The Talkies: Sexual Performances
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman Sexual Performances he old year ended and the new T year began with a sudden spate of films about wildly, cringe-makingly inappropriate sexual relationships....
...the teeth of everything Jamesian, that Isabel fell into the trap of marriage with Osmond because the puritanical Victorians allowed her no other sexual outlet...
...But the classic case of inappropriate sex is that of the dirty old man, and we had an example or two of that as well...
...I mean I love them...
...And it is pure Hollywood that she is destined for the arms of the dull but handsome Goodwood in the end...
...Suddenly, she is herself stricken with leukemia and will surely die unless, by chance, she can get a bone marrow transplant...
...One could even cite The Crucible, Arthur Miller's parabolic paean to the heroic anti-anti-Communists of the 195&s, now made into a film by Nicholas Hytner...
...In Unhook the Stars, Nick Cassavetes directed his own mother, Gena Rowlands, in the part of a lonely widow who rejected the invitation of her rich but boorish son to come and live with him and his wife so that she could have an affair with a French Canadian truck driver played by Gerard Depardieu...
...I have been so lucky to have Dad and Ruth, to have such love in my life," says Bessie...
...For we learned that Abigail Williams (here played by Winona Ryder), who made her accusations of witchcraft in old Salem to cover up an adulterous affair with John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis), was in real life ii years old and Proctor in his sixties...
...But most of the rest of the film is well put-together, and it makes a point which has hardly been heard in the land since they packed away the flying nun's wimple: that sex is not necessary to personal fulfillment...
...In Michael, the archangel of that name (John Travolta) found in his bag of angelic tricks the power not only to read minds, resurrect small animals, and flatten uncooperative banks JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement but also to attract the babes with his personal magnetism and the aroma of baking cookies...
...Lee, a divorcee who keeps insisting that she is "finally getting my life together" and hopes soon to take her "degree" in "cosmetology," is having trouble with Hank...
...The American Spectator February 1997 63...
...A successful musical comedy cannot be "hip" or cynical—which is one reason why they don't make them anymore and Allen has to use old songs even to attempt one...
...In Evening Star, Shirley MacLaine had an affair with her therapist (Bill Paxton), who was young enough to be her grandson and who kept a photo of his mother in full regalia as a Las Vegas showgirl on his shelf...
...Oh no...
...Touchett (John Gielgud...
...But the attraction of both Hank and Lee to Bessie's essential and unfamiliar goodness as it squares up to the prospect of death is very well done, and the final reconciliation of the sisters is quite a moving passage...
...Yet among all the tributes to Hollywood's belief in multifarious and lifelong sexual gratification as a kind of human right, perhaps the most inappropriate and cringe-making affair of them all is that between Woody Allen and Julia Roberts in Everyone Says I Love You...
...In My Fellow Americans, James Garner played another president who, in the immortal words of John Glenn about some of his fellow astronauts, "can't keep his wick in his pants...
...This is becoming almost a clich?in the movies these days and, to me, strikes a false note...
...Bessie (Diane Keaton) is a dutiful middle-aged daughter who has devoted her life to caring for her invalid father (Hume Cronyn) and her crazy aunt Ruth (Gwen Verdon) in a small Florida beach town...
...At one point he took her to Victoria's Secret and loudly announced "I want some crotchless panties for my mother" to a completely unruffled sales girl...
...In James it is her progressive attitudes that make her especially vulnerable...
...In The Preacher's Wife, an angel (Denzel Washington) supposedly sent down from heaven to help a hardworking black minister (Courtney B. Vance) proclaimed his divine origins by lasciviously coveting the Reverend's wife (Whitney Houston...
...Nowadays, of course, he would be just another in the crowd of what the New York Times calls "start over dads...
...Campion all but insists, in44 Raw sexual appetite kills that innocent passion which makes people sing of love...
...This dance between the sisters is a little too sketchy and there are too many distractions, including even Hank's having to come to terms with the fact that the absent father whom he has tried to play off against his mother, was in fact a bad guy and used to beat him...
...In fact, when we first see him he is burning the house down...
...Only Woody doesn't know it, and that is disastrous ignorance in what purports to be a bright and breezy musical comedy...
...So shines a good deed in a naughty world...
...Its dramatic structure requires love to be a unique spiritual fulfillment and not, as it is for Woody Allen, merely a delightful adventure...
...The one real excellence of the film lies in the performances of Malkovich and of Barbara Hershey as Madame Merle...
...44 James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...62 February 1997 • The American Spectator New York at the beginning of the film, prove to have the same kind of hard-bitten quality to them...
...Far out...
...in Ms...
...Campion she is just a slightly more aristocratic version of Ibsen's Nora, the feminist prototype trapped by the norms of the oppressive patriarchy until she summons up the nerve to walk out...
...The film has its flaws, the most important being the waste of Robert De Niro's talent in the role of the comic Doctor Wally, and the puzzling cross-talk with his brother and receptionist, Bob (Dan Hedaya...
...says Bessie...
...Raw sexual appetite, we can't help but feel, kills that innocent passion which makes people sing of love...
...They love you very much," says Lee, lapsing into banality to fill the conversational void...
...What is the point of them...
...Even in this he is a vampire, sucking up the innocence of those who sang of happiness or disappointment in love fifty or sixty years ago...
...If mere comic relief, the relief is not quite comic nor the comedy quite relieving enough...
...It is much easier to understand that Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman) is taken advantage of by Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich) just because she is a woman, rather than because she is the kind of woman she is—which is to say, for her time, rather a "liberated" one...
...yet into the midst of the entertainment industry's perpetual celebration of sexual license there occasionally breaks a ray of light...
...Bessie's seizing of the moral advantage on their first meeting in seventeen years is if anything more unlovely than Lee's frank self-centeredness...
...But what is outrageous is Woody Allen's sublime unconsciousness of the outrageous...
...When Miss Barrymore's character temporarily forsakes Norton's to indulge herself in an affair with a randy ex-convict (Tim Roth) we cannot help but raise the eyebrow...
...Besides the Oedipal motif, there was, perhaps in keeping with the Christmas spirit, the angel motif...
...Innocence is now so unfamiliar to audiences that one of the greatest of Henry James's many studies of the subject, Portrait ofa Lady, has had to be converted by its cinematic adapters into little more than a feminist object lesson...
...At least someone in Hollywood still respects the taboo on sex with other species...
...But he gets leave from the mental institution to which he is subsequently shipped to go to Florida with mother and brother to (maybe) save the life of Aunt Bessie...
...E-mail him at 72o56.3226@compuserve.com...
...It is a true moment of epiphany and gives one renewed hope for American movies...
...Such, I take it, is the Movie of the Month, Mar-vin's Room, directed by Jerry Zaks from a screenplay (adapted from his own play) by Scott McPherson...
...Also in the supernatural department, there was human-alien sex in Star Trek: First Contact and Mars Attacks...
...Campion's best efforts...
...As directed by the New Zealander, Jane Campion, all kinds of tedious complications and qualifications that must be navigated in the novel are ironed out and made simple for us by the introduction of this political agenda...
...Even the young lovers, Holden (Edward Norton) and Skylar (Drew Barrymore), who sing joyously (Miss Barrymore is dubbed) "Just you, just me" on the streets of Woody Allen is not the only one with sex on the brain...
...They are so deliberately to outrage...
...The only close relatives Bessiehas are her undutiful sister, Lee (Meryl Streep), and Lee's two sons, Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Charlie (Hal Sciardino), who live in Ohio and whom she has not seen or communicated with in seventeen years —principally because Lee has left her with the entire responsibility for pop and Aunt Ruth...
...Isabel's own subtlety is reduced to her telling Henrietta (Mary Louise Parker) of refusing Caspar Goodwood (Vigo Mortensen) because of a desire to gain "a general impression of life," but we never see the connection between this desire and the curious kind of vanity that attracts her to Osmond...
...Between them they almost manage to save this couple from caricature and make them interesting in spite of what were no doubt Ms...
...On the contrary, we have astonishingly crass fantasy sequences in which she imagines herself being fondled by all the film's major male characters except old Mr...
...In all the other examples, there is always a kind of smirking self-consciousness on the part of the film-makers, a sense that they know they are being naughty...
...This would require a rare tissue match, only really conceivable in a close relative...
...In the latter case, the alien babe played by the astonishingly shaped Lisa Marie first murdered Martin Short and then vaporized a golden retriever belonging to the President of the United States (Jack Nicholson...
...From an adjoining room, one of his conquests could be heard to exclaim: "Wings...
...Charming as are many of the jokes and the musical numbers in this film, just beneath its surface there lies the stunted sensibility of someone who fundamentally believes that sex and love are the same thing...
...His usual schlemiel character is here a sexual predator who uses information acquired by his daughter from eavesdropping on a therapist, to deceive and seduce a married woman in her twenties—and it is meant to be lighthearted comedy...
...For innocence, with its belief that love is of the heart and not the loins, that it leads inevitably to marriage, and that it lasts forever, is the essence of musical comedy...
...I've never been kissed by a sociopath," though undoubtedly a great comic line, just doesn't quite work in musical comedy...
...As another of Mia Farrow's adopted children said to him at the time of his affair with Soon-Yi: "Everyone knows you don't have an affair with your step-daughter...
...The best thing about the film is the contrast between the selfishness of Lee (her complaint to his psychiatrist is that "Hank cost me a perfectly good relationship") and the unselfishness of Bessie, which is not without its own kind of selfishness...
...In Mother, Albert Brooks, having found himself incapable of successful relationships with women, moved back in with his mother (Debbie Reynolds...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
