The Talkies
Bowman, James
THE TALK IES by James Bowman Selling Our Souls Retellings, in one form or another, of the Faust legend may constitute a trend in Hollywood this autumn. We had an oblique treatment of it in...
...By contrast, Ang Lee's moral imagination in The Ice Storm is powerful enough to overcome some serious disadvantages and genuinely to move us...
...Small wonder that the film couldn't have been made in Hollywood...
...Coincidentally, it also has a Faustian element...
...His Mephistopheles, played by a marvelously raffish Burt Reynolds, is much more like the real thing, offering Mark Wahlberg the chance to be a porn "star" without himself realizing—so complete is his moral blindness—that such stardom is anything but what his victim imagines it to be...
...The children...
...That is one of the things that is so depressing about it...
...72 December 1997 • The American Spectator dren that, if No One is watching, they might as well do as they like...
...Anderson shares many of his characters' delusions...
...Loyalty like hers cannot but shed some of its moral luster on its object, and we are the more disposed to pity him when Ham-sun's arrogance is taken to school in the movie's most searing scene...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site—http://www.spectator.org...
...But what a fee in dead and damaged people the devil always manages to exact...
...he mutters as the tears roll down his cheeks...
...Reeves's Bible-bashing mother, is made to look as camp and silly as religious people almost invariably are in the movies...
...Yet without even the counterbalance of Hamsun's skill as a writer—so difficult to put across in a movie —Troell and von Sydow between them manage to make us feel more for him than we ever could, believe it or not, for Keanu Reeves...
...But although it presents us with a real moral conflict and makes the essential point that the devil's temptations are effectless unless we freely choose to yield to them, the film itself yields to a diabolical temptation to exaggerated, Grand Guignol effects...
...Nor are we meant to take it seriously...
...Hollywood is too predictable in its moral obtuseness for that...
...The film tells the story of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (Max von Sydow) who, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, became a Nazi sympathizer during the war and was tried after it for treason...
...Here — Connecticut, 1973—both God and Mephistopheles are absent...
...She is actually much more the Nazi than he is, since "The Cause" offers her a reason for existence apart from him...
...To him, as to David Duchovny, hell on a good day looks a lot like L.A.—or at least the San Fernando Valley...
...That is a real failure of moral imagination...
...It is a declaration of independence which he cannot allow himself to recognize as such...
...the more we are let off the moral hook...
...Like Boogie Nights it is set in the Iwo's, but unlike Boogie Nights it milks its presentation of the decade for all it is worth...
...The filmmakers themselves (Taylor Hack-ford, director, Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, writers) don't take their material any more seriously than do Al D'Amato or Don King, both of whom put in good-natured cameos as close friends of the devil...
...Could it be that by so calling attention to the unbelievability of that which induces in them only complacency, Figgis means to criticize, even ridicule that complacency...
...Unfortunately, the movie audience in this country being what it is, there is a very good chance that this film will never come anywhere near you, and you will be lucky to find it, a year hence, on video...
...It is typical of the man, who is a deeply unsympathetic character from beginning to end:arrogant, insensitive, self-centered, pigheaded, cruel to those who love him and unforgivably naïve...
...In one of the film's many memorable scenes, Hamsun, as empty-headed a celebrity as ever prattled of his political views to David Letterman, lectures Hitler himself on Norwegian national interests and thinks that he is listened to...
...The other is that its diabolical denizens are in fact one's fellow countrymen...
...Even the supposed moral counterweight to the devil, Judith Ivey in the role of Mr...
...The terribly moving final scenes leave us with images of personal and domestic life's outlasting and triumphing over the political, which is also the diabolical...
...In this so-promising state of freedom and moral collapse, we experience along with them a dawning realization of the truth so baldly and frighteningly stated by Marlowe's Mephistopheles—"Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it...
...Larry Flynt, does not cheat by attempting to mask the sordidness of what these people do (though the need for an "R" rating is a considerable constraint on his representation of it), but at some level he does share their belief that it must all be worth it...
...Faust wears blue jeans, Mephistopheles has dyed blond hair, and Gretchen (Angelina Jolie) has the most amazing lips since Brigitte Bardot...
...Of course, it is precisely his f—ing mother that she is...
...And hell does not always look like hell...
...A lot of the credit, too, should go to Ghita Norby, who plays Hamsun's long-suffering wife, Marie...
...Figgis is English and Miss Kinski—who looks to me to have passed her sell-by date—is German, but they are de facto Americans...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Thus the pathetically incompetent but rather sweet "Dirk Diggler" (Mr...
...What she brings to the picture is not the pathos of her treatment at her husband's hands so much as her sense of loyalty in spite of it...
...It's the old story," he says in his lugubrious voiceover: "the choice to be a slave in heaven or a star in hell...
...Paul Thomas Anderson, the talented young auteur of Boogie Nights, at least understands this much...
...The movie also gets the quote about reigning in hell versus serving in heaven closer to the way John Milton wrote it—which may be why it names its Mephistopheles, JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement played by Al Pacino, after him...
...Certainly Mike Figgis in One Night Stand is...
...The children...
...Fortunately, the temptation he is offering us—namely a belief in that romantic love whose demands excuse every sort of appalling behavior to spouses and children—is so familiar from a thousand Hollywood movies that no one, unless he is already pretty far gone in self-deceit, is likely to fall for it...
...Maybe Ang Lee himself is a kind of Mephistopheles here...
...The funniest line in the picture is when, during a quarrel with Amber, Dirk shouts at her, "You're not my f---ing mother...
...Reynolds's benevolent porn producer, Jack Homer ("What a good boy am I!"), Mr...
...Anderson, unlike Milos Forman in The People vs...
...It allows Al Pacino his natural tendency to overact and it indulges itself in a lot of those computer-generated morphings that, however much they may cost, always look cheap to me...
...The concatenation of circumstance which results in their yielding to temptation is almost as incredible as the plot twist at the end which sets the capstone on the adulterous lovers' unassailable self-esteem...
...It's the ewige Weibe with attitude...
...Interesting, then, that the film itself is so largely a study in self-deceit, as the two principals, played by Wesley Snipes and Nastassja Kinski, follow their first impulse to jump into bed together while continuing to treasure (with the director's connivance) the comforting illusion that they really did try to avoid it...
...Yet in the post-war world where the theme of loyalty and betrayal is on everyone's lips—where their friend, the Nazi puppet Quisling (Sverre Anker Ousdal), is shot and Marie is sent to prison and Hamsun himself is said to be merely senile—it is only through the trickery and deceit of the enlightened victors that Marie is made to betray her husband...
...Wahlberg) cheerfully embraces degradation, if not damnation, for the sake of forming a sad but oddly loving little family—the family he has never known—with Jack as the daddy, Dirk's co-star Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) as the mommy, and the equally stupid and waiflike "Rollergirl" (Heather Graham) as his sister...
...Well mostly...
...It strikes us like an electrical jolt...
...On a good day, it can look a lot like L.A...
...M eanwhile, in a small country on the edge of Europe with a population about the size of Alabama's, they can produce real grownup pictures like our Movie of the Month, Jan Troell's Hamsun...
...Lee gets excellent performances out of Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver in the principal roles, and the children—Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, Tobey Maguire, Adam Hann-Byrd—are beyond praise...
...The psychiatrist's interview with Marie, in which she has finally been induced to tell the story, weeping, of Hamsun's appalling neglect of their children, is intercut with Hamsun himself watching newsreel footage of the German concentration camps—something which, never much of an anti-Semite, he just never bothered to notice before...
...Perhaps, like poor Richard Nixon whose slow-motion fall everyone is watching on the TV, they are in the process of resigning their respective presidencies...
...Call me old-fashioned, but I want something more out of a movie than just the feeling that I have to be cool to appreciate it Devil's Advocate offers us a more moralized Faust in the person of Keanu Reeves, a small-town lawyer in Florida who suddenly finds himself courted and offered a senior partnership in the devil's own law firm —which is naturally in Manhattan...
...We had an oblique treatment of it in Playing God where the hang-dog David Duchovny as a de-masked surgeon (he lost a patient on the operating table when he was high on drugs) gets a chance to practice medicine again at the invitation of a vicious gangster, played by Timothy Hutton...
...Yet the more we are invited to laugh at the clothes and the music and the hair and the other outdated fashions (just look at that waterbed...
...But if you do have the chance, be sure not to miss it...
...Al Pacino might as well have been given a red suit with horns and a tail, so far is he, like the temptations he has to offer (megabucks, impossibly eager women, media stardom), removed from the ordinary experience of his audience...
...The rest of the movie, written by Mark Haskell Smith and directed by Andy Wilson, trades on similar, not-quite-successful attempts at wit and profundity, but its real point is simply to be hip...
...But it is this absence which is the temptation, the sense at the height of the sexual revolution among these wife-swapping suburbanites and their troubled chilHollywood is the one devil you can always resist...
...The American Spectator • December 1997 73...
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...Naw.44 want something more out of a movie than just the feeling that I have to be cool to appreciate it...
...But the disadvantage referred to above is, in my view, the film's precise location in time...
...The film loses some of its impact and immediacy as we are tempted to believe that we have got beyond not only those things but the state of moral and spiritual crisis which is their setting as well...
...It is not with the monarchy of hell offered to Keanu Reeves that the real devil wins usover, but with much more paltry temptations — and he does so by means of our own self-delusion...
...Hitler (Ernst Jacobi), the Mephistopheles to his Faust, offers him that most subtle and ubiquitous temptation, flattery of his victim's self-importance...
...The problem with Boogie Nights is that, like Mr...
Vol. 30 • December 1997 • No. 12
