Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN CATCHING FIRE 'RAINBOW,"RIGHT,' & 'MS. CRACKER' Blen Russell never saw a waterfall he didn't like; at least in his films he can't resist its allure as a symbol. For decades, the English...
...Hunter, ever indomitable, climbs an observatory to reach for the stars...
...Stealing the show is a relative newcomer, Amanda Donahoe (in Russell's 1988 Lair of the White Worm...
...For decades, the English director has made wild, lyrical, sometimes lurid movies about sexual freedom, preaching that free love is the road to Utopia...
...on film, it looks like overacting...
...Maybe in theater she could have pulled this off...
...Gavin has slight resemblances to contemporary caricatures of a passive, awkward man (e.g., the "geek"), but never fits a category...
...It treats a more difficult subject than The Rainbow: the sexual awakening of a thirty-one-year-old man, a hairdresser named Gavin (Jesse Birdsall from Wish You Were Here...
...Give Lawrence credit for trying to imagine the world of a young woman and at least for being ahead of his time...
...Noah's arcs, luscious rivers, rocky cascades, a turn-of-the-century marble swimming pool- the movie is all wet, which is exactly what Russell desires...
...Rebellious, indomitable Ursula becomes a teacher, endures a Dickensian school, flirts with a soldier, is seduced by a woman, is chased by an artist with odd tastes, meets the soldier again, and, in short, explores life's possibilities among the "other Victorians...
...Hunter, Steenbergen, Robbins (plus Alfre Woodward, Trey Wilson, and Amy Wright in minor parts) have no choice with this material but to hype it as much as possible and hope that the result seems wild and wacky...
...The film is both spunky and sweet, in the best sense of the term...
...He is quietly handsome, competent in most areas of life, just extraordinarily reserved in sexual matters-not on principle but from insecurity...
...Gavin still lives at home with his father and mother, eats her terrible food, and avoids other women...
...Her family is a sweet but heavy weight around her dreams...
...First, with crow's feet and a mature body, she doesn't look the part...
...She is supposed to be in her early twenties, and fierce as a hurricane to win the small-town "Miss Firecracker" beauty contest...
...Svelte, blonde Donahoe has a fine time being naughty with several sexes in a way that seems less immoral than camp...
...Russell's comparative restraint...
...Hunter is likable...
...Unfortunately, the lead role is too much for Sammi Davis...
...Paul's, the public gardens and private flowerboxes-Kleiser shoots these with poetic affection...
...TOM O'BRIENced...
...The strengths of the film rest on the characterizations...
...and a dead older relative and his (and more normally her) malign influence on the present...
...Queen Victoria has a lot to answer for in making Ken Russell possible...
...Few of Russell's "romantic artists" have escaped the director's affectionate but reductionist touch: from Mahler, to Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers (1971), to the Byron-Shelley crew in Gothic (1987): every bygone creative soul was really a flower child in period costume...
...The Rainbow concerns Ursula Brangwen, a mature heroine in the later Women in Love, but here a late adolescent in Midlands England...
...In film, she has two disadvantages...
...Southern gothic comedy requires a bonkers family...
...Getting It Right covers a city which is neither tourist nor trendy-another (perhaps more real) London beyond costumes ancient or modern...
...In truth, every bit of it seems forced...
...Second, absurd realism is easier to manage on stage, an actor's medium where laying it on thick can make things convincing...
...Beware when she tells anyone with an ache, "Let me help, I'm a trained osteopath...
...Oetting It Right does just that...
...Sporadically moving, frequently absurd, Russell's films treat the past as prelude to the 1960s, his I'dge d'or...
...Do such men exist...
...Houseboats by Tower Bridge, late June dusks over St...
...Gavin is drawn to three women at once-Helena Bonham Carter in the thankless role of spoiled little rich girl...
...Ursula sinks under Lawrence and Russell's lectures about love...
...Some of the performances are good, especially Jackson's...
...To like this film you have to appreciate the environment Russell creates around the young lovers, not the central story itself...
...Ursula (Sammi Davis from Hope and Glory) is bright and ambitious...
...Lawrence provided the best material-first in Women in Love (1969) and now a prequel, The Rainbow...
...The plot drags a bit, and two of the women are dispatched abruptly...
...and his aide at the salon where he works (Jane Horrocks...
...the effect is supposed to suggest happy, magic transformation...
...She serves as spokesperson for Lawrence and Russell's ideology, and that might be too much for any actress...
...Birdsall plays the role perfectly...
...squabbling siblings...
...But the supporting cast helps the film over such rough spots: Peter Cook as owner of the salon, John Gielgud as Carter's father, and Redgrave, who sets new standards for older glamour...
...The affection that evolves will come as no complete surprise, but is still well acted, paced, and edited...
...but her dynamic energy {Broadcast News) fizzles here in a poor role...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...It is nice to be reminded of it...
...Getting It Right skirts cliches to get at reality...
...She is also weakened by the dry mechanical performance of Paul McGann as the soldier...
...Director Thomas Schlamme aims at the same goal, ending with a symbolic, grand fireworks display...
...Howard could cite Jane Austen here, "if not, the credit of a wild imagination will be entirely my own...
...his skill at evoking lyrical beauty in the scenery (an important gift when nature is a character...
...Naturally, love must enter his life, and when it rains it pours...
...Yet director Randall Kleiser and screenwriter Elizabeth Jane Howard (who adapted her own novel) have drawn from this a charming contemporary comedy where improbable happiness breaks out...
...Getting It Right treats London like a. well-loved sofa-lived in and cozy-a London where ordinary people live...
...Lynn Redgrave as an artsy London hostess...
...Although set in Mississippi, Miss Firecracker has more ham than Virginia...
...their younger cousin (Holly Hunter) is the aspiring naif who carries the burden of purging family ghosts...
...Peopled by the standard eccentrics of time-honored south-A em gothic traditions, it derives from play and screenplay by Beth Henley, but arrives about ten years too late...
...Gavin appeals because he is neither seducer nor loser, neither hunk nor wimp...
...In Firecracker, the wicked ancestor was the repressive "Momma" of a hypocritical sister (Mary Steenbergen) and a loony brother (Tom Robbins, from BuiI Durham...
...Of greatest interest is Kleiser's cinematography of London, less for its notations of the art world and decadent punks than its quiet grace...
...Indeed, the film pleases by getting romance quite right...
...her father wants her to help out with four younger siblings, and Mum (Glenda Jackson, Ursula in Women in Love) quietly concurs...
...she convincingly depicts the suppression Ursula fears...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 11
