The Talkies: The Past Is Another Movie
Bowman, James
by James Bowman The Past Is Another Movie T he late British novelist, L.P. Hartley, survives in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as the author of a single sentence deemed...
...Can Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe), a sensitive soul under a ruthless exterior, find true happiness with the call girl and Veronica Lake look-alike, Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger...
...Instead, "Larry" Cook (Jason Robards) is an Aunt Sally with "patriarchy" painted across his chest...
...Instead, she has created a great human drama which leaves Catherine not (as she is in The Heiress) an embittered old maid but looking, for the first time in her life, genuinely beautiful, and smart as well as good...
...Confidential by Curtis Hanson has received a lot of praise as a sort of latter-day noir thriller—about police corruption in Los Angeles in the early 1950's, and a seedy demimonde of prostitutes and dope fiends and hangers-on of the entertainment business...
...To drive home the point, Ms...
...Ginny and Rose live with their husbands on the eponymous thousand acres, which Larry proposes to deed over to a corporation to avoid estate taxes...
...When Joyce finds out, she threatens to tell her father unless she too is allowed to sleep in Harold's bed...
...Or are trying to be...
...Smith, the chief of the L.A...
...The other two are, well, not...
...rackets after Mickey Cohen gets sent to prison, is a caricature villain who would be more at home in Edwardian melodrama than noir cinema...
...There is no question of her being cast as a victim of the patriarchy, though she would have a better claim to be one than most...
...You may begin to get the idea that these characters are maybe just a little too good for noir—just as other characters, especially the chief cop, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), are way too bad...
...Both the men she cared most about in the world hold her in contempt...
...66 November /997 • The American Spectator racism and sexism and imperialism and homophobia—now generally supposed to occupy the dustbin of history...
...The film ends with a little purr of satisfaction as both Ginny's and Rose's marriages have broken up and the farm sold off...
...Can Lt...
...And once the revolutionary cadres have thus undermined our cultural foundations, there will be space for two, three many G.I...
...Marjorie, who asks Harold to call her "Mum," tells him that she can't sleep with one-legged Stan "for medical reasons," yet almost immediately she seduces him...
...Rupert Graves gives a marvelous performance as Harold Guppy, a good natured ne'er-do-well who rents a room in the home of the Beasleys — Marjorie (Julie Walters), a woman of near 5o, her older husband, Stan (Matthew Walker), a one-legged veteran of World War I, and their 13-year-old daughter, Joyce (Laura Sadler), the only one of four children still living at home...
...Each time Ms...
...Caroline, a A drunk driver and abuser of his daughters, this Lear hasn't a paternal leg to stand on...
...As in L.A...
...L.A...
...Yet by the end, when he tries to explain that he left her for her own sake, she has to realize that he treats her as much like a fool as her father did...
...A drunk driver given to irrational rages in addition to being an abuser of his daughters, he has not a paternal leg to stand on...
...What a rarity...
...Can Sgt...
...But the center of attention in this film is Marjorie's truly awesome powers of denial...
...Vincennes is the "technical adviser") for the sole purpose of showing up the fraud of attaching any idea of "honor" to the LAPD...
...You might have thought that the pre-Rodney King LAPD was corrupt and racist and violent, but L.A...
...The American Spectator • November 1997 67...
...Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) rise above his cynicism and his desire to bask in the effulgence of the Hollywood constellations in order to do the right thing...
...Some license may have been taken with the facts ("Just the facts, ma'am" here is a comical catchphrase brought in at a key moment to discredit the show further), but that is a small price to pay to make social discipline, that speciality of the 1950's LAPD, look merely evil...
...Instead, he takes some trouble to preserve it alive, the good and the bad alike (though not unexaggerated), and to give the bare sociological construct of "class" something of a human context...
...Agnieszka Holland's adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square tries to do something much more difficult by showing us the past as it was, rather than as an annex of the present...
...This is something which cannot be said of anyone in the dreadful movie adaptation of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, in spite of their contemporaneity...
...Lany/Lear's three daughters are Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh...
...This kind of cultural vandalism happens in American universities every day...
...As in the play the old man soon regrets both his gift to his eldest two daughters and his disowning of his youngest, but here Larry's expectation of a little of the respect owed to an aged parent by his daughters is seen as completely illegitimate...
...I want all of this to stop with our generation," says one sister to the other, leaving up in the air the question of whether "all this" might not include the very continuance of the species...
...Confidential either, but his immediate target, the British class system, is much more amusingly as well as subtly hit...
...Hartley, survives in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as the author of a single sentence deemed worthy of preservation unto the ages: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there...
...And Townsend, who is merely weak rather than sardonic, genuinely admires her ingenuousness...
...It is interesting that what conjures up the fifties for the British is motorcycles with sidecars and grammar school girls and comic class-consciousness rather than TV—at least if we are to judge by Philip Goodhew's film, supposedly based on a true story, called Intimate Relations...
...Poor dumb Harold has no desire for either of them, but he stays on in the midst of this Freudian cat's-cradle partly because it is the nearest thing to a family he has ever known and partly because he just doesn't know what else to do...
...Af James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Sloper's sister...
...Only the role of the daughter, Catherine, is played by an American actress: the versatile if inconsistent Ms...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site—http:I/www.spectator.org...
...Though Hanson and his team have taken a lot of trouble to get the period details just right—the cars, the clothes, the topical references—in the end we ask ourselves what has the story gained by its setting in the 1950's...
...Here, surely, is a potential field day for feminists almost on the scale of King Lear, and yet Ms...
...A woman without guile...
...Confidential is here to tell you that you had no idea...
...A Thousand Acres is nothing but our own angry and fractious and distorted times reflected back at us...
...The show does not figure in the action, but it is always there in the background (Sgt...
...Holland...
...Ben Chaplin is Morris Townsend, whocomes to court his plain and stupid daughter...
...Smiley and her adapters make him into an outrageous parody of one of the great monuments of Dead White Male culture...
...lawyer in Des Moines, objects and is instantly excommunicated...
...Yet Goodhew's purposes are not narrowly ideological, nor is he himself an imperialist of the past, exploiting what material it affords for his own political purposes and letting anything rot which does not serve them...
...E-mail him at 72056.3226@compuserve.com...
...Sloper...
...Jason Leigh registers her father's cutting ironies, which he thinks she is too stupid to understand, it is almost as unbearable to watch as not to watch...
...and Maggie Smith plays Aunt Lavinia, the daughter's terminally silly chaperon and Dr...
...Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce), the son of a dead police hero, hang on to his ideals and still live up to his father's promise...
...It would be impossible to catalogue all the beauties of this terrific production...
...For the only reason why anyone would want to rewrite King Lear so as to make Goneril and Regan the heroines and poor old Lear and (to a lesser extent) Cordelia the villains is to make a revolutionary feminist statement...
...Nothing, apart from a demonstration to anyone who may still be treasuring fond memories of the decade that it was a time when corruption and violence and hypocrisy were the norm...
...Movies, at least, generally want us to believe that both chronological and geographical foreigners are just like us...
...Townsend," she says...
...So it's out into the storm with him, and if Harold (Pat Hingle), in the Gloucester role, and the respectable churchgoers of the community think that the girls have mistreated their poor old dad, it is only an indication of the extent to which respectable churchgoing society is self-deluded by the myths of patriarchy...
...Or else they are fair game for a red-blooded, dunderheaded American hero like George Clooney in The Peacemaker, a film whose political and dramatic idiocies are scarcely noticeable as we flash by them on the Spielbergian roller-coaster...
...I wouldn't swear to it that Goodhew's ultimate object isn't similar to that of L.A...
...Janes to finish the job...
...Confidential, they scarcely even look as if they were meant to be true or real, an impression that is heightened by our knowledge of the film's antecedents...
...Her holding her own with the veteran Brits redeems the disgrace of having taken part in A Thousand Acres...
...When Morris greets her with a harmless gallantry, she assumes that he is exactly like her father: "Please don't mock me, Mr...
...Her self-possession is such a hard-won personal triumph that she is able to transcend her time and speak to us in a universal human language out of the past—that foreign country to which she is also one of our diminishing number of guides...
...Much better, in fact, than the old Ralph Richardson–Olivia de Havilland screen version of 1949 called The Heiress...
...But in four other films this month we have the opportunity for an extended consideration of the treatment of the past...
...Holland somehow manages to resist the political temptation...
...Marjorie herself, like Harold and Stan and Joyce, has the ring of truth about her as a character, in spite of her strange pastness...
...It succeeds admirably...
...The real heart of this film is a parody of "Dragnet" called "Badge of Honor...
...Like a Calvinist whose belief that he is among the Elect makes him immune to sin, she believes so perfectly in the class system and her own place within it that she is simply incapable of doing anything unbecoming a lady...
...We can believe him when he tells her father that this is the very thing he loves about her...
...The ending is predictably a violent one, but the subtext has to do with the absurdity of class-consciousness, another of those sociological and political prunings —like A thousand rural acres are no match for a city square...
...Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this is a film not about a "dysfunctional" family in Iowa whose patriarch's sexual abuse of his two eldest daughters comes out after he passes the farm inherited from his forefathers on to the next generation...
...How banal, how uncontemporary...
...JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Two of these, the second and fourth, are wonderfully good and both Movies of the Month...
...Jason Leigh whose tendency to overact is here kept admirably in check by Ms...
...Albert Finney plays rich Dr...
Vol. 30 • November 1997 • No. 11
