There's no place like home
O'Brien, Tom
FAMILY BREAKUPS ON FILM There's no place like home TOM O'BRIEN WHY DO movies about marital breakup need villains? Although this need was only subtly evident in earlier versions of the breakup...
...He articulates his regression in others ways, commenting, for example, that "the only lady in my life is seven years old," a cute daughter named Georgie whom he prefers to wife or any potential girlfriend...
...Kramer, it dominates the more recent Shoot the Moon and Smash Palace...
...a beaten Finney reaches his hand out and calls, "Faith, Faith...
...Its male lead is even more psychotic, destroying his marriage for no discernible purpose, not even another girlfriend...
...The end of the film typifies its dead-end character: after a closing apocalypse of family violence on the tennis court (where else...
...Diane Keaton plays Finney's wife, Faith, and tries to keep the family circle together when he leaves home...
...In these last two, the triangular relationship of mother-father-son dominated the story line, with the plot reconciling father and son as the true partners and expelling the mother as emotionally superficial...
...For all their worth and dignity, Kramer vs...
...Kramer, the plot was more subtle...
...In Smash Palace, in particular, there is no sense of distance between the moviemakers and their subject, but rather some extra sadistic violence thrown in that has nothing to do with the main plot...
...He drives his wife crazy by refusing to please her in small ways (like going to a local party) or discussing their big problems (she wants him to sell the autobody garage, or "smash palace," he inherited...
...The movies thus document a desire to avoid or drop out of the pursuit of mature heterosexual love as simply too difficult...
...While such characters are important, in treating them the directors don't scrutinize fantasies...
...The movie is constructed on these cycles of violence and tenderness, and one keeps hoping for them to stop...
...Thus, while both movies reflect a new emphasis on fatherhood - one of the best results of changing relations between the sexes - they also conform to an older pattern...
...The bulk of the movie enacts a grotesque, sadistic vengeance on the husband...
...Smash Palace ends on the same equivocal but violent note...
...Shoot the Moon and Smash Palace illustrate the commonplace difference between laughing with or laughing at someone, although here the issue is crying...
...The characters are too superficial to suspect that they are puppets of compulsions, particularly a perpetual I-can't-live-with-you-or-without-you mania...
...They allow no way to measure a norm, either by directorial irony or by a sympathetic leading character...
...There can be no real denouement because there is no real growth, not even to a conscious acceptance of ambivalence...
...Moviemakers in the "domestic realism" genre seem incapable of conceiving of a breakup as an agonizing but mature, or coldly indifferent, or simply moderately hostile parting between two people who no longer get along...
...Some viewers may excuse the presence of villains, and even have sympathy for them, as a bow to the imperatives of plot or the modern fad of the anti-hero...
...New tenderness would only precipitate new violence...
...Kramer and Ordinary People...
...Shoot the Moon and Smash Palace have similarly received laudatory reviews - Smash Palace was praised by Vincent Canby of the New York Times as "one of the best of the lot" of the domestic realism genre...
...Hoffman changes into a tender father, the returning mother is transformed into an outside force threatening to break up the new intimacy between the males...
...Presumably the garage has sentimental value as the place he grew up in, but if so, the husband petulantly keeps this to himself...
...despite liking the film, the Ms...
...TOM O'BRIEN teaches literature at Manhattan School of Music...
...Curiously, the plot of both these movies falls into the classic pattern outlined in Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel: fathers and sons are reunited at the expense of a mother or mother figure...
...soon, however, she takes up a new boyfriend, a redneck paving the surface of her tennis court...
...critic confessed feeling that she had been slightly used...
...Kramer and Ordinary People sacrificed mothers on the altar of male bathos...
...To be sure, such movies are welcome in focusing attention in a relatively mature way on the tensions of family life - anything is better than Father Knows Best...
...but naturally conclude by making love...
...So far, the new realism is a set of old cliches, twisted, and writ large...
...Most of the films have, however, been well received by critics as a welcome change from kung-fu and sci-fi, or alternatively, from the older cinematic versions of hunky-dory American family life...
...His own childishness is most evident when he drives his wife into the arms of another man and then accuses her of infidelity...
...Kramer and Ordinary People in 1980 and 1981...
...Being au cou-rant can cover a multitude of sins...
...In short, this is not a movie, about a "breakup" but a crack-up, a crack-up caused by childish delusions of betrayal and persecution...
...Fatherhood per se has an impressive genealogy in recent films, with Coal Miner's Daughter, Santini and Son, Tribute, and above all Kramer vs...
...It is, of course, riding the crest of another fad as well as the latest down-under film, though not from Australia but New Zealand...
...In Smash Palace, moreover, a father's fantasy to be a child again is expressed through an incestuous regard for his daughter - another unconscious fad of the times...
...But no one comes to understand why the cycles persist...
...no one bothers to try...
...But these newer movies are depressing because they do not seem to be conscious of the dementia that they are representing...
...Together with other kinds of movies - Private Lessons, Manhattan, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs - breakup films locate primary emotional relationships between generations, not within them...
...they mirror them...
...He is a traitor to his family, overheard by his eldest daughter in a phone conversation with a girlfriend who later distinguishes herself by telling another of Finney's children that "making love to your daddy is like eating an ice cream cone...
...He tries to maintain power from outside the family circle by taking his children on expeditions, but the oldest daughter wants nothing to do with him...
...Despite critical acclaim, they are not examples of "domestic realism," but gratuitous violence masquerading as adult melodrama...
...Their key characters are not really husbands and wives, but mommies and daddies...
...But these defenses seem weak when the movies are examined closely and their patterns, of psychopathology, emerge...
...Furthermore, the newer movies contain a more disturbing element: they clearly show fathers destroying homes but neither condemn nor criticize this...
...In another scene, Finney and Keaton fight, publicly, absurdly, in a restaurant...
...Father and mother neither know best nor worst, but moviemakers either don't know that, or are afraid to say it...
...This was obvious in Ordinary People, with Mary Tyler Moore's expulsion at the close, when she lacks the emotional maturity even to raise her voice beyond a shudder to stop the breakup...
...Here, father still knows best...
...When he attempts to give her a birthday gift, she refuses, precipitating the first brutal physical assault of the film - followed by a tender, incestuous love duet...
...The male psychosis in the newer movies is even more disturbing...
...His relation to this child, while tender, is therefore suspect as another method of avoiding adulthood...
...Shoot the Moon for all the critical praise, provided an inverse fantasy: father knows worst...
...with a view of Dustin Hoffman as a Madison Avenue honcho early in the film, Meryl Streep as the mother wins our sympathy at first...
...when she disappears after walking out, however, the equation shifts...
...Some feminists grouched that Hollywood never discovered the problems of a single parent until it found the perfect film for the single father in Kramer vs...
...they seem to need to find a demon under every unused marriage bed...
...Although this need was only subtly evident in earlier versions of the breakup tale, like Ordinary People and Kramer vs...
...But how much better...
...Two things have changed, however: in the former, the mothers were the villains, and in the latter, fathers...
...But the small value of the pun on "faith," and the echo of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," is lost in the terrible impression that her answer does not matter...
...In Kramer vs...
...There are, of course, defenses for this kind of movie-making: directors have no responsibility to dignify life, psychotics exist, etc...
...The movie details psychotic regression, not family tensions...
...Kramer...
...Breakup movies reveal one more disturbing pattern: cross-generational sex...
...The movie ends with a final question about her power: does she, or doesn't she, respond to the broken, impotent male...
...The only difference between this and Doris Day-Rock Hudson scenes are four-letter words and explicit sex...
...From the opening of Shoot the Moon, for example, Albert Finney plays an ugly character...
...The movie ends with her enlightenment about how wrong she's been and her self-imposed punishment...
...The newer versions of these films extend this basic exaggeration by sympathy for the devil...
...And while such unconsciousness might be acceptable in a film like Conan the Barbarian, home life deserves something better...
...But these demurrers were exceptions to the general critical praise, which resulted in several Academy Awards for Kramer vs...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 18
