Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN OUT ON A LIMB RECAP & 'ACCIDENTAL TOURIST' What were the best films of 1988? No single work had the force of last year's The Last Emperor or the year before's Platoon. But there were some...
...There are further problems...
...Too bad she and Turner didn't trade places...
...My list is shaped by this timetable...
...It bogs down by being too literary...
...Without a strong Muriel, the tale is limp...
...The film is all-Hollywood...
...The film is often incongruous with the essence, the spirit of Tyler's fable...
...Gene Hackman in the former and Forest Whitaker in the latter were best actors of the year...
...Kasdan has made the film for Warner Brothers, and its hi-gloss production values overwhelm the delicate nature of Tyler's text...
...While faithful in detail, the film is completely unfaithful on the more critical issue of texture...
...A special award goes to the re-released The Manchurian Candidate, the scariest film on screen in 1988...
...Accidental Tourist is not, on its own cinematic terms...
...From abroad came another extravagantly wild work, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and the stark, stirring, political melodrama, A World Apart...
...Tyler's Muriel is vulgar, impolite, unpredictable, demanding-everything Macon, his wife, and (one senses) Tyler is not...
...Hurt also catches her Leary, especially as he becomes even truer to his name-almost affectless-after the murder of his only son (dealt with both in novel and film in flashback...
...It's directed (and partly written) by Lawrence Kasdan, who made The Big Chill and Body Heat-not masterpieces, but good blends of words, character, and wit on screen...
...he uses a studio to reach for art...
...But the value of these side moments is diminished by the films's too faithful inclusion of detail...
...Accidental Tourist is a curious symbol of all Kasdan's work...
...To make Tyler's work sing on screen, Kasdan had to find some acceptably pop form of film minimalism...
...Tyler's work centers on one Macon Leary who is, well, "leery" of life: cool, distant, watchful...
...The irony of the whole story is that those moments were among the greatest ever depicted in any film on a religious subject...
...its defenders overrate it because they perceive the issue of free speech under attack...
...she's competent...
...I suppose we will have to endure now a rehash of the turmoil last summer when the film was released...
...You can't do Tyler and not ask Warner's to take more risks, especially in reining in studio overkill...
...Mississippi Burning and Clint Eastwood's Bird-for all their defects- handled difficult subjects with power and integrity...
...First, a word of caution...
...the Cannes Palme D'Or winner, Pelle the Conquer-er (on the verge of going into national release...
...and Eight Men Out, from America's most promising, but not-yet-fully-successful director, John Sayles...
...leave-takings between husbands and wives...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...attachments and rejections between lovers...
...Muriel is a trashy trip through the id...
...He writes travel books in an "accidental tourist" series, tailored for business travelers who wish they hadn't left home and want minimal contact with the places they visit, especially if foreign...
...but her choice (and presumably Kasdan's) is to play Muriel perky, fast, and off-key...
...There are three good scenes, all at the beginning, and sporadic moments of comedy and pathos afterward, but the film never catches fire...
...Old cliches about the organic nature of texts here take on real life...
...But knowing the novel helps us understand why-and what could have been done differently...
...Geena Davis plays Muriel, and she's out of her depth...
...Warner's probably feels out on a limb doing a film about people, not car crashes, terrorists, or drug dealers, but when you're after quality, why not go whole hog...
...Honorable mention goes to Dustin Hoffman and his recent Rain Man...
...All three were finely written, and Melanie Griffith in Working Girl was actress of the year...
...It's dishonest, and unfair, not to honor them...
...So what went wrong when he turned to the novel...
...The Last Temptation of Christ...
...but it did have moments...
...I keep my list to seven...
...Davis never fumbles, but she never knocks your socks off, and she has to...
...By the time she walks into Tyler's novel, you're desperate for some fire and pizzazz, and her entry makes the rest work...
...It would have worked better dramatically if Kasdan's style had been as laid back, as slim, as Macon Leary's...
...Some films don't appear here (Babette's Feast, Stand and Deliver), because they were released before January 1, 1988 in New York or Los Angeles to qualify for the 1988 Oscars...
...Macon's wife can't take their life together after the murder...
...Limited though they are, comedies lead the list, particularly Working Girl, Bull Durham, and Big...
...and subplots involving Macon's publisher, brothers, and sister (Amy Wright, strong in support...
...So far, so very good...
...But it doesn't travel well from Anne Tyler's novel to film, despite the presence of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner...
...every nomination or award will rouse its critics again...
...I can't see 500 movies, and readers may want to nominate a few I don't mention...
...As it is, the film doesn't look, feel, or move right...
...But problems arise when, faithful to the novel's development, Kasdan introduces the second woman in Macon's life, a flamboyant animal "hotel" owner and dog trainer, Muriel Pritchett...
...The family provides good comic vignettes: though from Baltimore, they derive from those families of ever-daffy eccentrics in novels from well below the Mason-Dixon Line...
...Davis has been around before (in footsie and The Fly...
...The film was profoundly flawed, both from moral and aesthetic standpoints...
...in the film's third scene...
...The film's first two scenes artfully catch the comedy of Tyler's send-up of a certain kind of American abroad...
...The issue, of course, isn't whether or not the film is faithful to the novel, but whether or not it is a good film...
...Tyler's work thrives on parallels...
...As a result, she never attains the comic authority Muriel must have for the tale to work in any medium...
...Turner shows her hand at melodrama with an affective leave-taking...
...But there were some good films to choose from, perhaps more than on average...
...I liked parts of or performances in A Cry in the Dark, Everybody's All-American, Tucker, the sadly underdistributed Summer Story, and (yes...
...the novel is either wacky middle class or slum Baltimore...
...Nineteen eighty-eight will long be remembered as the year of Scorsese...
...To be sure, high praises will be heaped upon the film only for political reasons...
...Accidental Tourist was named Best Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics...
...This time, despite noble intentions and some real craft, he fails...
...Less money spent on gorgeous, settings, less full-bodied cinematography, less perfect hair (on each star) would have meant more...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 3
