Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN TASTE & AFTERTASTE 'CRIMES,' 'MORNING AFTER,' 'LJTTLE SHOP' Crimes of the Heart survives its Southern Gothic mannerisms to qualify as the best among the many current film adaptations of...
...Spacek has the advantage not just of the stronger part but of not having to put on a Southern accent, and therefore appears more natural than Lange and Keaton...
...Nevertheless, on her own merits she has quite rightly received the New York Film Critics' award as best actress in 1986 for her performance...
...It has trekked the route from grotesquerie through tunefulness to jolly absurdity without ever passing by good taste...
...but "little did he know" what it/her would bring him, or at what price...
...At one point, Fonda laments, "I coulda been a contendah" —Marlon Brando's line from On the Waterfront — that is not even successful here as a self-conscious, semicomic gesture...
...The supporting cast is filled with recent American masters of unembarrassed sick humor such as Steve Martin (as a sadistic dentist), John Candy, James Belushi, and Bill Murray, who all enjoy themselves too thoroughly in their high camp roles, some as victims of Audrey II...
...when Fonda and Bridges clinch and some in-jokes about Bel Air, California...
...When Audrey II acquires the recognizably black voice of Levi Stubbs (one of the Four Tops) late in the film, it is not just dramatically ineffective but racially bothersome...
...Each one of these is used, and then tossed aside, without even the energy of nuance normally given red herrings...
...For one thing, one keeps on waiting, as in Agnes of God, for something more than professionalism from Fonda...
...Seymour finds Audrey II by accident (during an unpredicted solar eclipse —are you following this...
...they're part of the genre...
...It mixes potentially rich elements of alcoholism, racism, ethnicity, pornography, destroyed careers, and of course the aforementioned dead body in a way that leaves them connected but never coherent...
...Some of the wackiness is predictable and cartoonish, but the trouble is real, and the conclusion is one of the best depictions of family renewal in recent cinema...
...they comprise a streetwise, mock heroic version of Macbeth's Weird Sisters...
...The Morning After, finally, features some awful scenes (did they need them to earn the essential "R"-for-risque'rating...
...SCREEN TASTE & AFTERTASTE 'CRIMES,' 'MORNING AFTER,' 'LJTTLE SHOP' Crimes of the Heart survives its Southern Gothic mannerisms to qualify as the best among the many current film adaptations of plays...
...If this Faust in a Florist's is your kind of plot, well, you may enjoy some of the lighter moments ofLittle Shop...
...Subtleties save Crimes, none finer than Spacek's portrayal of a mad waifdom in which lurks real sanity...
...Jack Nicholson got his start in Corman's original version (known as "the film shot in two days...
...Crimes is Hannah and Her Sisters from the sisters' point of view, and few scenes of women together outdo the lusty, spontaneous, expressive closing...
...To be sure, Lumet creates some anxiety as the plot evolves...
...The Little Shop of Horrors is a new film based on an offBroadway musical based on an earlier film by Roger Corman, master of the schlock, low-budget, horror movie...
...One is an inhibited spinster whose insecurity allows Diane Keaton to lean heavily in the role on her Annie-Hall bag of fretful gestures...
...Contrivances aren't the problem...
...Tess Harper plays a domineering, sanctimonious cousin, who regards the three sisters as embarrassing "black sheep...
...The Morning After irons out the paradox...
...Under her influence, Keaton finally, grandly, and constructively explodes at Harper...
...But often the film simply disgusts...
...But are they worth the whole...
...Audrey II was much more pitiable —and its/her demands for "meat" that much more comically absurd —when it/she was played as a silent orphan...
...When Julia tells Fonda, in an early scene, with earnest matter-of-factness that she ought to tell the police about the body, his tone is a dead giveaway: it's exactly what he ought to be doing to fool us, and so he doesn't...
...The heavy hand does not prevail, however...
...The only false note is the shot of a factory wall with a graffiti spray-painted alongside: "You are alone...
...The Morning After traces an opposite arc: it starts out promisingly, then skids downhill...
...Whoever recalls Lumet's The Verdict will notice parallels between Paul Newman's drunk lawyer and Fonda's actress...
...The new movie sparkles at times 30 January 1987: 55 because of the excellent comic acting and singing of Ellen Greene, retained from the off-Broadway version...
...Jessica Lange enjoys herself, perhaps too much, as the other sister, a tart who fails as a country singer...
...There are also two mistakes in "its/her" casting...
...her role allows for exaggeration, but, like other elements in the film, it's spread on too thickly...
...The Morning After excels at limp echoes and missed details...
...When she emerges in bewilderment onto Los Angeles streets, Lumet perfectly matches her inner desolation with shots of blank, open perspectives and monochromatic vistas: the credits then roll in cold light purple, set against the even colder white of airport terminals or the angry orange-red of a Chinese restaurant-supply warehouse...
...indeed, one of the annoying things about this kind of high-gloss thriller is getting involved without really caring about the characters...
...Like predecessors such as The Thing, Audrey II is not just your ordinary Venus-flytrap, but a vampire vegetable, who tempts Seymour with promises of power in return for "meat...
...Greene plays a flower arranger named Audrey, the model for Audrey II, a mysterious plant raised by Seymour Krelbourn (Rick Moranis), Prototypical Nerd...
...In her marriage and attempted murder, Spacek embodies the complementary extremes of repression and anarchy which her two sisters express individually...
...The story that follows has all the flaws and none of the strengths of the opening...
...There are rules for thrillers, the key one being that nothing is as it seems...
...Playwright Beth Henley wrote a screenplay that opens up the action with just the right amount of flashbacks, and Australian director Bruce Beresford gets excellent teamwork from his three stars (Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Diane Keaton) as the survivors of a wacky, troubled family...
...Lovers of thrillers will also be depressed by the gross neglect of such rich raw material as a white cat, a closet, a girl downstairs, and Nancy Drew mysteries...
...The plot rests on foundations of black comedy: the sisters' mother committed suicide (hanging the family cat along with herself...
...Her considerable legal problems reunite her with her older sisters, who are both more limited by the cartoon aspects of their roles...
...She can't remember how she got there, and she can't remember if she did it...
...what it lacks (or completely violates) in manners, it sometimes compensates for in refreshingly bizarre humor...
...Spacek tries homicide on her macho lawyer husband, schizophrenically alternating gunshots with offering him lemonade...
...The Morning After suffers because the parts never become a whole that resonates.with any significance, despite the professionalism of performances by Fonda, Raul Julia as her separated husband, and above all Jeff Bridges as an ex-alcoholic ex-cop (he starred last year in a similar thriller, Jagged Edge...
...Then there is the problem of suspense...
...There is no parallel in the sympathy they evoke...
...Howard Ashman, who adapted Corman to Broadway, wrote the screenplay and lyrics, and deserves some credit for such inspired moments...
...TOM O'BRIEN 56: Commonweal...
...Director Frank Oz uses a Motown-like choral group of three young black women for better comic purposes...
...Nevertheless...
...No kidding...
...The film's best scene involves her song about happiness as a Good Housekeeping suburban housewife: "I'll cook like Betty Crocker and I'll look like Donna Reed...
...Even better is Greene, who plays a sweet tart with sureheaded silliness...
...Director Sidney Lumet (his last film was The Verdict) begins the murder mystery with a long pre-credit sequence in which star Jane Fonda, playing an alcoholic, failing actress, wakes from a drunken stupor next to a man's dead body...
...Later, when Spacek attempts her own suicide (in one of the most weirdly comic sequences in recent film), she moves Lange to unexpected depths of giving...
...Seymour works in the same ghetto floral shop, and dreams of success, sex, and, specifically, Audrey...
...Lumet's The Verdict was a winner about a loser...
Vol. 114 • January 1987 • No. 2
