SPUNKY PUNKS
Brien, Tom O'
Screen SPUNKY PUNKS TRADING PLACES IN AMERICA Desperately Seeking Susan is slick but entertaining, a novel twist on the old screwball formula of "trading places." The basic plot is simple: a...
...Most importantly, will they be able to integrate freedom and responsibility...
...Nevertheless, even as he declares independence from his Ivan Illich SoCal culture, he wants a protected version of dropping out — i.e., taking along a cash "nest egg" built on trading in stock options...
...Hagerty gets a light year of comic mileage from a wide-eyed routine when she gambles away the' 'nest egg'' one night in Las Vegas and magnifies her stare to resemble that of a rambunctious kitten's...
...The only serious thing about Desperately Seeking Susan is the old chestnut that tub salesmen make inadequate husbands, and on this I recommend Flaubert...
...it's her actual middle name...
...Lost in America, too true to its tone perhaps, runs away from it...
...If only teenagers took her with the high camp she insinuates...
...Matter-of-factly, Hagerty accepts the notion that her boss, a peach-fuzzed teenager, has to take a night to "sleep on" hiring her...
...The farcical action of Lost in America is thin at times, but the sociology is interesting...
...It plays with the issue of clashing values, but even a comedy should play for bigger stakes...
...The screenplay is cute, despite the clunk and some other contrivances...
...Some of the scenes in Lost in America are too casually constructed and fall flat...
...Arquette has an odd mix of baby face and fully developed body that perfectly matches her embryonic character...
...Southern Californians, like New Yorkers, apparently assume that they are no longer a part of it...
...She shows up at one of the odd couple assignations, accidentally gets clunked on the head, develops amnesia, and through certain mechanical plot devices, is forced to assume Susan's identity...
...Lost in America is less slick, but in some ways more provocative...
...Seidelman provides a few scenes where Madonna languishes in tubs and pools, almost on the verge, one senses, of chucking all her downtrodden glitz...
...Johnson's adage on odd couples, "his nonsense suited her nonsense...
...Writer and Director Albert Brooks plays a creative writer for an ad agency who fails to get an expected promotion...
...Most of the plot involves a set of misadventures, based on Brooks's desire to relive Easy Rider ten years after...
...But the key problem with Lost in America is its evasion of the social questions it so ironically, if farcically, raises...
...Nevertheless, despite her sure grasp of feminine psychology, Seidelman misses a few beats...
...One hopes that before Seidelman's apparently limited subject matter exhausts itself, she can regain her initial raw vision...
...She's costumed in a weirdly illuminated jacket with a giant pyramid on the back ("one worn by Jim Hendrix," we're told...
...she asks Roberta's spouse who says he's nervous...
...And when they return to yuppiedom, what impact will their adventure have on their future life...
...Commonweal: 304 Hagerty — the tall, thin, and wacky stewardess of Airplane — complements Brooks's manic chatter with her own sweet silliness...
...A cold, bitter satire, Smithereens made this new Bohemian low-life culture make sense even while it simultaneously made one sick...
...she trades it for some star-studded boots and parades through the rest of the film in a corset...
...With sure, wenchish aplomb, she translates to the screen her MTV persona: sassy, sardonic, seemingly content to pass life in sex, drugs, and men, and wagging her way successfully from one to the other...
...But Madonna steals the show...
...The film may seek, but it doesn't delve into character...
...Because of the "nest egg" disaster, Brooks and Hagerty never get a chance to pursue their fantasy...
...But others include marvelous material, like Brooks's attempt to persuade a casino owner to return Hagerty's losses, although this is not well-integrated into the main line of the story...
...the men, although convincing, are mostly foils...
...After absorbing the ads at a local beauty parlor for months, Roberta finally decides to take action...
...She effectively captured it in Smithereens, the story of a girl from New Jersey with a perfervid dream of rock stardom and a fascination, to the point of self-destruction, with punk males...
...She probably can't do more than this movie, but she does herself immensely well...
...How can you eat when your wife's disappeared...
...their marriage proves true Dr...
...Madonna," incidentally, isn't as blasphemous as it sounds...
...The basic plot is simple: a bored and boring New Jersey housewife named Roberta accidentally exchanges lives with a Lower East Side punk princess named Susan, thereby discovering far more fulfillment in love and life than with her hot-tub salesman husband...
...It shares the energy of Smithereens but lacks its satiric bite...
...Desperately Seeking Susan is the second effort of director Susan Seidelman, whose Smithereens (1983) won an award for best first feature at Cannes...
...Her disaster leads to an attempt to find work in the "real world" of Arizona, with Brooks winding up as a crossing guard and Hagerty as the assistant manager of a fast-food hot dog stand...
...all he could think of then was jobs and millions...
...In the new film, as the title indicates, she has affectionately put some of her own fantasies, and brought to life a certain category of female escapism — the illusion that tough, biker lovers somehow provide more interesting male partners than bourgeois husbands...
...But the whole wouldn't amount to much without the work of Rosanna Arquette as Roberta, the Madame Bovary of the 'burbs, and the punk rock singer Madonna as Susan, playing, in effect, a close resemblance to herself...
...in the early scenes, she has down pat the Fort Lee naif look and gait...
...Roberta first becomes aware of her alter-ego's lifestyle by reading a personal ads column where a touring rock musician periodically contacts her with the headline, "Desperately Seeking Susan...
...It's a yuppie drop-out film about seeking some meaning in life beyond gentrification...
...Even among the minor characters in the suburban set of Desperately Seeking Susan, Roberta's sister-in-law, not her husband, dominates, providing some of the best vapid lines in the screenplay...
...The truth and comedy derive from Madonna's half-wink that implies she's not half as bad as she pretends to be, but simply every little good girl's fantasy of being bad...
...It may be the ultimate American dream: to have your cocaine and eat it too...
...It told tough, tart truths — the kind on view in the current documentary Streetwise, about runaway teenagers living "on the lam" in Seattle...
...Her sociology is cliched, a feminized version of Woody Allen's view of Manhattan and the Rest of the Cosmos...
...If they had, one wonders, what would have been the result...
...But the deeper humor of ironic inversion is never fully developed...
...As Brooks explains himself, he has been too responsible in college and late adolescence...
...Seidelman's films focus entirely on women...
...With demonic glee, Brooks, in effect, plays the old yippie Jerry Rubin, now stockbroker Jerry Rubin...
...When Brooks reflects on the price he has paid in eight years of post-college conformity, he decides to revolt, dragging his wife (Julie Hagerty) away from her equivalent upscale job and comfortable Los Angeles lifestyle to "discover themselves in America...
...Why can't you act like a normal person and take a Valium...
...Will they be back to the zombie-like pursuit of bigger and better...
...In addition, the all-too-frequent references to Easy Rider and other films have an inside air...
...Part of the film's charm is the casual way it develops the ironies of their situation...
...the preludium to the film, a Larry King-Rex Reed radio discussion of comedy, provides an awkward, almost academic, declaration of intention...
...More importantly, she never penetrates Madonna's pose to make the finely ironic point that a punk-rock damsel might like life in Fort Lee...
...This is not because Seidelman can't see punk's dark side...
...Whatever its defects as a story, at least The Big Chill tried to answer the latter question...
...TOM O'BRIEN 17 May 1985: 305...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 10
