Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN DEVILISH DUOS 'SHE-DEVIL,"ROSES' & 'BLAZE' She-Devil starts poorly. Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep are both involved with the same man (Ed Begley, Jr.), but rarely with each other....
...Their struggle to keep ownership rights is the ne plus ultra of a time in which the idea of home has become so powerful that it has displaced not just romance, but even its old ally, marriage, as the central core of the myth of domesticity...
...Shelton hits no home run here, but, as in Durham, he redefines the patriotic film...
...In certain ways, it replays her Desperately Seeking Susan, where a suburban housewife "trades places" with someone more flamboyant...
...Worse, it fits this film's coarse tone...
...As in When Harry Met Sally, War stages an all-out assault on the notion of sexual harmony, then tries to tag on a closing affirmation...
...What she wants is his body, which she gets, not counting on Barr's ability to engineer a role reversal by dumping the kids, dog, and domesticity into Streep's lavish mansion...
...All the surfaces shine inside the opulent house that Turner and Douglas make and destroy together...
...Watch for its climactic inconsistency: an exchange of "I always loved you's" juxtaposed to Turner's final gesture...
...It lacks heart, soul, or real insides for its characters, but has dramatic momentum...
...Watching her endure household slavery, two kids from hell, and low jibes at her looks is just no fun...
...Things dominate this marriage and they are used to illustrate how it is torn asunder...
...Everything once bright and beautiful is twisted...
...Even in Louisiana, this was too much to take...
...Still, it's frustrating never to get to know these people, and unbelievable that their venom goes as far as it does...
...It may not be truthful, but makes for delightful Americana...
...Unlike She-Devil and War of the Roses, he is able to evoke from Davidovich and Newman a convincing, affectionate battle of wills between a man and woman...
...In She-Devil, it's a relief to watch her jumping off a pedestal, almost satirizing her own, well-crafted "loftiness" in the cartoon of Mary Fisher...
...War of the Roses outdoes She-Devil for vulgarity, but often makes up for it in other ways...
...The film is vintage eighties in another way: the omnipotence of real estate...
...True, reactive sexism from women is not as bad as active sexism against them...
...De Vito is good as a straight man to Douglas and Turner, a twist, but a welcome one...
...Directed by Danny DeVito, and starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as embattled spouses, the film relies on excessively vile black humor...
...Newman's scrawny geezer prances, gesticulates, and demagogues so vociferously that-it happened last year to me in Rain Man-for ten minutes I really did forget I was in a theater...
...The political foreground is colorful, especially because of fine support from character actors like Jerry Hardin as Long's crony and lieutenant governor...
...Newman makes him seem one...
...he's an accountant and she claims to need his "manly" expertise...
...Directed and written by Ron Shelton, whose Bull Durham also reveled in raucous Southern energy, Blaze celebrates flamboyant roguery for its heart of gold...
...she has a soft body but a strong, almost sculpted, intelligent face...
...But the background is blurry, especially on economics and race relations...
...Davidovich makes convincing the claims of innocence and attempts at dignity...
...And War is, in a way, literal deconstruction...
...Things get really nasty only when Turner and Douglas both refuse to leave their house and try to drive the other out...
...She's stolen Begley from Barr...
...Streep comes to her senses and liberates herself from step-domesticity...
...In part, this fits the look of the film...
...She-Devil, based on Fay Weldon's Life and Loves of a She-Devil, is directed by Susan Seidelman, one of the few woman directors active in Hollywood today...
...The pacing of the film is uneven, the plot wobbly...
...But both women can only suffer when housewives...
...Barr, as Begley's neglected spouse and an overburdened housewife, underacts dreadfully at first...
...He initiates the first by declaring, "The poor bastards never had a chance...
...The irony which our comedians are addicted to is never original...
...Professionalism sometimes has such an opaque surface that it's hard to pinpoint what's under it...
...Blaze stars Paul Newman as Louisiana governor Earl Long, who in 1959 defied the political gods and started running around with a buxom strip-per, Blaze Starr (Lolita DavMovich...
...Is it that De Vito doesn't have the courage of his coarse convictions...
...The editing makes the cruelty ambiguous...
...If a male-oriented movie presented such a reductive image of women, it would quickly be labeled sexist...
...The film fosters the notion that no woman can work at home and have dignity...
...Her phlegmatic style works better pouring cold water on someone else's hot temper, as on "Roseanne," than expressing her own...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Although he conveniently leaves out the fact that Long was married, he shapes a believable love story about real people...
...And watch for the dog: is its fate as grisly as it seems, or something less gruesome...
...Unlike Barr, Streep makes suffering interesting through wild exaggeration and a gift for physical comedy...
...Barr is appealing in executing her revenge...
...Her strong suit on stage was always humor...
...Does Shelton really see this man as a hero, and why...
...Here, as supporting star and director, he's under better control...
...As in Bull Durham, Shelton shows himself capable of presenting multiple aspects of feminine power...
...Begley has a thankless role as a philanderer, and Streep's Latino servant-whose hormones are also his main characteristic-is the movie's only other male character...
...War literalizes the battle of the sexes-here, two ignorant armies that clash by night...
...When Newman declares, "The three greatest friends of the poor are Jesus Christ, Sears Roebuck, and Earl Long," one savors the irreverent hyperbole, but would like to know more...
...De Vito not only directs but plays Douglas's partner, narrating the film in neat flashbacks...
...it only deconstructs to leave a void...
...Streep's comic zest, though initially straitjacketed in the caricature role of a romance novelist, helps the movie pick up energy halfway through...
...The discovery in the film is newcomer Davidovich, a considerable romanticization of Blaze Starr...
...Still, one aspect of War escapes him...
...he loves America for its sinners...
...For Seidelman, suburban domesticity is a fate worse than death, and escape is empowerment...
...in late- 1970s New York theater, she often shone as a daffy romantic...
...Domestic life goes awry not because of philandering, but because Turner finally realizes that she dislikes her shallow husband, an ambitious lawyer whose superficiality Douglas lithely catches...
...The battles between Turner and Douglas have their humorous, slapstick moments, especially when De Vito makes use of tender memories or expensive gifts from earlier, happily married life to punctuate the couple's escalations in nastiness...
...Like She-Devil, War assaults neoconservative myths of happy homes, but in a typical eighties' way, through slick ironic inversion...
...Like She-Devil, War is cynical about marriage...
...He and Davidovich even evoke tears for the old rascal at the end...
...Separately, they achieve some good comic effects...
...The movie closes sentimentally, but its plot generally sustains that keynote...
...Starr helped Shelton in making the film and has a bit part, so it's no surprise that the film cleans up her act...
...But it's not pleasant...
...Or that he doesn't know how to make a movie that transcends counterpoint of myths and antimyths about the hearth...
...The characters are ciphers, propped up to push an ideology...
...We are never sure how badly Blaze hurt Long's career or how much he suffered from advancing "progressive ideas" with his down-home populism and support (when safe) for civil rights...
...TOM O'BRIENits sinners...
...In "Taxi," and movies (with the same stars) such as Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, his midget-devil shtick got tedious...
...one step back and the movie loses its power...
...Its visual flair and dynamic pacing propel the film along on the route to a domestic Armageddon...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 2
