The Talkies: Twice-Told Tales

...If someone else had made a movie so obviously derivative of the originally original Star Wars, Lucas would have had good grounds to sue...

...Its heartbreaking tale of a young girl (Lu Lu), "sent down" from Chengdu to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and there placed at the mercy of corrupt party officials, still has the power to shock us when those officials, or their heirs, are still in charge in China...

...In Ms...

...The context in which we see what is otherwise a nicely-made and amusing film might make us wish for a little less of this inverse moral smugness and a dose of sackcloth and ashes all round...

...It's an old story...

...Ah yes...

...The trials and most of the public brouhaha all take place offstage, which if anything exaggerates the staginess of the piece...

...Catherine joins her father in importuning the most celebrated barrister of the day, Sir Robert Morton (Jeremy Northam), to seek what is called a Petition of Right as their final redress from Parliament despite her own deep distaste for his conservative politics...

...It was just this public admission of deceit which was wanted to make the good Lady Chilton truly good...

...Yet this is just what is needed in a play or a film that is so entirely about character...

...The Cinderella ending is the same, but the sexes are reversed, the wicked stepsisters just realistic friends, the fairy godmother an oafish roommate ( Rhys Ifans), and the social disparity between the lovers is comically ironic rather than earnestly melodramatic...

...Because the context is our late-century therapeutic culture when seemingly everyone in the public eye, from Monica Lewinsky to Bill Clinton, trades on his emotions in public discourse, a film that celebrates reticence, manners, and uncompromising morality is almost shockingly fresh and exciting...

...But now, in the context of the 1990's, the previous fin de siecle's becomingly humble reluctance to indulge in self-righteousness looks more like the first disastrous steps on the road to where we are at this fin de siecle, when all moral judgment is stigmatized...

...A film like Tea With Mussolini, which contrasts the civilities of English society with the barbarities of Italian Fascism, would have been piquant in the 19365, when the film is set...

...lied and all the rest of those present—witty, clever, and attractive people—applaud her for it...

...The story, based on actual events, concerns an English boy of 14 called Ronnie Winslow (Guy Edwards) who is dismissed from the Royal Naval College at Osbourne on the grounds that he has forged the name of another boy on a postal order for five shillings—now worth about 4o cents...

...In other words, not only the story but the context is the same, and the film's evocation of anything but the memory of an emotion is uphill work...

...The mere fact that he himself is collecting all the money from the sale of this cheap-looking knock-off—with its wooden acting, its boring and predictable battles with an even more boring and predictable enemy, its by now over-familiar comic grotesques who talk like Teletubbies, and its portentous nonsense disguised as Jedi wisdom ("Your focus determines your reality," says Liam Neeson's JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...In every case the courts find that he is guilty and the navy acted correctly...

...The cost of pursuing the action virtually bankrupts his father, ruining his health, and his sister's fiancé breaks off their engagement, partly because of her diminishing financial prospects and partly as a result of the public attention the case receives in the press and the music halls—the TV of the day...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website—wwwspectatonorg...

...The sister, Catherine, is played by Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet's wife, who has just the right amount of fervent earnestness for this committed suffragette...

...Qui-gon Jinn, who seems himself to be slightly out of focus) —seems to me not a good enough reason for him not to register a protest in any case...

...Such deliberate defiance of any expectation that it will accommodate itself to the demands of the cinema, or even of more conventional drama, serves to increase the picture's focus on the four main characters, giving it an almost claustrophobic quality...

...But so is what happens to you when you become, like Lucas, too successful—in the movies, or in anything else...

...But these characteristic transformations are by now very old hat, and it is thrilling to see rebeautified and newly respected what has been presented to us as ugly in the half century since Terence Rattigan's play of The Winslow Boy was first turned into a film by Anthony Asquith...

...Pidgeon has just the right amount of fervent earnestness for this committed suffragette...

...Whether a story seems fresh and new orold and tired depends not on the story itself but this new context, and that is especially true where it has a moral purpose...

...When Oscar Wilde wrote the play on which it was based in the 1890's, there was arguably some need If care is taken with context a good story can be redone...

...Never one of la divine Julia's biggest fans and always inclined to suspect that her gaping smile was not the only indication of too much space between her ears, even I could not but be touched by her here...

...I n our Movie of the Month, The Winslow Boy, David Mamet, of all people, also takes us back to the turn of the century, or near it, not for the implicit self-congratulation of An Ideal Husband but for the much harder moral work of learning from the way they did things then...

...To a modern audience, there is something more than a bit "off" in the climactic scene where the rigidly moralistic Lady Chilton (Cate Blanchett) admits in front of her husband and sister-in-law, the sister-in-law's just accepted fiancé and his father, that she has (gasp...

...This is good enough for his father, who takes his son's case up with the naval authorities and then with one government tribunal after another in an effort to have Ronnie reinstated...

...But to explain a social phenomenon by comparing it, as someone did, to the tulip craze in seventeenth-century Holland, is not necessarily to enlighten...

...No one who has come through the last thirty or forty years of the therapeutic culture with some sense of honor intact will fail to shed a discreet tear or two when Sir Robert proves, in spite of himself, that he has not got a "dead heart" but one capable of being stirred, as ours will be, by the words of the Petition: "Let right be done...

...A woman of strongly progressive views in general, she paradoxically finds herselfcast in the role of her father's principal supporter and champion of a positively Virgilian sense of masculine honor (fiat justitia, mat caelum) while her more traditionally minded mother, Grace (Gemma Jones), is driven to the point of open rebellion against the paterfamilias for ruining the family on behalf of his quixotic dream of honor...

...Naturally, he loses her and then finds her again, then loses her again, then finds her for good in a climactic scene so comic and heartwarming that it almost makes us believe in the incredibly hokey but crowd-pleasing line in which Miss Roberts claims to be "just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her...

...Such apparent public enthusiasm for what is an obviously inferior movie is, as it is now becoming commonplace to observe, a product of the hype...

...You start imitating yourself...

...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@cs.com...

...People sometimes just go a little nuts...

...68 July 1999 • The American Spectator for those who were the fat cats of their day to be told that it would be well for them to bear in mind the Biblical text, "Judge not, that ye be not judged...

...She thinks he is only taking the case for the publicity and says he is "not a man of feeling" — in fact that he has a "dead heart" — but in spite of herself she is impressed (as we must be) with his cross-examination of Ronnie, as a result of which he agrees to take the case...

...the normal Hollywood context, reticence comes across as "repression," manners as snobbery, and moral firmness as rigidity...

...His father, Arthur Winslow (Nigel Hawthorne), asks him to tell the truth, because "a lie between you and me cannot be hidden," and Ronnie repeats his denial...

...Context is also all-important in the case of An Ideal Husband...

...One would expect the portrait of Chinese Communism in a movie like Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl to be similarly familiar stuff, and it is one measure of the corruption of our culture that it is not...

...We seem to have heard somewhere before that fascists were brutes and boors while English ladies of a certain age were often lovable eccentrics with a sublime disregard for merely political realities...

...Interestingly, this brief passage is almost the only moment of forensic display in a film that would seem to be a natural for extended court-room drama...

...Now that she has implicitly acknowledged she is just like the rest of us lying, deceitful buggers, she has presumably achieved that state of humility which is the perfect foil for her glittering virtues...

...The progressive-minded people who run Hollywood find accounts of the cruelties of life under Communism uncongenial material, so we must wait for the occasional success of the victims of those cruelties themselves in smuggling their stories out of the country...

...He says he didn't do it...

...But perhaps a century on we may allow ourselves the thought that Wilde's own well-known moral lapses may have made him just a bit too eager to celebrate what was almost a Clintonian confession avant la lettre — one, that is, which carries with it its own absolution and which is something rather to be proud than ashamed of...

...In the 1990's there is, how shall we say, a certain familiarity to the moral sentiment on offer...

...Mamet puts the three Winslows and Sir Robert under the microscope as surely as the British legal system did their prototypes — and, like them, they stand up to the scrutiny remarkably well...

...That is what happened to the first of George Lucas's long-awaited "prequels" to his Star Wars trilogy, Episode One: The Phantom Menace —which (in case you are living on the planet Tattooine) came out in May to mixed reviews but near record-breaking box office receipts...

...A much better retelling of an old story comes with Notting Hill, which is a reverse Cinderella tale starring Hugh Grant as a poor drudge for the 1990's (he runs a travel bookshop in Notting Hill, London) who catches the eye of pop cultural royalty in the person of a movie superstar called Anna Scott (Julia Roberts...

...What keeps the new retellings of the same old stories from losing their savor is that they are always retold in some new context...

...The American Spectator .44 y 19 99 69...

...Happily, I knew from the start that the right gal and guy were bound to end up together—as they do not, for instance, in the very original and very disappointing Forces of Nature...

...Joan Chen, for example, only managed to make Xiu Xiu by deceiving the authorities of western Sichuan province about the nature of the film she was shooting there...