people), hypocrisy, and superstition, and the violence that they produce...
...What is there to say about Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame that I have not already said about Pocahontas or Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
