Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN MELANCHOLY BEBOP 'BIRD' & 'PATTY' Bird is a labor of love from Clint Eastwood, marked by an intelligence and sensitivity that, I admit, surprised me. Eastwood has produced and directed...
...In the second half, some resonance is gained by Schrader's satiric thrusts at SLA madness: the racial posturing, sexual hypocrisy, the seas of jargon, the pseudo-military plans for a coup...
...As noted, the film could not have been made without Ms...
...To imitate Miss Hearst's physical experiences when first abducted, Schrader shoots from inside a closet where she was kept for six weeks...
...What holds the film together is the mood and the superb acting...
...A great strength of this film is the economic editing that brings back, in a sequence of brief tableaux, the SLA moment in the sun of media attention: the abduction of Hearst...
...Patty tells the story of Patricia Hearst- indeed, it was made with her collaboration and, as a result, makes one sympathize with her when she is abducted by the SLA...
...wits have said it gives new meaning to the term "film noir.'' Only in the last hour of the film does the lighting become brighter-and then, ironically, as a counterpoint to Parker's darkening career...
...Best or worst of times, the film makes perfectly clear this era in our history was the wackiest...
...In the last half-hour he also allows Miss Richardson to shine a bit-a symbol, as F. Lee Bailey put it, of "a whole generation kidnapped...
...These segments were booed at this year's Cannes festival...
...Now the whole world is watching Part II, or, as they say in the business, "The Sixties-the Movie...
...a consensual evaluation of that period may never be possible...
...her audio and video tapes from "under-grdund...
...But his artist is less sinned against than sinning...
...the SLA demand for distribution of free food in the slums as ransom...
...the European left still thinks such American radicals are ideologues, not-as Schrader presents them-a Manson-like gang with slogans...
...The structure of this concluding section is strong and clear: Eastwood maps out the wrenching progression from Parker's first suicide attempt to his final dependence on drugs and a fatal heart-attack...
...Were the sixties and early seventies the best of times or the worst...
...All of this may be artistic, but many viewers will be confused...
...Eastwood has a fetish for color schemes and dark scenes like this...
...No doubt Eastwood wanted the drama of an opening in medias res...
...When he was a child, Eastwood saw Parker perform and never forgot it...
...Bird has faults: its length, its risky structure, and its cinematography...
...Hearst's own acknowledgment...
...Venora is a smart, sultry actress with classical training who tries to ward off Whitaker's proposals with crackerjack lines like "I was born to drive men crazy...
...It's not just her accent that's flat...
...As in Amadeus-a film which Bird approaches-the artist is seen as a self-destructive adolescent who never quite grows up...
...Whitaker also projects playful high spirits in a tour of the South on which he drags "Albino Red," jazz trumpeter Red Rodney (Michael Zelniker), a white friend who had to be falsely advertised to evade segregation laws...
...Hearst's help...
...Still, the film is often hard to look at...
...the camera angles are always low, the images dark...
...they also perform a short comic duet at a Brooklyn Jewish wedding...
...First, the film is nearly three hours long...
...Eastwood is clear about the social aspect of Parker's problem: his music was gorgeously, daringly revolutionary, and only a few could respond...
...But adding to the difficulty of caring about Patty is the style of Director Paul Schrader (previous director of Mishima and original writer for The Last Temptation of Christ...
...one exchange at night on a beach with Dizzy Gillespie (finely acted by Samuel Wright) is especially pathetic...
...As flawed as it is, Patty has the strength of quiet honesty...
...In a good, post-arrest interview with Bailey (played by Gerald Gordon), Richardson says, "I'd like to tell the truth.'' Then she shrugs, "But I don't know what it is...
...It creates both strengths and weaknesses for the film...
...Hearst's ultimate enlistment in their cause as "Tania" (the name of Che Guevara's last lover...
...Venora craftily projects both dire resentment and love...
...But his expressionism is so hyperbolical that it makes the story seem even colder...
...Schrader is undoubtedly skilled with a camera...
...TOM O'Brienhonesty...
...now comes Running on Empty, Patty, and the upcoming Imagine (on John Lennon), 1969, and Walking on the Moon (on Peace Corps idealists...
...Patty is played by English actress (and daughter of Vanessa Redgrave) Natasha Richardson, who brings to the role a fine, flat, California accent and a visage deliberately empty of character and intellect...
...it also creates a problem of empathy, since it is hard to care about a cipher...
...it's her soul...
...Eastwood is responsible for setting the first: the film eyes its subject with affection, regret, pity, and not one iota of false sentiment...
...Memories by one character blend into memories by another and flashbacks are layered inside flashbacks...
...Presenting Patty as a tabula rasa makes it easy to accept the process whereby she accepted SLA propaganda and eventually joined in their bank robberies...
...You recall the SLA-the Symbionese Liberation Army, sixties' radicalism reduced to the absurd...
...First came Platoon and the Vietnam war film trend...
...TOM O'Brien...
...parts are probably self-serving...
...Perhaps this characterization is unavoidable...
...A crop of recent films suggests they were certainly memorable...
...Parker is played compellingly by Forest Whitaker...
...This seems to be true to life, even by Ms...
...Actually, Parker's addiction almost drives her to the edge...
...Eastwood has produced and directed this film tribute to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, whose postwar, bebop improvisations on the alto sax raised the instrument to lofty heights of lyrical intensity...
...The whole world is watching," peace demonstrators used to chant as cops moved in on them and TV cameras rolled...
...Including her fantasies of being buried alive, or living blindfolded for the rest of her life, helps to some degree...
...no doubt there is a value in avoiding the predictability of chronological narrative...
...And the score of the film is a jazz fan's delight...
...their arcane symbolism (the seven-headed cobra flag against which Tania posed, submachine gun in arms...
...Oddly, what is completely missing from the film is terror...
...But the earlier parts of the movie are structured elliptically: Eastwood starts with the suicide, then moves the story backward in a complicated, tangled way...
...their wild nomenclature (adopting names like "Cinque" and "Cujo...
...But the conclusion also rings true as a general statement about a confused and still confusing period in which moral right and wrong were set off balance...
...In Bird, he has a solid justification: jazz musicians are nocturnal animals...
...Whitaker interacts well with Diane Venora as Parker's white wife, Chan, on whose memoirs the film is based...
...Now he has cashed in his chips with Warner Brothers, who reaped the enormous profits from his "Dirty Harry" movies, and persuaded the studio to sponsor this offbeat, melancholy, and moving tribute to Parker, one of the saddest artistic casualties of recent times...
...The couple and all their supports here make this the best acted film of 1988...
...his Western Pale Rider frequently used nighttime shots in which characters were barely visible...
...his cutting is exceptional...
...But Schrader has caught everything physical about her diso-rientation while neglecting the psychological...
...Second, although shot in color, the film almost seems black and white at times, especially in the many nightclub scenes (one evokes the old "Birdland" on West 52nd in New York) where the performers are clad entirely in plain colors, tans and greys...
...Eastwood doesn't glamorize the fact that Charlie Parker was a junkie, and never could command himself long enough to make the most of his marvelous musical talent...
...Eastwood might also have been trying to imitate in film the effects of a jazz improvisation, in which skeins of notes are strewn about abundantly, even chaotically, before final order emerges...
...the first half-hour of this movie involves such a display of technique that emotional issues seem secondary...
...His best scenes involve his recognition that he must fight addiction, and his despairing sense that he can't...
Vol. 115 • October 1988 • No. 18
