The Talkies: Those Awesome Aussies
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman Those Awesome Aussies R ussia supplies us with caviar, France with foie gras; Germany and Japan make our luxury cars and Sandia Arabia supplies our oil; we get...
...we get gardeners and maids and farmworkers from Mexico, baseball players from the Dominican Republic, and journalists from Britain...
...Bowman are available on the TAS web site—http:/lwww.spectator.org...
...They are not produced domestically anymore...
...It is true that from all three films they will learn that amazingly brilliant scientists tend to be young and pretty—and it is a nice question whether Elizabeth Shue, the physicist of The Saint, Anne Heche, the geologist of Volcano, or Eric Stoltz, the ethnographer of Anaconda, is prettiest...
...She only wants to make Harry swear that he will be hers until he dies, which he does, affectionately calling her "you nutter...
...About these monuments to juvenile sensibilities there is nothing to say once we have emerged from our stupefied admiration of their predictability and crassness...
...Getting secret messages about the future from an angel who communicates with you through the Australian version of "Wheel of Fortune" is just a kind of exaggeration of the craziness that we all go through in love...
...This is not funny," he says, echoing her, and for a moment it's really not...
...And more and more, as I have had occasion to observe in these pages as recently as two months ago, Australia is becoming our chief foreign supplier of movies for grownups...
...Then she still will not untie him until he also drinks a love potion she has prepared — "to make sure...
...There is something heroic about such a failure that you don't find even in a serious film by a talented Australian director, Bruce Beresford, who has been working in Hollywood for too long...
...The American Spectator - June 1997 67...
...She is waiting for him naked when he gets home...
...Is it merely curmudgeonliness which leads me to the conclusion that the fantasies of my own youth were more wholesome...
...This is a woman, we think, who is capable of anything...
...4i James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...In addition they will learn that it was an act of environmental "arrogance" to build the Los Angeles subway system...
...I suppose we have to allow the largo from Dvorak's New World Symphony as a well-recognized soother of savage breasts—though the savages in this case are soothed with suspicious alacrity...
...After their lovemaking, Harry wakes up tied to the bed posts and begins to panic...
...purpose and the sense that love gives us all of being somehow chosen and favored by God...
...When he gets home, Kate has already found out their good news through "Wheel of Fortune" — whose saying when she asked Astral was "Roll out the red carpet...
...Unfortunately, there is such a thing as literal schizophrenia, and we cannot but be reminded that two schizophrenics who in real life decided to stop taking their medication and have a baby (which they planned to raise themselves) would be behaving very irresponsibly indeed...
...It The road to movie paradise runs through Australia...
...so eagerly deciphered by the contestants on "Wheel of Fortune...
...Reluctantly, Harry's and Kate's doctors and Harry's brother and sister-in-law, Morris (Colin Friels) and Louise (Deborra-Lee Fumess), agree that the two of them can move in together, and soon they are so closely in sync that their numerological obsessions have coincided...
...But this ending strikes a particularly false note...
...Who now could believe in this idyll of primitive innocence, this latter-day PauletVirginie, concocted by the left-wing playwright Edward Bond out of the novel by John Vance Marshall...
...By the same means she finds out that she is pregnant...
...Both the young Jenny Agutter and the photography, by Roeg himself, were as beautiful as I remembered them, but everything else looked laughably dated...
...But when the clues to the "Wheel of Fortune" board reveal the title "You are my special angel," it comes to both of them as a confirmation of the divine blessing on their union...
...The ending is especially unsatisfactory...
...From both The Saint and JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Additional reviews of current movies by Mr...
...At least our idle youth, bored with video games and intimidating their teachers, may derive from such films the improving lessons so often absent from their chaotic classrooms...
...He calls out to Kate...
...This is organized and directed by Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close), a tea-planter's wife who gave up a career in music in order to many...
...This story of a group of British, Australian, Dutch, and American women interned by the Japanese in unspeakable conditions in Sumatra during the Second World War has interesting characters and terrifically well-managed scenes, such as that of the Japanese air attack on the ship evacuating the women and children from Singapore in February 1917...
...Yet the picture's afterglow somehow survives the final blackout...
...Because this is very scary for me...
...Well, that and a little music played by the women's "vocal orchestra...
...Yet even here there is a touch of corrupting vulgarity...
...Beresford's Paradise Road does so many things so well that it is a great pity to see it spoiled by his coarseness of sensibility and weakness for sentimental clich...
...Valuable as this lesson no doubt would have been to such moral primitives, it is positively bathetic cinematically to put them through so much war and slaughter only in order that they should become a little more like us...
...The conditions imposed on this one as well as on her parents by their illness begin to seem more and more arbitrary and, well, crazy, and something of the magic of their early relationship goes out of it...
...They instantly know whether an address that they are looking at adds up to a good omen or a bad one...
...The pregnancy reminds us that madness is not only a metaphor but also a real condition...
...In this remarkable Australian film, even childish irresponsibility cannot quite dim our sense of the most adult experience of them all...
...Yet, silly as this film now looks to me, it still seems more grown-up than most films today...
...She comes back from the kitchen...
...It is Kate who explains to Harry, after they have met in group therapy, about her guardian angel, Astral, and the messages she receives from her through the titles, sayings, proverbs, etc...
...It is unclear whether it is the indiscriminate, promiscuous killing of Australia's larger fauna by mechanized white hunters or the delectable Jenny's resistance to his sexual advances which so depresses the young aboriginal boy (David Gumpilil) that he proceeds to kill himself...
...It is a disastrous lapse of taste...
...B etter by far, too, for Beresford to have stayed in Australia and made a picture like our Movie of the Month, Angel Baby by Michael Rymer...
...None of it can be taken seriously by anyone with a mental age of more than 4. Thus, even before the summer blockbuster season, the Multiplices of America were trumpeting the arrival of such mini-blockbusters as The Saint, Anaconda, and Volcano...
...At any rate, nearly everything that comes out of Hollywood these days is blockbusterized, which is to say that it consists of special effects punctuated by dramatic formulae, stock characters, and a few very familiar heartwarming lessons...
...Paradoxically, the only sense in which the way of life of these nomadic savages really is, as Bond and Roeg imagine, authentic and admirable is that, unlike some silly, white Europeans, they are not such fools as to commit suicide over a trifle like a dead water buffalo, or even a young lady's decision to decline the honor of authentic, aboriginal sex in the bush in favor of a conventionally girlish expectation of middle-class marriage...
...I was reminded of them recently with the re-release of Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout of um, the first Australian film I ever saw, though it was directed by a Briton...
...Is he the one...
...Their madness is indistinguishable from their love—maybe ours too...
...From Volcano they will learn of racial prejudice among white Los Angeles policemen, and that it takes the near-destruction of the city to teach stiff-necked Angelenos the wisdom of the little child who says that "everybody"—at least when covered with gray volcanic ash—"looks the same...
...Anaconda, for instance, they will learn of the gross evils wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, whose purpose in the world appears to be to offer its imprimatur to whatever thieves, brigands, and murderers manage to survive its sadistic treatment of them in childhood...
...E-mail him at 72o56.3226@compuserve.com...
...But I am afraid that when our world-champion slackers flunk organic chemistry for the second time at age zz, they may decide that there are easier ways of attracting the opposite sex...
...But it is at this point that the film starts to go slightly wrong...
...Like other recent (and good) Australian pictures such as Shine and Cosi, this film treats mental illness as a metaphor for universal experiences...
...she cries, insisting on the seriousness of what to an outsider looks precisely like a game...
...Harry, whose illness is apparently under better control, believes instantly and totally in Astral...
...Rymer makes the schizophrenia of Harry Goodman (John Lynch) and Kate Deier (Jacqueline McKenzie) almost irrelevant to their story, which is about love and44 Nearly everything that comes out of Hollywood these days is blockbusterized...
...Better by far that Percy Grainger's Country Gardens, which plays over the closing credits, should have found its way in here...
...And yet love still means love...
...Kate asks Astral when they are alone together...
...This isn't a game...
...Like the victims of the Los Angeles Volcano, these women learn from horror and suffering nothing but the fashionable egalitarian credo which we are always so ready to congratulate ourselves for adhering to more steadfastly than our grandfathers, or indeed grandmothers...
...You can't ask that...
...Some kind of Gresham's Law of culture seems to dictate that blockbusters drive out proper films—that is, films by and for and about adults...
...Harry gets a job, but he has to lie about the two years he has spent in asylums and in outpatient care...
...66 June 1997 • The American Spectator also manages to strike just the right balance between barbarism and humanity in representing the women's Japanese captors...
...He proceeds to ask her "if we were going to get together," and Kate flies into a fit...
...It is okay to get Astral the angel mixed up with Astral, the baby in Kate's tummy, but while angels can remain mere symbols, babies can't...
...The sheer monotony of Bond's reiteration of his one and only point—that black and primitive is good and white and civilized is bad—gives one a headache...
...Shame...
...Once again, Harry and Kate are sweet and funny and lovable, and we have learned to care passionately about what happens to them, not because they are ill but because they are, beneath their respective illnesses, recognizably normal...
...But what on earth could Beresford have been thinking when he chose, as the only other selection from the women's repertoire performed during the film, Ravel's Bolero, with its inevitable reminiscence of that bit of seventies fluff, Blake Edwards's io...
...But, presented with the opportunity to show us how this group of prewar women coped heroically—or, in some cases, much less than heroically—with appalling conditions, Beresford simply cannot resist making them nineties women manqué and offering a redundant treatise on the evils of class, racial, national, and sexual prejudice...
Vol. 30 • June 1997 • No. 6
