Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN GRAY GHOSTS 'ALL AMERICAN' & 'A CRY IN THE DARK' Everybody's Ail-American, with Jessica Lange and Dennis Quaid, is an uneven but interesting mix of sports, comedy, romance, and social...
...Lange answers (drawing both innocence and self-aware self-betrayal), "Gavin and me...
...Schepisi also overdoes the outrageousness of the media-an almost impossible task...
...In fairness, Streep is undercut by Schepisi...
...He knows, but lacks the will to fight it...
...As a recent "60 Minutes" episode reported, on September 15, 1988 the mother, Lindy Chamberlain, was declared innocent and released...
...A few of the plot twists are telegraphed ahead of time, but the actors rise above the material to make it compelling...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Still, its fully documentary style fits the story better than Schepisi's half-realized technique...
...Other critics are already raving about how Streep deglamorizes herself, donning a black wig and hefty-looking clothes...
...For A Cry Streep will probably get an Oscar nomination for showing up...
...60 Minutes" did come to the aid of the Chamberlains, underplaying, of course, the press aspect of the story...
...The child's body was never found...
...Because she is so radiant, what many miss in her acting is the craft...
...But this is Streep-watching, not film reviewing...
...In an early LSU scene Hutton asks shyly what she majors in...
...Schepisi, like Streep, can defend his methods intellectually: yes, he did have to include the role of gossips and the press...
...Director Fred Schepisi ( (Iceman) has two immediate resources to draw on the sweetness of the family toward the baby girl and the counterpoint provided by the fierce, glowering Ayer's Rock, a massive butte that dominates the wilds where the dingos rule...
...Amidst a number of cliches, originality triumphs through superb acting...
...But not this way...
...Aside from cliches, there are problems with the football-some modern footage is interpolated inaccurately and some plays make no sense...
...He is at his best in portraying Gray's later years...
...But Hackford makes good use of the ironic rhythm from the sexual and racial role reversals in the screenplay by Tom Rickman (Coal Miner's Daughter...
...Her gifts are evident: a genius for accent, an ability to disappear into a character- here a loving but brusque woman whose emotional control and reticence are parlayed by gossips into cold indifference...
...Quaid contorts his body to express pain and age...
...Everybody's Ail-American-like Bull Durham and Eight Men Out-celebrates and satirizes sports mania...
...Timothy Hutton plays Quaid's mousy college friend (and worshiper of Lange from afar), who becomes a professor and keeps on popping up in the hip guise of the moment: crew cut, mustache, hippie long hair, and a full-fledged beard, the kind that comes with tenure...
...Unfortunately, the satire is overdone...
...He has a hot story here, and some good points to make, but he so scatters his effects that the film's tone becomes flatter than a pancake...
...Jessica Lange is Quaid's girl, "Magnolia Queen," young wife, domestic, childbearer, and finally savior as a shrewd eighties businesswoman...
...Quaid carries his doom-laden glory well...
...I major in Gavin and me...
...But Streep's limits are clear too...
...as with the gossips, there are too many asides...
...But the issue remains...
...Their overuse is painfully distracting...
...Schepisi depicts media viciousness, especially noting the standard antireligious prejudices...
...Sam Neill also does well as her nervous husband, showing less grit under pressure...
...The issue is not Streep's self-transformation...
...Lange perfectly encapsulates at least four phases of contemporary American womanhood...
...Against government, against criminals, citizens have some protection, if only theoretical...
...This film belongs to Lange and Quaid...
...The story involved a Seventh Day Adventist family on a 1980 outback camping trip where-the mother claimed- the baby was stolen from an open tent by a species of wild dog, the dingo...
...With Quaid, she creates a sulky, sultry chemistry, a bittersweet symbiosis of love/hate...
...Yet the role is powerful precisely because it is understated, cleanly done, and centered...
...Despite the initial acceptance of her story, the mother was later prosecuted and convicted for murder, with the some of the press suggesting that the child was killed as part of a religious ritual...
...What goes wrong...
...In reinventing the real Lindy Chamberlain, Streep has omitted the necessary passion to generate empathy...
...It declares that winning is good, but shows that it's not everything...
...His motive is valid: the case became Australia's largest legal cause c61ebre, ruining marriages, tennis games, and dinner parties, as the film's rapid-fire cameos show...
...Director Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) shoves in other role reversals: the downward career of the "ghost" is contrasted to the upward mobility of a black athlete (Carl Lumbly) who, denied a shot at college in the fifties, turns cook, joins the civil rights movement, and becomes a successful restaurateur...
...This is fair enough, but still something must be done to make brusque-ness interesting...
...Among the gossips (in a giant credit list) are "truckies, trendies, ! and other assorted bit roles...
...A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep, is based on a family tragedy in Australia in which a mother was accused of the grisly murder of her infant daughter...
...but God help you if the press decides to feed on your private life...
...But Quaid keeps things pumping with cocky energy (similar to his astronaut in The Right Stuff) and his portrait of the athlete as a prematurely old man...
...The plot sometimes drifts because of these tangents and tie-ins...
...She approaches her subject intellectually, keeping the role oil a documentary level...
...From Picnic at Hanging Rock to Crocodile Dundee, the Australian film tradition highlights the spooky mystery of the landscape down-under, haunted places of both good and (more often) bad magic...
...First, Streep...
...This film's maternal scenes reinforce a dominant image in recent cinema: warm, protective child care, as in Three Men and a Cradle, Baby Boom, or even The Good Mother...
...Burly John Goodman plays Quaid's "other" half: his LSU teammate, main blocker, drinking companion, and "good ole boy" who naturally turns out to be untrustworthy...
...Even Hutton, whose function is to throw a few blocks for the story (so to speak), shoulders his caricature decently...
...But the film well documents one of the new terrors of life in any democracy...
...She even manages to make a love scene with Hutton sexy...
...But again, between conception and execution falls the shadow...
...Quaid plays Gavin Gray, "the gray ghost," an LSU tailback in the late fifties who knows something has to follow All-American status and a career in the pros...
...The movie tackles a question most sports films neglect: what happens when the touchdowns are over...
...SCREEN GRAY GHOSTS 'ALL AMERICAN' & 'A CRY IN THE DARK' Everybody's Ail-American, with Jessica Lange and Dennis Quaid, is an uneven but interesting mix of sports, comedy, romance, and social history...
...The film's strongest moment follows the miracle finish of one of his college games, in which, heroically shouldered atop his teammates, Quaid uses his eyes alone to convey how well he knows life is downhill from there...
...They all make the same point, and blur the central one...
...Like a groggy running back, it bumps raggedly around, but still manages to total points...
...Her range is enormous: from belle-like sweetness, submissiveness as a player's wife, obsession with maternity as compensation, anger over Quaid's irresponsibility, growing assertiveness, and, throughout, an alluring eros...
...But he never plans for the future well enough, and so winds up a boozy, self-pitying, middle-aged man...
...Unfortunately, the "60 Minutes" segment was better than this film, which has power only in its first half...
...he hunches over, managing nearly to erase his neck...
...Lange can also be seen in the current Far North, written by her real life companion, Sam Shepherd...
...The issue is does her character sing...
...Initial momentum dissipates as he cuts between the family trials and the media coverage and pan-Austrialian gossip on the case...
Vol. 115 • December 1988 • No. 21
