Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN TRUTH BY DROLLERY 'HIGH HOPES' & 'NEW YORK STORIES' In Victoria's Britain, Disraeli once termed the rich and poor "two nations." In Margaret Thatcher's Britain, a new English film makes...
...The Coppola piece, "Life Without Zoe," has fine visual style, and Scorsese's "Life Lessons" looks interesting if familiar...
...Cyril's mother is also realistically drawn-worn down by age and poverty, nearly indifferent to attempts to humor her...
...High Hopes invokes the current prime minister, first, as a stage device: in the small flat of Cyril and Shirley, adownscale, bohemian, Marxist couple, "Thatcher" is the name of a thigh-level cactus to be avoided while turning a corner...
...The film doesn't mistake a critique of current social norms for a rejection of the merit of all moral order...
...ironically, Allen comes off as the most broadminded, least parochial, even least arty and Manhattanite of the three filmmakers...
...he's like a vampire sucking Arquette's lifeblood...
...Still, High Hopes lacks the defects of such other anti-Thatcher satires as My Beautiful Laundrette and the charmingly titled Sammie and Rosie Get Laid...
...The result is a powerful naturalism, in which lyrical, pathetic, and satiric notes blend...
...This is surprising, since New York Stories contains three films-each about forty minutes-by Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola...
...they squabble, get along, and joke together better than many other recent screen lovers...
...More accurately, they are a haute cinema version of talented kids sitting around until one of them finally says, "Hey, I know what to do: let's put on a show...
...But in this case it's too short to wear out its welcome, especially considering the rest of New York Stories...
...someday he's going to take her to Paris...
...Despite the new surface, Scorsese's, work has much in common with Coppola's, especially an uneven blend of grandiose overstatement and narrow scope-with tight focus on the ever so unfascinating, by now absolutely conventional world of the artiste...
...The scenes are pretty to watch, especially one costume party at the sheik's place...
...Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks," from its first shot, employs some familiar routines...
...Leigh's legitimate impulse to lampoon often threatens to overwhelm him...
...High Hopes is a sad, real Big Chill...
...TOM O'BRIENt...
...No ordinary people show up here-except for service staff and a homeless person outside the Plaza whom Zoe treats to chocolate kisses...
...But trips to Soho on screen have become so routine that they are as full of surprises as bingo night...
...This joke typifies the film's droll, round-about-the-house humor...
...The tale even contains a lawyer and ad executive...
...Their performances are shrill or silly, one-note caricatures, entertaining enough, but at odds with the film's naturalism...
...Charitably described, the three works are miniatures where one can watch classy directors at work-as Dr...
...it's also, like so many of his recent works, a one-joke film...
...Johnson said of sonneteers-carving heads on cherrystones...
...Some of its best moments involve bleak recognitions of working-class defeat, especially when Cyril expresses his greatest fear, "becoming bitter...
...Naturally, Scorsese's hero is hyperbolic, part mad, driven both as a creator and lover...
...The story was told much better, and long before it became completely cliched, by Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, in vignettes between Barbara Hershey and Max von Sydow...
...Somewhat better is Martin Scorsese's "Life Lessons," in which Nick Nolte plays (snore) a Soho loft artist tormenting his studio assistant/mistress (Rosanna Arquette...
...The couple is pictured realistically but tenderly...
...In either case, the tale soon pales because of its cliched character and lack of dramatic development...
...Mum" is the last tenant in some old public "council" flats that Thatcher's government turns over to yuppie real estate investors as tenants die...
...Director Mike Leigh achieves good effects by allowing his ensemble to improvise their roles and by refashioning the script around their suggestions...
...you're never sure if the portrait by Nolte is satire by the director or self-indulgence...
...Shirley also looks the part: with a sweet, birdlike face, complete with overbite...
...not for him any chocolate kisses...
...The latter (up for an Oscar for Pelle the Conquerer) even endowed driveling Bohemianism with ironic nobility...
...It has enough maturity to distance itself from left-wing infantilism, and satirizes it strongly in a tough exchange between Cyril and a younger Marxist...
...Arquette and Nolte repeat the same routine about four times, with the latter merely throwing some paint on canvases for brute emotional punctuation (he's an expressionist, if you hadn't guessed...
...There are eight million stories in the Naked City, but New York Stories contains, at most, only one good one...
...Coppola's "Zoe" is a blatantly silly look at the life of a twelve-year-old Manhattan girl...
...This could be interesting...
...A scene at Karl Marx's grave at Highgate cemetery, for example, is the film's moral center: watch it if only to see a director tell three powerful truths at once...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...as the title suggests, she has destructively mythic potential...
...Copolla and Scorsese don't have one...
...Cyril (Philip Davis), Shirley (Ruth Sheen), and Cyril's sev-enty-yearrold mum (Edna Dore) make up the film's strong center...
...But some depth ought to be there: you do, finally, need a real story...
...Ironically, however, the worst looking of the minifilms is the only one that works dramatically, Allen's "Oedipus Wrecks...
...Heather Tobias as Cyril's would-be yuppie sister and David Bamber and Leslie Nandille as a yuppie couple (the perfectly named Booth-Brains) who live next door to Mum...
...New York Stories is described as an anthology, and, to be fair, the forty minutes doesn't allow room for development...
...However, he should have controlled three actors better...
...the whole smacks of an oversize chocolate kiss...
...This in itself wouldn't be such a bad idea if their execution weren't so uneven...
...Zoe's father (Giancarlo Giannini) is a filthy rich flute player who's mostly off on tour...
...It's fun, but small rain after drought...
...glamour has clearly been sacrificed to sensitivity...
...As usual in all Scorsese films, tone wavers seriously...
...In Margaret Thatcher's Britain, a new English film makes the same claim...
...True, Scorsese locates this downtown...
...she leaves Manhattan only for a suburban prep school (and when she misses the bus, hops a cab), and flirts with a young schoolmate, the spoiled son of a sheik...
...but it winds up pure decadence: the girl (Heather McComb) lives in the Sherry Netherland (the Plaza must be too downscale...
...Mae Questal also delights as Allen's classic "Jewish mother...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 7
