Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST 'BIG,' 'BIG BUSINESS,' & 'A WORLD APART Business and Big prove the timeless appeal of Plautus' comic formula, "trading places." His technique of transposing...
...Tomlin is feisty in West Virginia...
...Big is more successful, despite a similarly absurd premise: a twelve-year-old's wish to be "big" is magically granted at a carnival...
...Big Business feminizes the formula, with Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler each playing two roles in sets of unidentical twins...
...He acts as if he is visiting a body too big to handle, spreads his feet awkwardly, and banters perfectly with his pal, Jared Rushton, the only one in on the secret...
...TOM OBRIEN...
...The most honest portrayal in the film is May's resentment over her parents' choice of politics over family, social demands over personal...
...She looks superb-once she (literally) lets her hair down: she's a young Judy Garland in slyly chic, free-flowing yet elegant costumes...
...When Hershey is dragged off to jail in lieu of her husband, typical scenes of tough police interrogation are balanced by May bearing the homefront burden...
...His rival super-exec (John Heard) sneers at what he takes to be Hanks's slyness...
...This is the best film about South Africa in recent years...
...her mother was killed by a parcel bomb in 1982...
...Thereafter, one of each is out of place...
...The results are rewarding because of Tom Hanks's "big" version of the boy...
...His technique of transposing characters and identities to create sublime confusion inspired Shakespeare, who doubled the pleasure in A Comedy of Errors...
...Directed by Chris Menges (who shot The Killing Fields and The Mission), A World Apart is written by Shawn Slovo, some of whose life May portrays...
...Her vocals in the role are wildly unforgettable, and her line readings get some huge belly laughs...
...But Hanks makes it work (like Steve Martin in another Plautine canter, All of Me) with body language and facial gestures...
...His boss (Robert Loggia) quickly recognizes him as a genius at toy design (without understanding why...
...She is ostracized by friends, teased at school, and (through Mvusi) befriended by blacks, only to become quickly familiar with the horrors with which they must live...
...a woman executive (Elizabeth Perkins) falls for him...
...The twins are mismatched because of a mixup in a rural hospital, where one of each pair of newborn sisters is placed in the wrong crib...
...It won Barbara Hershey her second straight Cannes Best Actress Award, shared with co-stars Jodhi May (as her thirteen-year-old daughter) and Linda Mvusi (their black cook) in a South African household in the early 1960s...
...sex comedy occurs when she follows him to his urban loft-complete with bunk beds...
...Sometimes I do understand," she says...
...The leads deserve credit not just for their versatility in playing different roles, but for their efforts to individualize them...
...Texture is rich from scene one, when May watches father kiss Hershey goodbye and feels Electra-like longing...
...When Hanks comes to the city to work in a toy company, Big evolves into a childlike fantasy which combines a satire on big business with a hymn to spontaneity...
...Sometimes I don't...
...Midler is a domineering careerwoman in New York, while her misplaced twin in mining country pines for urban excitement...
...Would that these women had made this film, rather than just starred in it...
...He embodies the gentle subtext of the film: how to keep childlike zest alive into maturity...
...she had to fight to keep it in the script when she was told it was too hard for the "average moviegoer" to follow...
...A World Apart also concerns childhood-in South Africa...
...Midler steals the show-less in her obviously hammy role as wicked witch of the urban Northeast than as a sweet naif from the hills...
...The film includes comical, childlike elements that add real-life texture...
...Tomlin's West Virginian does some inventive "hexing" of urban enemies...
...Conventional but well-crafted humor is the result when the rural "twins" come to New York to fight the strip-mining of their valley by the company which the New York "twins" have inherited...
...Directed by Penny Marshall, the film was written by Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg, screenwriter and sister of The Mogul...
...It is set just after the Sharpeville massacre, and Hershey's husband (Jerroen Krabbe) must leave to escape imprisonment as a "Communist" under the new (and subsequently notorious) ninety-day Detention Act...
...Slovo's own parents were arrested and fled South Africa in the 1960s...
...Hanks reduces complicated product-marketing meetings by hesitantly raising his hand (in classic sixth-grade style) and asking, "But is it fun...
...Hanks, the urban hero renewed through love of the innocent mermaid in Splash, here reverses positions: he is the naif, whose charming innocence disarms or transfigures the tough types...
...Unlike Cry Freedom, it places the need for political commitment in a fully human context...
...Her father is currently the only white member, of the Executive Committee of the African National Congress...
...The film is often dazzling, screwball comedy...
...A World Apart has the dignity to present this as a real ethical dilemma, especially in a climactic mother-daughter confronta tion, without the easily recited answers about social obliga tion...
...her lost twin in New York is confused by city life and longs for a home in the country...
...Refreshing (and mostly chaste...
Vol. 115 • July 1988 • No. 13
