Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
GENES, LOST & FOUND 'SCANDAL' & 'POETS SOCIETY' Scandal tells the story of the Profumo case, but from a limited point of view. For its original English audience, telling the story may have been...
...the film's melodrama derives from this...
...Robin Williams might get an Oscar nomination for his work here...
...Hurt clearly shows how Ward was governed by sick but nonmercenary motives: a class-based hunger to be liked by bigwigs and an epicurean but nonerotic pleasure in women...
...The film's focus of sympathy thus shifts to Keeler...
...Caton-Jones catches the emptiness of such pursuits, but is too limited by his original choices to offer much satire about it...
...That, and a slow-motion bit near the end, are overdone...
...It may be that he sensed the film itself had a missing gene...
...Two scenes are excellent, one in front of a trophy case, and one during the first class, where Williams tells his students to tear out the preface to a poetry textbook...
...but paradoxically, Williams becomes more of a star by taking second place to the English language...
...Indeed, Weir's skill at spooky effects even redeems the tragic sequence near the end...
...Despite faults, I welcome Dead Poets Society after too many years of teachers being trashed in film (see Commonweal April 21...
...Scandal takes as its first center Dr...
...Keeler's complement is Mandy Rice-Davies (Bridget Fonda, Peter Fonda's daughter...
...Scandal depicts sex without eros...
...Always the pragmatist, Rice-Davies lands on her feet after the scandal and brightens Ward's trial with frank, no-nonsense answers about sexual romps at the doctor's house...
...He had lived, to be sure, an odd, immoral life, partying with establishment playboys, looking out for young girls to introduce them to, but never pursuing the women himself, pushing them to sell themselves, or living off the profits...
...Nothing suggests he was homosexual...
...Williams and this ensemble of young actors are thrilling together during the film's first half...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Dead Poets is directed by the transplanted Australian Peter Weir, whose previous mainstream works (Witness and The Year of Living Dangerously) also attempt to match conventional plots with unusual settings and the texture of real experiences...
...As a result, the tabloids loved her, and kept her famous afterward as a model and "celebrity," status on which she has built a successful business career...
...Perhaps films don't affect images of teachers that much...
...Dead Poets displays Weir's gift for landscape...
...Ward killed himself (the film's climax) at his trial's end...
...but Keeler now lives in poverty in London...
...It continually interests, even engages, but it fails to resonate with anything universal...
...Recut to R, it leaves one hard put to imagine what could have been left out...
...The saddest thing in Scandal is Ward's lack of love for Keeler, whom he genuinely liked...
...Still, the set-up makes Dead Poets worth seeing...
...Although Scandal treats Ward as a scapegoat, Hurt doesn't make him attractive...
...When the scandal broke, Profumo resigned, and went into charity work...
...In the last year, Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, and Dead Poets Society mark a shift in image...
...But in several sequences off-campus, Weir uses landscape evokingly...
...When she and Whalley-Kilmer dress for a naughty night out, director Michael Caton-Jones uses Western-style music to echo mockingly the routine of marshals putting on six-guns before shoot-outs...
...But such gestures weren't the way to finding it...
...The preppy setting itself isn't as alive as his Amish country in Witness or Indonesia in The Year, it looks too much like Ralph Lauren Land...
...Poets Society stars Robin Williams, acting more subtly than ever before...
...Thoreau, Whitman, Byron-he brings them alive for his students (and movies) again by underplaying his own power...
...As played by Whalley-Kilmer, she is certainly an amoral, lushly beautiful free spirit...
...he walks a fine line between being repulsive, understandable, and at last pitiable as he becomes Scandal's fall guy...
...The eventual result of their dangerous liaison was a Scandal that led to the fall of the Tories who had held power since the late forties...
...Of course, all his favorite poets are romantics...
...Curiously but aptly, its images are not genuinely arousing...
...For its original English audience, telling the story may have been enough, especially given the film's new viewpoint...
...but lack of glamour certainly hasn't helped their status recently...
...Profumo is back in society if not government...
...But the film focuses less on the political consequences than on the personal ones, and much less for Profumo than for Keeler and Ward...
...Scandal, naturally, is very graphic about sex, with enough orgiastic imagery to have almost earned it an X rating...
...some cave scenes recall the haunting (and haunted) power of his glorious, low-budget Picnic at Hanging Rock...
...Despite some good moments and colorful looks, the film has a cold, almost documentary feel...
...Her best moment occurs when, tired by the decadence of dirty old men, she tells Ward that she's young, wants to have fun with a man young at heart like her, and goes out to find one-a move that brings "scandal" into the open...
...Fonda catches Rice-Davies' devil-may-care buoyancy, but at times the screenplay calls on her to ham it up too much...
...his infectious devotion to literature inspires his students with a love of real learning...
...but when will someone create a Pulitzer or Nobel for the kind of teaching that he embodies...
...English tabloids, naturally, had a field day...
...To a degree, Scandal becomes another of many recent films about strong women in need of love being failed by inadequate, unloving men...
...He plays an English teacher at a boys' prep school in 1959...
...He calls Keeler a "thoroughbred" and "Derby winner" but, as played depressingly well by Hurt, Ward stays detached, a circus master with a gene missing...
...And the romanticism works- with references to jazz, the beat generation, the coming '60s deluge-as a partly successful satire on realism...
...Ironically, the film implies, one real caress from Ward, and Keeler would have gladly settled down as the doctor's wife...
...TOM O'BRIENhe embodies...
...The Victorians believed in love without sex...
...A plot line is also left hanging, perhaps a result of poor editing, but probably a sign of filmmakers wanting to do more with character than formulas allow...
...In these and other scenes, Williams puts his manic, muscle-mouth energy into low gear, placing his verbal acuity entirely at the service of literature...
...Only when formulas take over does the movie go soggy...
...Incidentally, Keeler had been bedding both Profumo and a Russian diplomat...
...The film isn't a star vehicle...
...to satisfy media cries for blood, Ward was tried for pandering...
...the sex is cold, mechanical, and, like Ward, not really erotic...
...Stephen Ward (John Hurt), who introduced the infamous Christine Keeler (Joanna Whalley-Kilmer) to John Profumo, England's Defense Minister (Ian McKellan...
...her large oval eyes suggest depth behind the facade...
...Blunting the satirical edge are soap opera conventions common to school films: overdone teenage rebellion, adult insensitivity, crises, tragedy, and final bittersweet triumph...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 12
