Screen
O'Brien, Tom
OBSESSION & MEMORY 'HOUSE OF GAMES' & 'HOPE & GLORY' D avid Mamet and Lindsay Crouse aren't the best known of entertainment couples; they may be the brightest. Mamet made his name with...
...Complying, Bill complains, "But it's not the same...
...Mamet has matched two worlds for his film: the clean, bright office of Dr...
...Mamet made his name with downbeat, laconic studies of American low life in such prize winning plays as Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo...
...A frequent companion in the comedy is Bill's six-year-old-sister (Geraldine Muir), who gets laughs merely with her impotent pathos...
...the most suffering Bill shows is a suspicion of pity when a child down the block loses her mother in a raid...
...Bill notes the difficulties between his parents, and his mother's (Sarah Miles) ironic reliei when his father (David Hayman) enlists in the military...
...But this feminist material seems uncoordinated, as if from another movie...
...The strongest subtext in the film supports the last...
...Boorman loves such country, although usually his film scenery is more primitive...
...it would annihilate half his milieu — or rather, in his plays, his entire ambience...
...in one of the greatest "walk-ons" in film, Crouse stole the show from the lawyers (James Mason and Paul Newman), speaking in a brogue so sweet no other proof of truth was required...
...By telling the story of his youth in England during the Second World War, Boorman has found an enjoyable way of placing his fascination with woodland adventure in the more everyday world...
...Overall, the film stays true to a child's vision...
...Mamet always photographs toward the border between sleek new skyscrapers and decrepit nineteenth-century townhouses next door...
...In truth, however, Boorman found that the war's "real thing" outdid celluloid...
...For him, the war is a terrifying, but also humorous rite de passage...
...Boorman makes no special point about the film's being autobiography...
...Once, watching a dogfight on a newsreel, Bill resists responding to sirens announcing an air raid...
...his mother has to drag him to shelter, saying, "They got the real thing outside...
...Margeret Ford and the seedy joints where con men hang out — cool infernos of card games, pool tables, 4 December 1987: 703 omnipresent smoke, and darkness visible...
...The problem is what to make of all this...
...Better still, Mamet has matched characters from two professions whose oblique speech patterns fit his gift for transcribing subverbal lingo...
...in one extremely good, extended poker scene, she spots a trick and saves herself from being duped...
...on some deeper one, his writer's self identifies with their constant play with illusion and reality...
...Presenting himself as the child "Bill" (Sebastian Rice Edwards), Boorman recalls less the terror of the blitz than the excitement of it all—building a shelter in the backyard, collecting shrapnel, inspecting wreckage...
...she is duped by one of her male patients, and identifies strongly with one of her female patients, a murderess...
...Surprises come so thick and fast afterward that a viewer gets the sickly, suspenseful intuition of an inevitable final surprise...
...Bill is a real (and winning) child, neither too conscious nor too good...
...There is also one fine, understated, sentimental scene: his mother at the piano— her hand bandaged, her neighbors behind her listening...
...Beneath rubble, he learns to hear the groans of sex, not death...
...At the outset, the conception works brilliantly: one can feel Crouse's curiosity piqued by a profession so paradoxically close to her own, not in its goals but its subject matter — the stimulation of trust, becoming attuned to the "feel" of a person or situation, the penetration of masquerade...
...On one level, he simply loves their argot...
...Hope and Glory is another fond memoir of England's Pyrrhic victory in World War Two...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Crouse idolizes one of her teachers, an older woman therapist...
...Its appeal is universal...
...Since then she has appeared in literate films like Places in the Heart and Alamo Bay...
...The ending is enigmatic, suggesting either morals about psychology, psychotherapists, assertiveness, selfforgiveness, or feminine anger...
...His main goal, like that of many little boys, is to avoid getting kissed too much by older female relatives...
...Despite the urban setting for most of its length, Hope and Glory has the same kind of appeal...
...In House of Games, her husband's first effort at direction, she stars as a troubled psychotherapist...
...To his merit, Boorman adds no deep reflection on the progress of the war, it...
...Bill's story is not only very relevant to Boorman's filmmaking, but to the fate of heroism in England...
...At times, Boorman goes too far, and one actor (Ian Bannen as a cute cur of a curmudgeonly grandfather) lays it on a bit thick...
...H ope and Glory ends where English screenwriter and director John Boorman's other films begin: in beautiful but perilous woodland—specifically the upper reaches of the Thames, where, as a child, he was taken during the blitz in World War Two...
...Crouse seems able to take care of herself as she enters the world of the cons...
...The adult world is included...
...The film is set in Seattle, where even the streets have been shot to underline the plot...
...But it is more...
...Mamet has put this obsession into Crouse, who becomes involved first through anger, then curiosity, with a con man named Mike (Joe Mategna...
...In the latter, he wrote a small role for his wife as an Irish nurse last to testify at the trial...
...Crouse's character has written a book (Driven) about obsession and compulsion...
...At the same time, the understated self-reference and the avoidance of vanity in this "portrait of the artist as young man" makes Hope and Glory one of the best Bildungsromans on film in recent memory...
...By steadfastly sticking to the child's view, Boorman manages the novel trick of treating the war as a comedy...
...writing for films, he provided the ounce of depth in The Untouchables and the uniformly fine screenplay of The Verdict...
...It has been Boorman's distinction to depict boyish adventure without a tinge of childishness or macho posturing...
...The film begins with Boorman's nostalgic (but not always sweet) recollection of lower-middle-class London neighborhoods when Hitler's bombers first started flying over...
...one can believe, to a point, that even a so-called expert, in control of herself, might become enmeshed in the psychology she ostensibly deplores...
...politics, or even other children's suffering...
...they may be the brightest...
...His famous Deliverance (1972) was only a prelude to wilder, stranger studies of the relation of man and nature—his bloodcurdling but magical version of the Arthurian myth, Excalibur (1981), and the Amazonian back-to-nature fable, The Emerald Forest (1984...
...He must be privately horrified by the specter of urban renewal and gentrification...
...the film reveals how an Englishman is still dealing with the memory of an empire, in its outlets for heroic effort around the world...
...But director and cast manage some hilariously incongruous scenes, especially those involving a "rogue blimp" and an air raid at school, where the festive children don gas masks and recite multiplication tables through their goggles...
...his literary parallel might be Tolkein...
...In protecting her, Bill gradually becomes morally mature by learning Boorman's favorite (very English) virtue, chivalry...
...The film would be pathetic were it not for its subtle, quietly self-conscious blend of irony and poetry...
...Sarah Miles, who used to play bad, hypermelodramatic heroines, might find her salvation as an actress in playing women of stolid endurance...
...But credibility problems aside, Mamet doesn't appear to have a point to make about his material...
...OBSESSION & MEMORY 'HOUSE OF GAMES' & 'HOPE & GLORY' D avid Mamet and Lindsay Crouse aren't the best known of entertainment couples...
...Some American narcissists — who never tire of telling us their life story in messy, tasteless, and selfimportant detail — could take lessons from Boorman on how to be an artist as an older man...
...As a result, though rich in text and substance, House of Games seems slightly beside itself...
...Mamet has always been fascinated by hucksters and tricksters, one might almost say obsessed...
...there is simply an older man's narrative voice-over at the opening and closing of the film to identify it as part of someone's life story...
...Childhood was not just a central element of plot in Boor704: Commonweal man's earlier films, but an atmosphere, a feeling of new alertness to the power and beauty of nature and a desire to test the self against them...
Vol. 114 • December 1987 • No. 21
