Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
olutionary religious songs fortissimo, and before the final new film, Newman attempts to make a comeback by shaping a blessing came around I looked at the congregation again. ...
...He said, "But they have a right to play up facing Cruise at an Atlantic City grand championship...
...can't...
...In vindication - and enrich it with echoes of sin, penance, and the first film, Newman's career was shaped, and wrecked, by redemption...
...But The Color of Money evokes an one by too much seriousness...
...Stage Indeed, if the film has a weakness, it derives from its reticence, its eschewal of propaganda, its willingness to let history speak for itself - almost, one is, tempted to say, its FESTIVAL IN PHILLY willingness to let historical characters act out their conflicts without talking modernistically about them...
...But producers David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire) and Fernando perhaps he can reclaim the "sophisticated" film, like The Ghia...
...worse the conscience to obey the commandments of God and almost in horror of the spoken word, the film gives :no one a country...
...and co-stars as diverse as Dan Berrigan, stalwarts of the fused with exciting narrative...
...De Niro is even better as Mendoza, first a slave trader, lington's Queenie Pie in the huge Zellerbach Theater at the and then, after gruesome penance for killing his brother in a Annenberg Center to late-night cabaret at the Top of Centre love quarrel, a Jesuit who works as Irons's principal assistant...
...As an epigraph about current Jesuit activities among the Indians T HE MISSION, winner of this year's Best Picture award at notes, the issue of violence in defense of the powerless is still Cannes, attains interiority, and a kind of solemn grandeur, painfully relevant...
...loud...
...Almost everyone connected with Puttnam has recently been named head of Columbia Picthe movie brings impressive credentials: director Roland Joffe tures, tempting some to believe he will liberate Hollywood...
...manager, then strikes out on his own after being humiliated at After the Mass I spoke to Father Molina...
...de Niro's resort to "just war" avoids a simple judgment...
...If He calls cese and screenwriter Richard Price have a complicated story for patriotism, be patriotic...
...Teamwork here at least counts, since all involved seem to have put ego in the service of a moral question: what use is violence...
...and music by island...
...Always the professional, evil in a brutally powerful, provocative way...
...Apparently someone - possibly even the pope Hustler...
...Irons pleted its third season in Philadelphia...
...Authen- tried to expand it into a full-length "street opera" (quotation ticity has been achieved, however, through fine ensemble marks from the program) by inserting an extended dream acting by the Wuanana Indians...
...Newman first seeks a vicarious comeback as Cruise's guitars, bang their drums, and sing their songs, amplified...
...THE American Musical Theater Festival recently comBut the actors here, at least to me, justify the strategy...
...His photography seems more fascinated with trickery (like positioning the camera on the cue ball as it breaks the pack) than with the PUBLIC INTROSPECTION reality of the game itself...
...commissioned for television but never produced, about a conThe Mission also has the common weakness of all films test to choose the leading hairdresser in Harlem...
...What's really depressing is a trend toward Tough Guys, another recent film aimed at an older audience, in junking the dramatic potential of many films aimed at a sophis- its struggle to replay heroic roles from the past...
...chant and genocidal Armageddon...
...olutionary religious songs fortissimo, and before the final new film, Newman attempts to make a comeback by shaping a blessing came around I looked at the congregation again...
...And let the young men strum their to tell...
...camera style and evenhanded treatment of Irons's pacifism and needed...
...De Niro never set out to cover the festival, I managed to sample quite a deserves an Oscar nomination for facial acting, concentrating few of the works...
...He (The Killing Fields) and his cinematographer Chris Menges...
...moment reflectively to draw the strands of the story together, What a contrast to the statements of Cardinal Obando and as Newman did so magnificently in the final battle of The Bishop Vega...
...Pool here seems a matter of helterskelter panic, not Platonic geometry, or felt chess...
...For Newman, involvement with older kind of filmmaking only to make us miss it...
...But every chance at character depth and draAngeles have discovered the remedy for the religious disaffec- matic irony that such parallels allow is wasted...
...serves only to distract, and the sultry Mary Elizabeth Mastran tonio (as Cruise's moll) is increasingly obscured as the film progresses...
...screenwriter Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons...
...Perhaps Father Molina and Sancta Maria de los home movies...
...everything has to be kept strictly impossible to ignore since it so self-consciously builds on the superficial to reach the widest possible audience and offend no 1961 classic, The Hustler...
...Square, where the performers had to fight the self-absorbed But his vows of obedience and nonviolence cannot outlast the buzz of the bar's regular Yuppie clientele...
...funny idea that they cannot regain their ability to dance (their Nevertheless, the end raises the issue of violent resistance tonatural rhythm...
...An unnaly as the key papal envoy who must decide whether to finished work, it was put into a shape of sorts by Maurice support the Jesuits or the colonial powers...
...career for Tom Cruise, who plays the kind of sweet naif that There were more Nicaraguan men present, and in the door- Newman once was as young Fast Eddie...
...To love God, to love the coun- Scorcese's photography deny the movie depth...
...stunning on-location photog- sequence in which Queenie Pie is transported to a mystical raphy, especially of the mammoth Iguaza Falls...
...Color of Money, from those who assume filmgoers can't leading actors Jeremy Irons and Oscar-winning Robert de handle moral questions, or assume moral questions can't be Niro...
...such a film is not just a comedown from The Hustler, but even This "sequel," directed by Martin Scorcese, again stars from the more recent The Verdict, where David Mamet's Paul Newman as "Fast Eddie Felson," the young pool shark screenplay gave him room to take subject matter similar to The of the 1961 film, who twenty-five years later attempts to Color of Money - the search of a middle-aged failure for reenter the pool-hall world from which he has been banned...
...Royal Shakespeare Company, and South American Indian- TOM O'BRIEN rights activists...
...For someone who threat of genocide to the Indians he has come to love...
...makes a good Christian...
...Newman's appeal in The Color of lone's rampages, and tawdry nonsense from "stars" Money parallels that of Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster in like Eddie Murphy...
...Here, callow Tom Cruise seems at home: his superfi21 November 1986: 631 ciality fits the content perfectly...
...Ellington later about the third world: undue attention to the outsiders...
...bitter confrontations with co-stars George C. Scott (as his Scorcese's haphazard style is a great asset in evading such Satanic manager) and Jackie Gleason (magnificently sad as the significance, and a cheap, mindlessly upbeat conclusion also pool champion, and damned soul, "Minnesota Fats...
...MONEY' & 'MISSION' Cynically viewed, The Color of Money exemplifies the worst of current flmmaking-by-demography: you can just see production heads licking their lips over the box office magic in W HAT's depressing about Hollywood is not its penchant combining two hot sex symbols like Cruise and Newman from for junk...
...McAnnaly is sup- Peress (musical adaptation) and George C. Wolfe (libretto), posed to be caught between loyalty to conscience and reasons presumably with the blessing and cooperation of Mercer Elof state...
...The film is based on efforts of who dismiss liberation theology, or ignore the murder of Latin eighteenth-century Jesuits to protect their South American American archbishops and nuns when, committed by rightjungle missions and Indian converts from liquidation by wing fanatics...
...It will always produce junk films in several genres...
...Fighting age playing, so loud that we could scarcely hear each other speak...
...Joffe's cool Newman gets by on gusto and bravura, striking smart poses as...
...But he is opaquely enigmatic, swerving from one lington...
...Understatement is 'JUNIPER', 'HEADS', & 'QUEENIE PIE' unusual for Bolt, a master of the apt quip , as in his unforgettable Thomas More...
...Scorcese also stages so many pool contests that no Screen one single game attains climactic power...
...The Mission will not be comforting to those despite taking some large risks...
...Still, there should have The dream tries to continue the comedy by allowing Queerfie been more climactic focus on what the Indians, not merely the Pie to impose Harlem values on the island people, and it is a Jesuits were thinking...
...In the last case, the poverty of the screenplay is in conscious introspection...
...But he's "dumping...
...Despite the Ellington music, however, it was a lumposition to another without appropriate dramatic buildup or pish show the night I saw it...
...And so they do...
...To fulfill ope's duty, to obey A story like this needs interiority, but Price's writing and the laws of the country...
...Both films, ticated audience...
...It began as a one-act opera, semblance of conflict...
...For five weeks in - who studied his role as Father Gabriel, principal missionary September and October, there were productions in among the Guarani Indians, with Berrigan's help acts theaters and other performing spaces all across the city, rangsublimely restrained, suggesting either a mad stoic or perfect ing from the expensively produced premier of Duke Elsaint...
...Newman wins, then is shocked when he learns Cruise has On July 28 a new papal nuncio, Archbishop Paolo Giglio, "dumped," or lost deliberately in order to win money on landed at Managua airport and made the following remarks: side-bets.' He taught Cruise the concept, but, like all Doctor The mission of the church is to form good citizens, to Frankensteins, is stunned when his creature turns such instruct our Catholics to love their country . . . What methods on his creator...
...In the helps...
...Duke Ellington's name assured that Queenie Pie would Understatement fails, however, with Irish actor Ray McAn- attract wide press attention in and out of the city...
...Scorof the poor), calls for revolution, be revolutionary...
...The special try, to love one's neighbor, to open the heart to work and language of pool halls and hustlers is often confusing...
...you expect Friday the 13th, Sylvester Stal- different generations...
...tion of the Latin male...
...Cases in point this year include The Color however, limit the dramatic power of these considerable actors Purple, Out of Africa, Heartburn, Children of a Lesser God, to a shallow encounter with time and loss...
...Newman aches for a clear-cut victory...
...The Mission provides both...
...Newman's sideline love affair with Helen Shaver himself - has been listening to the music...
...as Newman says ways, looking in and listening to the band and the songs, were while observing Cruise, "I sometimes think I'm watching still others...
...I and weak eyesight, Newman retrains intensively, then winds protested mildly...
...until she brings the curl back to their Commonweal: 632...
...They are not and now The Color of Money, another victim of emotional allowed to probe into a world where pain and triumph coexist flattening...
...The band was still nine-ball by a young black hustler named Amos...
...If God, el Dios de los Pobres (the God Part of the reason' is clutter, part simplemindedness...
...the pain and irony of his position into eyes and cheek muscles...
...The Harlem scenes are essentially satiric, mocking Ennio Morricone, which mixes liturgical and primitive motifs, beauty contests, excessive hair styles, and publicity-induced especially powerful in a final counterpoint of high-pitched celebrity, but they also want to celebrate Harlem in its heyday...
...colonial Portugal and Spain...
Vol. 113 • November 1986 • No. 20
