Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN LOVE STORIES 'DAISY,' 'ENEMIES' & BEST OF '89 Once you get the set-up, Driving Miss Daisy is unsurprising: it's a mixed-sex, mixed-race, gerontocratic version of "odd couple" and "buddy"...
...in the last, she gracefully yields to Freeman the feisty independence that is her life force...
...Too bad that when all the pieces are finally assembled the film doesn't have a place to go...
...ethnic typing suits her (Prizzi's Honor) better than romantic loftiness (The Dead), though her best scene here lies in recalling her and Herman's murdered children...
...Technically, their descent must be matrilineal, a complication which the film gingerly sidesteps and the photography strongly subverts...
...Some small, nonepic films were also excellent...
...Given the two leads, this is not a bad idea...
...With his dignity, patience, high-pitched voice, and folksy intuition, his acting is a gem of elegant understatement...
...All they have to do is become really self-conscious and second-guess such mocking wit...
...They never thought an adapted play, with two veteran actors, without sex or violence, would sell in an age of Batmania...
...But will they...
...Readers are urged to round out, or revise, my list with their own choices...
...In Bruce Beresford's direction of Alfred Uhry's screenplay (from his Off Broadway stage hit), Tandy and Freeman perform a tour de force...
...Henry V improves Shakespeare...
...but theirs ends without punch, in a dramatic whimper...
...I didn't see everything (miss-ing, for example, the often praised, low-budget independent works True Love, Roger and Me, My Left Foot and Drugstore Cowboy...
...They were funny, but with a certain ineradicable vulgarity...
...Enemies has a moving, delightful balance between nervous comic edginess and tragedy...
...Naturally, Herman's original wife, the intellectual Tamara (Angelica Huston), shows up in Manhattan, though he thought the Nazis had killed her...
...The conclusion raises complex issues of religion and ethnic identity, but in a disguised form...
...Unless I am wrong about the last shot, Tamara symbolically gets back her children and Yadwiga is softly but firmly put in place...
...He has to play second fiddle in Daisy, a quiet, sweet counterpoint to Tandy's sassy sourpuss...
...The Fabulous Baker Boys was notable for the ensemble work of Jeff and Beau Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer...
...No one could choose which actress is better...
...And in spite of its strengths, I do not include Born on the Fourth of July, a big winner come Oscar-time...
...Stein redeems the role, especially when she first meets Tamara and when, shocked at Herman's irreligion when she tries to convert to Judaism, she lapses into Christian prayer...
...The plot and design fuse perfectly when Herman becomes bewildered by a subway sign with arrows pointing three different ways for Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx, a transit version of Herman's choice...
...And-the critics' dogmatic unsentimentality be damned-I liked Field of Dreams, not for the baseball, but for its brave stab at naked emotion...
...Glory tops my list, despite its weaknesses...
...Honorable" mention goes to Batman, partly for its sets and partly for revealing the real Jack Nicholson...
...Despite the hype around it and a thin plot line, I liked sex, lies, and videotape for its casual texture and naturalistic acting, as well as the use of avant-garde tactics (a welcome relief) in the service of old-fashioned values...
...But in two final scenes, Tandy pulls out all the stops in coming to terms with the finalities of aging...
...But what a couple...
...Mazursky's source in Singer (Mazursky co-authored the screenplay as well as directed) raises him a number of notches...
...He doesn't push symbolism and lets his actors, not the cameras, do most of the work...
...Huston comes on strong...
...Enemies stars Ron Silver (most recently in David Mamet's Speed the Plough) as Holocaust survivor Herman Broder in Coney Island in the later 1940s...
...Besides Enemies, A Love Story, what were the best films of 1989...
...We know generally what's going to happen...
...Up to that point, Paul Mazursky plies his best film magic ever, using a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer to transcend previous works like Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Moscow on the Hudson...
...Enemies, A Love Story is so fine for so long that one goes away unsatisfied at the flat, troublesome conclusion...
...Olin is ferocious, with volcanic reserves of bold sensuality and anger on immediate call...
...Following my custom, I will not name ten...
...Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing vividly portrayed New York's black/white tensions...
...Warner Brothers was anxious about Daisy, marketing it slowly, then watching it top Variety charts in late January...
...Fatter in this film than ever before, but also better, he liberates himself from "Saturday Night Live" clone comedies and shows brains and feelings rather than slick, sick wit...
...SCREEN LOVE STORIES 'DAISY,' 'ENEMIES' & BEST OF '89 Once you get the set-up, Driving Miss Daisy is unsurprising: it's a mixed-sex, mixed-race, gerontocratic version of "odd couple" and "buddy" formulas so common lately...
...But American demographics are changing, with some good results: the "greying of America" increases the chances for the adult and literate to succeed...
...Daisy doesn't often get as deep as the Geraldine Page/Horton Foote collaboration, Trip to Bountiful...
...Stein has to do the dirty work as one who normally gets dumped on...
...The film blends genuinely funny bedroom farce (and Singer's spectacle of Herman as a mock-heroic Lothario) with the weight of remembrance that burdens Herman's life...
...Nicholson is its prophet...
...but the acting, directing, and genially comedic writing are so well calibrated that it doesn't matter...
...Tandy snorts, grumps, and scowls, but her resentment over the loss of her independence gives way to grudging respect and liking for Freeman, then a mutual alliance against the younger world...
...Veterans like Tandy have taken advantage of this by shaping strong roles (Cocoon) that reflect the needs of the new older audience...
...in all the fuss over its racial element, few noticed how, in Sal the pizzeria owner, Lee created the best image of a white, working-class man on film in the 1980s...
...But Herman is also involved (uptown, in Pelham) with Masha (Lena Olin), a Holocaust survivor who tries to bury memory in flamboyantly energetic lust...
...Mazursky reinforces the latter with noir-like photography, to which he adds a lively recreation of New York's richly ethnic postwar ambiance...
...Freeman is one of the best actors around (now on screen also in Glory...
...Another pleasure in Daisy is Beresford's feel for ambiance...
...But a greater problem with the conclusion is Mazursky's (or Singer's) failure to drive the story of Herman and Masha to a convincing end, either with the other characters or each other...
...Volcanoes like Masha don't fall dormant without a more fiery struggle...
...Strong understanding of laboring people also flavored the English High Hopes...
...An Australian in love with our South (Tender Mercies and Crimes of the Heart), he shoots Tandy only in middle and long shots in the first half of the film, framing her so often against the contours of her old house that it too becomes a character...
...some literary critics see this as a sad undercurrent in Singer's work, a stereotyping of Gentiles into a massive, subtle Polish joke...
...her piano number was easily the most memorable scene of the year...
...Jessica Tandy is a rich, 1940s Southern widow whose son (Dan Ackroyd) insists on getting her a chauffeur (Morgan Freeman) when she becomes too frail to drive...
...His wife, Yadwiga (Marge Sophie Stein), is a plain, peasant Polish woman who saved Herman by hiding him from Nazis...
...There are few larger forces corrupting our society that intelligent people can do more about than trendy cynicism and the cult of irony...
...Stories can end sadly...
...Ackroyd also helps...
...it was the best adapted screenplay of 1989...
...maybe it should have been faced more frankly here...
...This is the Age of the Joker...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Its scene at Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery was poignant and prophetic: despite our need to pursue real social justice, "Marx" is dead...
...One understands the strong sentiment within Judaism for more Jewish children after the Holocaust...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 5
