The longest mile
Bell, Robert H.
administration. Gorbachev recently offered such a treaty again, and temporarily put into effect a unilateral Soviet moratorium. The Reagan administration's response has been to object on grounds...
...Nolte is not really one of the homeless...
...Ivory has teamed with producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on similar material from Henry James before -- in the mildly amusing comedy of manners The Europeans, and in the less successful The Bostonians...
...A third "just-war" criterion, invoked by the bishops, was that of "reasonable chance of success...
...The Reagan administration's response has been to object on grounds of inspection and verification...
...I II II I Travel THE LONGEST MILE THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME I HAD A close cail recently and I'm still a bit shaken: I almost had to take a free luxury cruise to the Bahamas...
...As Midler says of Nolte, with offhand conviction, "He provides some sort of wisdom...
...WIFE: I think I read somewhere that you do have to rent park benches . . . . HERO (with usual witty repartee): You gotta be kidding...
...The Law of Inertia was being sorely tested by the Gift Horse in the Mouth Principle...
...Of course you're right: it must leave from Key West, you know, down at the bottom of Hell there, where thehighway patrol won't even go, and bandidos attack you on Route One, rob us, rape you, even steal my car...
...I knocked him over and he fled...
...The film isn't about the American middle class reaching out to understand something ugly and terrifying, but reaching out to one of its own -- a far cry from Renoir, where Boudu is consistently crude...
...ME: Where does this cruise leave from...
...CONGRATULATIONS MRS BELL...
...for what we are likely to get instead, the costs and risks to be incurred are enormous...
...the parts are there, but the soul of either part is missing...
...Its setting includes the glitzy homes, chi-chi restaurants, and palmlined boulevards of Southern California's most prestigious neighborhood, where somehow the plethora of things never seems to take up the spacious amplitude that surrounds them...
...Mazursky aimed to synthesize a film classic with contempo,rary social notes...
...Far from it...
...Star Wars' prospects for success as a protector of civilian populations are miniscule...
...Indeed, Steven Spielberg already made the point, and with far more imagination, in E.T...
...Eight hours from New York to the Bahamas...
...Moral action requires careful consideration of one's acts, and their likely results...
...Despite these limitations, A Room with a View is the best film of its kind in some time, held together by tight 11 April 1986:2-13...
...One never gets a full sense of his past, but his ready adaptation to Beverly Hills life -- all the way to his expertise at Debussy -- mark him off as a cultured hippie, not someone forced against will or choice into the streets...
...Millions of Americans saw La Dolce Vita and have longed to visit the Eternal City ever since...
...Forster's work also derives from the turn of the century, thus providing the Ivory-Merchant-Jhabvala team plenty of opportunity for gorgeous Edwardian sets, sophisticated wit on- the foibles-of-the- upper classes, suppressed but highly charged sexual sighing, tea parties, lawn badminton, and the like...
...The lady explained we had to look at a condo in New Hampshire and could take the luxury cruise anytime within a year...
...What, after all, does it mean to travel...
...Take Rome...
...The acting, at least, holds up to Renoir's standards, and, as in all Mazursky films, saves the director from his deficiencies...
...I picked this place because it was recommended by Arthur Frommer in Europe on Five Dollars a Day and I picked Rome because Frommer said, "Rome needs no introduction in this book...
...Admittedly, I'm not at my best when I'm traveling, and little things upset me...
...B ETTER COMEDY, and more elegant settings, are found in A Room with a View, a James Ivory film of E.M...
...Which is to say, never send a technician to do a storyteller's work...
...Everything was paid for except food and entertainment...
...It's that routine voice which sounds so ironic when you hear it on the black box recording...
...At one point, mocking the everpresent song, "We Are the World," a chorus of tramps sings "we are the bums, we are the homeless...
...He must have been seventy years old -- and so small...
...I said, "Probably New York...
...As a housewife addicted to swamis and aerobics, she is initially hostile to the tramp, and is most chillingly convincing when cold with Dreyfuss...
...I could feel the wind leaving my sails...
...Thanks, All American Sweepstakes, but I can't get there from here...
...The key is synthesize...
...Then there are the special effects: the airline that spices up its transcontinental flights by putting a camera in the cockpit, so you can watch the captain take offand land...
...But we keep getting these envelopes marked PERSONAL from places called Outdoor World or Bucolic Idyll: This is official notification that you have been selected as a participant in the latest merchandise program conducted by the Merchandise Distribution Center...
...ROBERT H. BELE (Robert H. Bell teaches English at Williams College, and airs his humor on National Public Radio...
...I made that telephone call, even though this time it wasn't an 800 number...
...ME: Must be New York...
...All this provides, except for a penultimate chase scene, is the comment that the ritzy bourgeois life-style-needs some emotional repair...
...Mazursky knows film history: the ironic tale of generosity rewarded that follows is taken from Jean Renoir's early black comic classic, Boudu Saved from Drowning...
...LADY: I don't know sir, it's an eight-hour cruise...
...But one day a homeless tramp, having been deserted by his dog, tries to commit suicide by jumping into one of the many private local swimming pools, only to be saved by its owner...
...Indeed, the film could have plausibly ended with Nolte's becoming a stockbroker, just like other sixties' rebels...
...The song may deserve ironic treatment, but the poor, at least, deserve more...
...In Down and Out, everyone eventually falls for the tramp, beginning with the house dog and moving on through the teenage daughter home from Sarah Lawrence...
...Director Paul Mazursky is an expert on the coasts of America (his last film was Moscow on the Hudson) and here lets his cameras spend much of the film simply gawking at California luxury...
...Again, selecting our accommodations prudently, we found ourselves in a dump about four miles from the beach at Nice...
...HERO: Guess I took care of that creep, eh honey...
...You will definitely receive two of the merchandise from helow~ CATEGORY 1 CATEGORY 2 CATEGORY 3 $1,000 cash Trip to 2 10-Speed Bikes Disney World Video Cassette Microwave Oven Pool Table Recorder a cookie a cookie a cookie To determine the categories your merchandise is in call 1-800 . . . . Well, I'm shrewd enough not to get suckered into driving two hours to look at a condominium in exchange for two cookies...
...Some people consider my dislike of travel a sign of laziness or crankiness...
...Or take France...
...They seem to have a life of refreshing freedom...
...By that criterion, Star Wars clearly fails...
...The best performance belongs to Bette Midler, who has always had more talent than her pretenses to vulgarity suggest...
...Richard Dreyfuss is manically fine as ~lolte's would-be redeemer, playing a reedy-voiced millionaire hanger salesman, bent on do-goodism...
...It was certainly not the everyday, routine, standard gesture you want to make in front of a nervous person when your aircraft has just taken off...
...Forster's classic...
...I Screen COMEDY HIGH & LOW 'DOWN & OUT' & 'ROOM WITH A VIEW' D OWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS provides a cool, glib treatment of contemporary social issues...
...Morality is not simply a matter of vague good intentions...
...Is that worth passing up the opportunity for a stringent comprehensive test ban...
...And then the captain made a very abrupt gesture...
...I know that, and that's why I do my very best not to violate the Law of Inertia...
...She said she'd be willing to drive to the New Hampshire condo Saturday, but wanted to know where the cruise disembarked...
...On this particular flight, the pilot adressed us in that soothing tone that puts on your slippers and brings you a hot cup of cocoa...
...I'm not even mentioning the agonies of getting there and back: the noisy terminals, the all-night flights, the soggy dinner and the cold coffee, the dumb movie and the tacky sound system, the lost luggage, the inhumanly tight seating, the incessantly crying baby across the aisle, and the drunk beside you who wants to talk (alcohol goes right to my wife's head...
...It must be from Florida...
...WIFE: How could you hit him...
...This would have violated Bell's Law of Inertia: few 9 things are worth seeing, and nothing is worth going to see...
...Playing the tramp is Nick Nolte, whose hulk formidably conveys both menace and a sense of power self-betrayed...
...The X-ray laser's present research stage is going badly, and has been de-emphasized in the latest round of Pentagon budgeting...
...Mazursky's treatment of the homeless is also painfully superficial, even allowing or excusing the comic setting...
...Very bad idea...
...But then we received the following: "ATTENTION MRS BELL STOP URGENT STOP SECOND AND FINAL NOTIFICATION STOP: You are computer-selected as an ALL AMERICAN SWEEPSTAKES underwriter finalist STOP You are winners of a luxury cruise to the Commonweal: 212Bahamas including free round trip ticket for 2 STOP Five days/4 Nights accommodations for 2 in Freeport...
...Unless they are Mrs...
...Without getting pedantic (viz, noting that the word travel has the same root as travail), I would define it as "greatly inconveniencing oneself for the sake of saying one has been there...
...The ointment got onto the sheets, which was brought to my attention by a four-foot tall maid who barged into our room at 7 A.M...
...When I declined, he tried to push my wife off the bench...
...I called my wife at work and asked her if we could rearrange Christmas plans to take this luxury, free vacation...
...Worse, the homeless friends that Nolte encounters once he has entered his new life are never seen as suffering or unhappy...
...But the bite of social satire is superficial...
...It didn't matter, once we saw the beach...
...I've been there...
...But its real objection is that a comprehensive test ban would prevent testing of the SDI-related X-ray laser -- a system that in all events would not be deployable until well into the next century, if it proved feasible at all...
...to scream at us...
...HERO: That's exactly how I was able to hit him...
...Field's Chocolate Chip Cookies...
...Sunburned and dismayed by the beach, we went to the park where some tremp wanted me to pay for the park bench...
...Stayed in a room with a glass door, peeped through by the concierge, a one-eyed scholar who carried a copy of Croce and began and ended every day (before and after peeping at my wife) by beating up his wife, with the bambino screaming louder than its mama...
...It was coated with tar, and I managed to get sunburned right away...
...As a social comment, despite the new setting, this is old and thin...
...The chase scene is the only point in the second half of the movie that's fully alive, and it's pure Hollywood, both past and present...
...Oh, well that's out of the question...
Vol. 113 • April 1986 • No. 7
