Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN BRILLIANT ODDITY TOLKIN'S 'THE RAPTURE' I've just seen the most original, the most audacious, the most disturbing American film of the last two decades. And you haven't. And you're not...
...The verbal protocol is hypnotically boring...
...Yet, as odd as this business is, it's a key to the meaning of the film...
...She has kept her appointment, now why doesn't God keep his...
...with her European partner, Vic, picking up other couples for group sex...
...They have a gorgeous daughter, an utterly straight lifestyle, and a marriage of seemingly transcendent happiness...
...First shot: a room full of telephone operators, each one boxed in his or her little cubicle, dispensing information to callers...
...The final victim, Randy, is killed on camera, but in long shot...
...I reject everything about The Rapture except its artistry...
...When the madman walks down an office corridor, kicking doors open and firing guns into rooms, the slayings aren't shown...
...Her countenance is open yet numbed, heavy, sensuous, dying of boredom...
...And the movie lurches perilously close to the visual texture of Poltergeist whenever angels or the Four Horsemen appear (though the very last scene is eerily, desolately perfect...
...Once panicked by the nothingness that she felt was at the center of existence, she cruised and copulated...
...Mimi Rogers, who at moments suggests a voluptuous Jill Clayburgh moving under water, captures Sharon's dividedness marvelously...
...She is damned...
...And then the trumpet sounds...
...But she can't blow her own brains out...
...And you're not going to, at least for a while...
...And, together with their fellow illuminates, they rapturously await the end of time...
...Let me try to do better by movie that yields up its meanings no more glibly than life itself does...
...I am emphatically not drawn to eschatological speculation, and I do not think, as Tolkin apparently does, that God is a cruel examination monitor faking out the student who is trying to cheat in the back row...
...It's a peculiar bit of business for a scene of lovers breaking up, but Rogers does it with a manic speed and compulsiveness that's subtly disturbing because it suggests that Sharon thinks she can clean up her character with the same efficiency with which she dislodges the food in her gums...
...It's like a comic variant on Lady Macbeth's handwashing...
...There is an undercurrent to them that is sinister, even murderous...
...Joined in the desert by the shade of her daughter, Sharon is transported to a nondescript place somewhere above the desert...
...Indeed, one of Sharon's pick-ups, a youth named Randy, does postcoitally confess to Sharon that he once killed a man for money, has repented, and is awed by his own capacity for evil...
...They are muttering about strange signs and coincidences and they hush up immediately whenever they notice that Sharon is eavesdropping...
...She speeds down the highway, gets arrested, is put in jail, declares to a cellmate that she no longer loves God...
...What really turns Sharon on is the sotto voce conversation of some of her co-workers...
...Perhaps no blame should fall on the critics either, for what are yuppie, go-with-the-flow touts fed full on schlock (The Terminator, et al...
...RICHARD ALLEVA...
...It doesn't have the diamond-hard perfection of Open Doors, for instance, or the Chekhovian humanity of Tender Mercies...
...This is Sharon, played by Mimi Rogers...
...The sun beats down and Sharon is filled with doubt...
...We barely hear the offscreen pleadings of the victims, see the gunfire, hear silence...
...But these faults count as nothing against the innumerable ways that Michael Tolkin uses dialogue, acting (Will Patton's performance as a compassionate cop would have done for his career what Easy Rider did for Nicholson's had The Rapture been received instead of snuffed by the critics), and sheer cinematic technique makes Tolkin's story—veering as it does so close to the ridiculous—concrete, believable, mordantly funny, tense, pathetic and, finally, deeply disturbing...
...Is that B as in boy...
...One might have walked by chance into a strange church where the congregation chants a liturgy that proclaims the supremacy of nothingness...
...She senses that they are onto something and she wants to be in on it...
...The daughter vanishes...
...cynical pseudo-journalism JFK), and highbrow kitsch (Naked Lunch) supposed to make of a film that is both pious and pitiless, an unabashed avowal of the existence of God and a blood-curdling horror movie, a triumph of suspenseful storytelling and one of the most personal reveries ever to flow across the screen...
...A connoisseur of sex devoid of all emotional content, she cruises the airports and bars of L.A...
...As she tells Randy (whom she's come to care about for more than his sexual services) that she is forsaking her hedonistic ways, Rogers flosses her teeth...
...The Four Horsemen ride (on TV no less, interrupting a football game...
...Only then do we get a closeup: of the dead foot shaking briefly for a second from the force of the kick...
...The walls of her prison crumble...
...The scenes of orgy have the lulled, slightly narcotized atmosphere of hard core pornography without hard core content...
...Thus does an artist convey the nightmare of violence...
...If you're ironing shirts on the day the world ends," asks a sarcastic friend, "do the shirts get burned...
...She's a hedonistic believer who thinks she's blessed when, in fact, she's only blissed...
...She flees from it at first, then flees toward it as her salvation...
...Replies Sharon, "I wear permanent press...
...At any moment, one expects a participant to produce a straight razor and slit every throat in sight...
...No blame to the latter for, after all, they must turn a dollar and Michael Tolkin's brilliant oddity will never fill an auditorium...
...Nothing...
...I won't describe the closing scenes in detail...
...We shift to Sharon's other existence...
...The faces are attentive and vacuous...
...Wondering what she should wear at the Last Judgment, Sharon treats the Great Beyond as just a grandiose extension of the Here and Now...
...But then the movie turns cruel, crueler than any film I have ever seen...
...Sometimes the plot shows its undergirdings, as when a compassionate neighbor, who has been hearing Sharon jabber about meeting death in the desert, offers her a revolver as protection against nocturnal animals...
...But, after her conversion, whenever the plot requires her to undress, the camera retreats, respecting her privacy...
...The screen is dark for a few seconds after the credits have rolled...
...Two brief instances of Tolkin's tact, a tact that verges on genius: In the early scenes, Tolkin's camera unabashedly looks at Mimi Rogers in the nude...
...They are exciting yet revolting...
...But that is superlative...
...So far, so funny...
...Like O'Connor, Tolkin punishes his characters for being shallow...
...As I have stated, The Rapture is the most original film I've seen in years, but it isn't necessarily the greatest...
...She has a knack of making her bored, slightly adenoidal voice go suddenly tremulous with barely leashed hysteria as the inexplicability of life, of all human action tears at Sharon, fragmenting her personality...
...Sharon is left alone in a place that is not place...
...Suffice it to note that Sharon, widowed by a hideous tragedy, goes into the desert with her daughter to experience the Apocalypse in utter tranquillity...
...She's mildly interested...
...The fact that Sharon is surrounded in the first part of the film by so many people who just happen to know of the end of the world is a condition of her peculiar fate, of course, but it leads to moments of ludicrousness...
...Though the nudity and groping are held to R-rated limits, it would be inept to suggest that these scenes are done in good taste...
...It turns out to be nothing less than the end of the world, the Apocalypse, the Four Horsemen, the last trumpet, the rising of bodies incorruptible, and all that St...
...Sharon's response...
...Now, even more panicked by the Something that will destroy Everything, she prays and prattles...
...Then the killer approaches the corpse and, in childish spite, kicks Randy's foot...
...Having killed her daughter, how can she face God's wrath...
...Sharon the believer is not really operating at a more profound level of existence than Sharon the orgiast...
...Sharon is widowed in one of those disgruntled-employee mass Commonweal 13 March 1992: 23 killings that happen too often nowadays...
...Do you know how long you will have to stay here...
...The camera comes to rest on one particular operator...
...But when the little girl asks her mother where heaven is, Sharon tells her that it's up in the sky, and seems to believe this herself quite literally...
...What finally convinces me that The Rapture is a great film is that it is completely alien to my interests and temperament, and yet it held me spellbound...
...Not physically sadistic but cruel in the way Flannery O'Connor's stories are...
...How do you spell that name...
...The voices are hushed and affectless...
...Forever...
...And nothing, indeed, is what they have made of it...
...Sharon nods: "Forever...
...Sharon is utterly consumed by her discovery...
...Nude and listless, she stretches out on her bed in the golden, declining sunlight in which Director Tolkin bathes the 22: 13 March 1992 Commonweal first hour of his movie, a light that seems to be trying to freeze time at 4:30 in the afternoon...
...John jazz...
...Nothing happens...
...The confession has brought a little variety to just another carnal afternoon...
...What city do you want...
...Angels wield swords of flame...
...Her born-again jag makes her radiant and charismatic when she isn't downright scary, and Randy, embracing her faith out of love for her, marries her...
...The Rapture has been swept out of sight by embarrassed, uncomprehending critics and financially strapped exhibitors...
...It begins with the murmuring of names and numbers...
...More time goes by and more merciless heat and beating sunlight and more hunger and, angry at God as at a date who has stood her up once too often, Sharon kills her daughter, then tries to kill herself...
...So much life an instant ago, so much clay now...
...the girlghost asks...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
