Screen:
O'Brien, Paul Baumann, Tom
SCREEN TRYING TO PLEASE 'PARENTHOOD' & 'HARRY MET SALLY' Parenthood broadcasts more messages than the electronic news board in Times Square. For those tempted by doubt, the moviemakers have...
...The story flirts with something outsized and close to the bone when Harry briefly deserts Sally, relegating her to the status of just another of his one-night stands...
...PAUL BAUMANN Paul Baumann is a staff writer and movie critic for The Day in New London, Connecticut...
...Reiner has said that he set out to explore the question of whether people of the opposite sex can be merely friends...
...Sally Albright, who lives up to her name as played by perky Meg Ryan, says yes...
...Since she was left by her former husband (a dentist, the archetypal suburban villain) to fend for herself, her own emotional life has all but atrophied...
...Meanwhile, she looks on with tolerant perplexity at the calamities shattering the households of her husband's troubled siblings...
...Still, screenwriter Nora Eph-ron (Silkwood and Heartburn) can banter with the best of them, and no other movie this summer delivers more laughs...
...Harry's long-feared encounter with his ex-wife and her husband is the best indication of how thin this material is: it falls flatter than the last University of Chicago football team...
...In Cocoon, Howard resurrected Don Ameche as one of a pack of senior citizens and conferred a suburban equanimity on the idea of death...
...Robards is never without a cranky bark or malevolent aside...
...Writer John Sacret Young (of China Beach) and director John Duigan are to be commended for their work on the film, along with Paulist Father Ellwood E. Kieser, the producer, who has pushed this project since the week of Romero's brutal killing...
...As the ideal mum and companion, Steenburgen seems to float just a step above the chaos engulfing her wholesome brood...
...Helen's scowling daughter marries a dolt, while her barely pubescent son has discovered the feral joys of concupiscence, turning into a mute and shaggy-haired creature who rarely leaves his lair...
...He makes clever but essentially ephemeral films-there's a lot of the antic goofing of the Mad magazine sort at work...
...Director Howard (Splash) is not without a gift of whimsy...
...These two attractive and intelligent New Yorkers waltz around each other as friends for a decade before finally admitting what everyone had known all along: they belonged together as man and wife...
...But in some ways it plays like that most dreadful of instructional primers: the old Catholic marriage manual...
...When Harry Met Sally...
...Parenthood too-busy canvas also features Rick Moranis and Harley Kozak as another pair of budding parents...
...Crystal's anguish comes across as gastrointestinal...
...She's a better physical actress than a comic monologist, and comes out on the short end of nearly every confrontation with Crystal, who is all mouth...
...It provides sequences of dire poverty, death squads, and one soul anguished by the horror around him...
...Parenthood muddles through...
...Romero then drives off, only to return a second time...
...The situation and the jokes are very familiar...
...Martyr in the making Romero tells well a story already known to most of us...
...The central scenes are strokes of genius: Romero's commitment, as shown here, is as messy, as indecisive, and as real as life...
...When Harry Met Sally...
...Martin teases us with some of these missed possibilities when racing about dressed in a makeshift cowboy outfit, desperate to make the world both wonderful and safe for his son...
...This couple's fevered volubility and narcissistic soulsearching are as transparent as the movie's own eagerness to please...
...Julia develops his character slowly, embodying Romero's hesitations, his lack of understanding about the social situation, his kinship with the Salvadoran upper class, his enjoyment of creature comforts, his full humanity...
...the final reconciliations unbelievable...
...But this passes quickly...
...are all verbal...
...For those tempted by doubt, the moviemakers have blessedprocreationanditsassociatedhusbandry, and given a resounding endorsement to the nuclear or nearly nuclear family established by God, Donna Reed, and the Cleavers in the moribund 1950s...
...Reiner even throws in a series of droll cameos featuring wizened married couples reminiscing about their seemingly fated, life-long romances...
...Harry has a standup comic's fatal patter, a mordant wit one can dislike but not ignore...
...Julia's performance is superb...
...But the music, by Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, and the other usual suspects, is seductive...
...T.O'B...
...He is assisted in his reformation projects by Mary Steenburgen (Melvin and Howard), as his doe-eyed wife Karen, an earth mother of calm and oceanic perseverance...
...In his honest clowning at his son's birthday party, or in the simple incredulity on his face when exposed to his employer's cynicism, he conveys the everyday desperation and shock we all feel but rarely express...
...The movie-sponsored in part with money from the Catholic Communications Campaign, the media arm of the USCC-sticks close to its subject: the short period in which Oscar Romero served as archbishop of El Salvador, before his assassination by right wingers in 1980...
...These are the yuppies from pre-kindergarten Hell, the contemporary version of Frankenstein...
...She is Parenthood's most pathetic modern casualty, a divorced and fatally permissive parent with two troubled and rebellious teen-agers...
...Despite his forever quipping approach, Reiner retains an undergraduate's sincerity...
...indeed, it's the prelude to wedding bells...
...Comedian Crystal doesn't have to reach very deep for his character...
...As Gil's sister Helen, Dianne Wiest, who won an Academy Award for Hannah and Her Sisters, is cast once again as a seemingly brittle yet determined neurotic...
...Miss Ryan, who has shown- in D.O.A...
...He wants you to feel guilty if you don't like his movie, and he succeeds...
...In one sequence, Romero, intimidated by vicious soldiers who have closed a rural church and machine-gunned the tabernacle, retreats and goes to his car, but comes back to pick up the scattered hosts, despite more intimidation and physical abuse...
...is strongly reminiscent of an early Reiner film, The Sure Thing, which similarly contrasted an easy sexual morality with the nagging questions of love and loyalty...
...That Reiner starts them out in the notoriously angst-ridden Gothic courtyards of the University of Chicago is almost quaintly pretentious...
...Romero stars Raul Julia, who foregoes overacting here for a perfect restraint...
...raising a family can be as challenging as other, better paid, grown-up occupations...
...Its portentous philosophical debate about sex and its corruption of friendship can be dismissed out of hand...
...Its principal error is in failing to risk reimagining the emotional contours of family life...
...Their over-stimulated and joyless little girl is tortured with flash cards and threatened with foreign language study...
...you cannot remake the world through a child...
...Childrearing is similarly sanitized in Parenthood...
...family life requires sacrifices...
...As Elie Wiesel has said, in some stories all you have to do is tell the truth to be sensational...
...A go-cart of a movie, it finally breaks down under the weight of a wordless, extravagantly composed coda on birthing and the joys of multigenerational families...
...and elsewhere-that she can act, is as bright-eyed and earnest as a fifteen-year-old cheerleader...
...you ask...
...Despite an uneven beginning, with overdone music and one or two doses of excessive sentimentality, the film has a quiet, understated power...
...He and Robards shift a lifetime of unresolved resentments back and forth in a succession of bitter quips as a mutually wary adult son and father...
...Martin is alive for the camera in a way few actors are, and you long for his quick return whenever Parenthood trundles off on its other dramatic errands...
...In the days of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, this used to be called "the battle of the sexes," and Grant usually ended up doing back flips, without mussing his hair, and melting all opposition...
...Passion is also the curiously missing ingredient in director Rob Reiner's otherwise effervescent modern romance, When Harry Met Sally...
...Harry Burns, played by the quick-witted Billy Crystal, says no...
...Gil is anxious to provide his children with the kind of understanding and encouragement his irascible father (Jason Robards) never offered...
...Carrie Fisher's supporting role as a desperate, single, New York woman has an endearing, rabid lunacy as well...
...He wants to please, and his heart is in the right place...
...Steve Martin, the nimble, self-assured comedian, plays Gil Buckman, the film's dutiful father...
...Only a pedant will begrudge Reiner (son of Carl) his masterly way with a setup and a punch line...
...Crystal is funny, and Reiner moves us limpidly from one bit of shtick to the next...
...Harry and Sally have the emotional range of your average soybean options traders...
...His is a fatherly passion sorely missed both on and, presumably, off screen...
...Funny...
...he puts on his vestments and leads a crowd into the church to say Mass, facing down the soldiers...
...children deepen one's love for a spouse...
...The domestic platitudes are unobjectionable enough: blood is thicker than gambling debts or race...
...He knows a sharp line, a funny bit...
...Here-more powerfully than in The Last Temptation-is a modern version of the biblical story of a man called by God to a high mission he would rather not have, even rather not know about...
...is trite and sentimental...
...Crystal is no Grant, and the somersaults in When Harry Met Sally...
...These lovers suddenly come to resent each other, as we do anyone we can't help but love or need...
...Tom Hulce, ofAmadeus fame, skirts in and out as the elder Buckmans' prodigal son, the one to whom Dad is almost too eager to turn over the fruits of his labors...
...Beyond funny he's lost...
...Known best as the "Meathead" of television's "All In the Family," Reiner has a sweet tooth where his sense of conflict and character should be...
...He is filling in for Tom O'Brien, who is on vacation...
...I know funny, this moviemaker can boast...
...Perhaps Ron Howard, childhood star of TV's "The Andy Griffith Show" and long a fixture on the frankly nostalgic sitcom "Happy Days," was born to direct this comedy...
Vol. 116 • September 1989 • No. 15
