The Talkies: Let Me Entertain You
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Let Me Entertain You" by James Bowman Let Me Entertain You Why explosions and aliens are not enough....
...For "escape...
...More often, you can expect to see a film like Courage Under Fire by Edward Zwick (Glory) where the political agenda simply runs roughshod over the drama...
...And there is a poignancy to their wildness in a world where feral masculinity is an endangered species...
...She is humbled and taught a muchneeded lesson in manners and morals, partly through the intervention of her wise bachelor neighbor, Mr...
...Elton is too...
...But so, too, should all entertainment be artful, or how can it truly entertain...
...Or is it rather a perverse and selfish assertion of her own rights, meant to sell us on the idea of equality of the sexes at the expense of mother love...
...Is this "duty...
...In the letter she leaves behind for her parents, she says: "I didn't let down my country, my crew, my fellow soldiers...
...The novel on which it is based offers the least suitable material for a movie of all Jane Austen's oeuvre...
...Captain Walden, for instance, is a single parent who has left behind a daughter called Ann Marie...
...And it still casts a blight on the entertainment afforded by a rather exciting story, about the murder of a sheriff in a Texas border town in the 1950's, and some rather interesting characters...
...that we can admire even though we admire none of them...
...just to let the Defense Department be the good guys for once...
...We'll all be wankers...
...For some reason, Jane Austen has inspired at least three such films by different directors in the last year, and now along comes a fourth in Douglas McGrath's Emma, the Movie of the Month...
...69 The American Spectator • September r 9 9 6...
...It's not exactly Henry V at Agincourt...
...That's pretty good by Hollywood standards...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Juliet Stevenson as the horrible Mrs...
...In other words, they do not give us the illusion of being real people...
...This part of the story, and the inevitable Pentagon cover-up for which it provides the excuse, are all but incomprehensible for reasons too tedious to go into, but it is clear enough that both Captain Walden and Colonel Serling owe their existences to their creators' political consciences and to hatred for the traditional, masculine culture of the armed forces...
...This is a film that is less triumphalist than rueful about the brave new world it points us toward...
...Knightley (Jeremy Northam) does, simultaneously infuriating and lovable...
...Such casualness about the picture's workmanship is a failure of art that affects its value as entertainment...
...I can take it...
...what can 44 Here is a woman whom we find, as Mr...
...But there are no dramatic illnesses or elopements to appeal to the camera...
...The best that can be said about Independence Day's Pentagon plot and its incipient one-worldism is that they are minor distractions...
...A thousand years from now there will be no guys and no girls...
...That I don't mind so much as I do the people who respond to my criticism by saying that they don't see why I have to judge everything as a work of art...
...She is a little fool, certainly, but it is not credible that either the sensible Robert Martin (Edward Woodall) or Emma herself could have taken an interest in her if she was such a ninny as this...
...How hard is it, after all, to make good triumph over evil by inventing a race of ugly, tentacled aliens to stand for evil and then wiping them out...
...In it, the beautiful, intelligent, rich, and spoiled Emma, with a boundless confidence in her own intuitions, plays match maker for her socially inferior friend, Harriet Smith, whom she treats as a pet, with an appalling lack of understanding of the emotional and social forces she is playing with...
...Now what do love and duty mean in those sentences...
...Any film that ends with the U.S...
...But if we thrill to the idea of a fighter-jock President of the United States (Bill Pullman) who himself leads a do-or-die attack on the alien stronghold, his climac...
...Her first duty she sees, as men have traditionally done, as being to her comrades...
...Nothing spoils an entertainment so quickly as the sense that the human drama before us is in competition with some ulterior motive of the film-maker's-usually a boringly predictable political agenda...
...In Hollywood, seemingly, that day has already arrived...
...I criticize the movies these days for not being escapist enough, for not working hard enough to take us out of ourselves and the morally and aesthetically dreary times in which we live...
...Elton and Sophie Thompson's Miss Bates...
...Didn't it occur to someone that trying to motivate men bound on a virtual suicide mission by an appeal to survival (even if, which is not clear, it was implied that the survival of the human race was intended rather than their own) might involve the film in a slight incoherence...
...oh, and by the way, "never stop telling Ann Marie I love her...
...JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor o f the Times Literary Supplement...
...11 you say...
...Even in Lone Star by John Sayles, a much better picture, it is hard to get over the feeling that we are being preached at all the way through...
...I know that the apartheid between "art" and "entertainment" is one of the legacies of modernism, but I have always thought it entirely wrong-headed...
...And if a general at the Pentagon is trying to stop him from finding out something, can you tell which of the two the film's makers intend for you to sympathize with...
...At the least, the film's makers ought to recognize that the lady Captain's heroics have some troublesome implications...
...Ewan McGregor, fresh from portraying a convincing junkie in Trainspotting, makes us believe in his Frank Churchill, which is even more of an achievement, and Polly Walker has just the right combination of desperation and serenity for Jane Fairfax...
...It helps that Emma's head here sits on the comely shoulders of Gwyneth Paltrow who, rather surprisingly I thought, does an excellent job with the role...
...Trainspotting's opening voiceover rant against consumerism, for example, is as tired in content as it is lively in style and is less a political statement than a junkie's comic-pathetic selfjustification...
...I, for one, am underwhelmed...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226@compuserve.com...
...Denzel Washington plays the main character, Colonel Nat Serling, who is investigating the story of Captain Walden for the Pentagon while at the same time being eaten up with guilt about his own actions during the war...
...Unable to invoke God or country or blood or honor or anything that men have customarily died for, he is reduced to urging the putting aside of "petty differences" in order to " survive...
...If I tell you that there is an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, can you guess whether he is a good guy or a bad...
...Miss Collette was splendid in Muriel's Wedding, but Harriet is not a kind of Regency Muriel...
...Knightley does, simultaneously infuriating and lovable...
...Would it have killed Emmerich & Co...
...All art should be entertaining, or what's the point of it...
...The world is changing," one of them comments sadly...
...Independence Day by Roland Emmerich is the latest example of a film whose advocates urge us to forget about art and concentrate on entertainment...
...Meg Ryan's character, a helicopter pilot in the Gulf War called Karen Walden, could not not be a hero, which means that it has to be the man who was the coward...
...The propaganda, mainly on behalf of racial harmony and good government, is for an unexceptionably good cause, but it is still propaganda...
...They, solid citizens that they are, go to the movies for entertainment...
...tic pep-talk just before flying into action is remarkably lame...
...It is hard to treat as a vehicle for "entertainment" or "escape" something that so insistently reminds us of its real-world motives...
...In the same way, it seems to go out of its way to include a gratuitous example of that hoariest of contemporary movie cliches, the military or government plot to conceal vital information from the public (this time about the supposed alien landing at Roswell, New Mexico...
...they are political symbols...
...Now political symbols have a way of raising unexpectedly awkward issues...
...Elton is way over the top, but then Jane Austen's Mrs...
...In fact, all the men under her command, as we learn in the climactic flashback, were ready to wimp out to save their own skins...
...There is an old-fashioned male solidarity among the five young ruffians from Edinburgh with whom it concerns itself ("Begbie's f---ing psycho, but he's a mate...
...Her father tells Col...
...By contrast, Trains potting by Danny Boyle is propaganda for anarchy, heroin, theft, and hooliganism, yet the film takes itself less seriously than the worthy and earnest Lone Star and it has a vitality that the latter film lacks...
...What I do admire is a film that is able so far to forget our late twentieth-century prejudices as to re-create with reasonable fidelity a world now passed for us to escape into...
...Weston (Greta Scacchi)-an immensely influential figure here largely relegated to the sidelines...
...Any regular movie-goer can answer such questions with ridiculous ease...
...Though perhaps not so obviously entertaining as Persuasion or Sense and Sensibility or the television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Emma is in some ways a greater achievement...
...For your sakes, dear readers, I have to see a lot of crummy movies...
...It ought not to be obligatory with every shot of the White House or the Pentagon to include a Watergate-style cover-up...
...By approaching Miss Austen's characters with humility and without motives of their own, this terrific ensemble has truly created an entertainment for us to escape into...
...And if a woman soldier is under consideration for a posthumous Medal of Honor but one of the men under her command accuses her of cowardice, do you know where the truth lies...
...And it is rather entertaining...
...68 September r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator Serling: "You can't imagine how hard it was for Karen to go off to war and leave her little daughter, but she wanted to do her duty...
...I would also like to have seen a bit more of the relationship between Emma and Mrs...
...That they do not is another failure of workmanship, common in political movies...
...Film-going is a kind of addiction with me, and my habit keeps me happy and hopeful every time the lights go down, even though there is usually a terrible letdown afterwards...
...There is even an environmentalist crackpot who is converted to cigarsmoking ("I always thought things like this would kill me," says Jeff Goldblum as he lights one up while waiting to be vaporized by aliens...
...Who wouldn't want to escape such a world...
...Knightley, of whose love she is thus made worthy...
...T H E T A L K I E S by James Bowman Let Me Entertain You Why explosions and aliens are not enough...
...the "love" she claims to feel for Ann Marie is just a feeling, a neurological phenomenon, since it has no moral standing beside her manly comradeship and patriotism...
...Air Force victorious and the conquering heroes returning to be folded in the arms of their adoring womenfolk can't be all bad...
...Most of the drama takes place inside Emma's head...
...Here is a woman whom we find, as Mr...
...I now expect a bidding war to break out for the rights to Mansfield Park...
...Knightley is as one had always pictured him, as is Alan Cumming's Mr...
...But of course one can't have everything...
...She was the only one who kept a cool head under fire...
...Even her rather annoying nasal delivery, perhaps accentuated by the put-on English accent, she manages to make endearing...
...I was less impressed with the casting of Toni Collette as Harriet Smith...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
