Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
BLAND & BETTER THAN BLAND 'IMMEDIATE FAMILY' & 'VALMONT' Immediate Family is a perfect example of the blanding of America. There's nothing very wrong with this film; it even addresses a serious...
...Baby Boom, She's Having a Baby, or even the current Dad...
...But if I have to take a "good" Glenn Close, give me the firebrand with a twist of virtue...
...she has a face made to express hard-earned courage...
...Forman, having survived the mid-twentieth century in Eastern Europe, doesn't know the luxury of not giving a damn...
...Immediate Family is one of the many recent "home movies" to go (cf...
...Directed by Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused), it was produced by Lawrence Kasdan and written by Barbara Benedek (who wrote for Kasdan's direction of The Big Chill...
...It was poetic justice, I suppose, that I saw this film in a mall...
...Forman will probably come in for some rough treatment because he has humanized, at times even sentimentalized, Laclos's novel...
...Its source is not the Broadway play, but the original novel...
...About the only lasting impression this movie leaves is a nasty taste of class prejudices toward blue-collar parenting and sexuality...
...But what her roles really illustrate is not so much change as confirmation of a cliche: movie women come in two sizes, good/weak and bad/strong...
...but, oh, for just an iota of resonance...
...Critics will constantly compare this film with Liaisons...
...Her best scene (and the movie's most worthwhile one) is in giving birth...
...Valmont takes Forman back to the age of Amadeus, pre-French revolutionary Europe...
...Benning doesn't rage as colorfully as Close, but is better at wit and mischief...
...In the early scenes, she is also shown enduring betrayal in love...
...From the beginning of Valmont, he is a rake searching for something better...
...Mozart, conducted again by Neville Marriner, echoes gracefully in its Parisian salons...
...Forman also uses minor actors wonderfully...
...Its new flavor reflects the humanistic vision of the director, Milos Forman (twice a big winner at the Oscars with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus), who continues to persist in his faith that nothing human can be wholly vile...
...she's too sad," the latter says...
...Close's career now shows how difficult it is for women to escape typecasting...
...It stars Glenn Close, James Woods, and Mary Stuart Masterson...
...Ideology plays a heavy role in criticism, which expresses judgments but also often masks them...
...At first almost senile, she comes on as a strong, shrewd observer, with a gem-like final gesture that seals Forman's claim that something good can even come of evil...
...The film shows the Hollywood marketing drive at its headline-driven worst: it should have been called Immediate Movie...
...In line with Forman's attempt to humanize monsters (cf...
...Meg Tilly competently plays the innocent young married woman seduced by Valmont, but lacks the radiance of Michelle Pfeiffer in Liaisons...
...one scene of a food-buying spree in an open-air market is an astonishingly fresh, vibrant vision of old-world customs...
...In one way, her work here marks a retreat to the angelic wholesomeness of her parts in The Big Chill and The Natural...
...even stars are limited by the options which producers are ready to offer...
...on the other hand, the film's credits declare it is "loosely based" on Laclos's text...
...tonally, it is a completely different, sometimes better, sometimes weaker film...
...Such complexity might confuse people...
...As awkward as that was, the alternative isn't better: watching a character wrestle with equivocations is often tedious...
...Forman won't bow to the god Irony...
...But this is only another way of saying his critics buy the cynical, ultra-ironic ideology which is the intellectual black hole of our age and which brightened the luster of Liaisons...
...One can only respect his blithe earnestness about caring.TOM O'BRIEN...
...Here you want to scream, "fish or cut bait...
...The film ends in a wedding attended by the king, with Forman hinting, for those who know history, at the fate of the beautiful people of this brittle ancien regime...
...the elderly Fabia Drake (sometimes on Miss Marple) plays Valmont's elderly aunt and gives a lesson in crafty professionalism...
...But the most deft touch in the scene is having Woods cut the umbilical cord...
...Benning brings to the role different skills and glamour than Glenn Close did in Liaisons...
...Hard as this may be to believe, their new collaboration is even slicker than their first...
...Benning is a lithe, visual stunner...
...The threat of such moviemaking doesn't involve the usual suspects, sex or violence...
...it isn't a film as much as a front for a fad...
...Forman loves to cast less well-known actors in major parts exactly for the freshness of their impact on the audience...
...for the Marquise, he relies on England's Annette Benning, who serves the purpose perfectly...
...the threat is overdosing on lite syrup...
...Still, this is no masterpiece...
...But Forman gets beneath the pretty surface by drawing in urban lowlife...
...What nonsense am I talking about, though...
...Surprisingly, Valmont is a better, deeper version of "immediate family...
...The problems of infertile couples and the ethics of adoption deserve treatment...
...She never gets to play something beyond that structure...
...She isn't even allowed to get mad (her real forte) when Masterson reneges on her contract...
...Even with her cliched material of tough, devil-may-care vulnerability, she does a good turn around the floor to promise more for the future...
...Beware of any who overrate its faults, which are real, without an honest discussion of the ideological differences between the two movies...
...in one elegant, authentic chinoiserie bathrobe she's at her glamorous best and moral worst...
...Close wears her yuppie-mammie smiles and is always shot in soft earthy browns...
...The acting at least gives the movie slight appeal...
...in Liaisons, he only discovers values very late...
...Salieri), his monsters are always first shown to be human...
...If I have to take goodness, give it to me as one finds it in its best exemplars in life, allied to strength...
...The trick, which Forman misses, was to get Valmont to express conflict but without seeming like a paralyzed, Hamlet-like pre-Romantic...
...Woods the bravura terror of Salvador and True Believer is nicely understated being cast against type...
...The major force in the film, as in Liaisons, is not the title character, an aristocratic rake, but his ally in seductions, the manipulative Marquise de Meurteuil, here a remarkable discovery...
...Forman tries to make Firth the movie's center, but forgets to give the character enough of one himself...
...In this movie, Masterson is the one who gets to scowl and wear black leather...
...gone is the deliciously evil meanness of Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons...
...First things first: Valmont is not a remake of Dangerous Liaisons...
...England's Colin Firth plays Valmont well, but the part is vaguely written...
...Jeffrey Jones, using the same gift for personifying the stiff pomp of his emperor in Amadeus, is fine as the lover who betrays Benning...
...he never sees through one prism only...
...As in Liaisons, there are chateaux aplenty and a costume feast for the eyes...
...her revenge plans against the world are given full motive...
...The first two play an upper middle-class, thirtysomething childless couple...
...Masterson has some real fire, which shows even through a screenplay limited to shrugs, half-smiles, and embarrassed acknowledgments...
...it even addresses a serious issue, infertility...
...her gowns have the right light grace of the 1780s...
...Glenn Close is not so lucky...
...Miss Masterson is the young working girl who has put up her child for them to adopt, but who also gets to know them along the way and ironically becomes more "immediate family" than they expected...
...Generally, it tells the same story...
...That she steals the show is partly due to her acting ability, but it also reflects the emotional anorexia of the script...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 21
