Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN ALL'S ILL THAT ENDS WELL 'REALITY BITES' & 'THE SNAPPER' ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ umbug and self-humbug are indispensable to H^^^^^^f comedy. In fact, it's hard to name a comedy ¦^HJH^H or farce that...
...Ethan Hawke gives a perfectly plausible performance in the movie's first half as that sort of young man who has cultivated an air of bored disdain as an announcement of his incorruptibility...
...This is an adaptation of the second installment of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy, acomic epic of life as it's lived in the streets and overcrowded houses of northern Dublin...
...Trouble is, when this guy comes out with lines such as "I got this arcane glimpse of the universe" and "There's a planet of regret on my shoulders," we may begin to wonder who's the real phony...
...Bracing himself for a fist fight with some tormentors in a pub, Dessie finds himself in the midst of a brawl when everybody jumps into the act...
...But what's truly funny about the movie is the way reality keeps breaking into every situation...
...If you accept the way it defines you, you're sunk...
...She's quite ready to announce her condition to family and friends but isn't willing to declare who got her that way...
...Sharon manages to shut him up but then must deal with the brushfire of gossip...
...The first novel, The Commitments, has already been unforgettably filmed by Alan Parker, but The Snapper isn't far behind as directed by the impressively versatile Stephen Frcars from Doyle's own script...
...Trying to take in the news of his daughter's pregnancy, Dessie (done to blustery perfection by Colm Meaney) finds himself playing traffic cop as the rest of his family troops by on the way to school or work...
...Then Ryder takes a cable TV executive (Ben Stiller, Reality's director) as her lover and everything heads toward a sexual showdown...
...But he's another problem...
...The father of the baby dramatically leaves his family in order to declare his true love for Sharon but gets left with egg on his face in the middle of a shopping mall when he learns that his "true love" thinks he's a creep...
...The Snapper nearly becomes a study in communal self-deception...
...But no matter how devious or ¦Hi IH1 gullible characters are, their creator must remain undeceived or there is no comedy...
...Unlike The Commitments, which found vitality and even kindness in every corner of Doyle's world, The Snapper, a more claustrophobic film, portrays the neighborhood as a trap...
...Janeane Garafola has chunky attractiveness and campy wit...
...In fact, it's hard to name a comedy ¦^HJH^H or farce that doesn' t have some manner of fraud ^^H~fl^H near its core...
...The most important character (Winona Ryder) is doing a stint as a TV intern while putting together a video about the aims and aimlessness of her generation...
...Through Sharon's eyes, we sometimes see her girlfriends as young, cackling hags who feed their soap opera imaginings on her misfortune...
...Anyway, he was dark...
...And romantic...
...It's the one right outside the window...
...But it's not a total waste of time...
...Winona Ryder is a latterday Daisy Miller, and ifonly this unlacquered beauty were allowed to play the James heroine then those of us exposed to the dreadful Peter Bogdanovich version of twenty years ago could forget Cybill Shepherd forever...
...Conversely, the family situation in The Snapper, for all its noise and mess, is portrayed more lovingly than in The Commitments...
...What isn't so funny in The Snapper, and isn't meant to be funny, is the feeling of being at the mercy of one's neighbors and friends...
...No, this is not a movie that can afford to sneer at the cliches of TV...
...What's wrong with Reality Bites is that its creators, particularly scriptwriter Helen Childress, are misty-eyed...
...In The Snapper, the dirt of life is leavened by wisecracks and scraps of dreams...
...She and her roommate (Janeane Garafola) acquire a couple of unwanted male boarders, and between one of them (a rocker played by Ethan Hawke) and Ryder some erotic tension develops...
...He's the latest version of Jimmy Porter, exposer of phonies in Look Back in Anger...
...But only we see this...
...The truth slips out, or at least half out, when the beat-theclock lover starts boasting to his drinking buddies...
...And the two female leads are delightful...
...Comic fools may sigh over themselves but their creators must cast a cold eye...
...He's particularly clever at changing the composition of his shots without cutting by skillfully moving the actors about within a fixed camera set-up...
...The deception here is perpetrated by unmarried, twenty-yearold Sharon Curley when she becomes pregnant by a middleaged married man during one of her periodic drunken bouts...
...Stiller shows, in the less drippy portions of the script, that he can direct...
...When the roommates hear a song they like in a convenience store and break into spontaneous dance at the cash register, you may fall a bit in love with them...
...Never mind that dad and mum would think, how would she look her girlfriends in the eye...
...This is most true for Dessie, who, after getting past his anger, becomes a kinder father, a joyfully expectant grandparent, and, comically yet believably, a better lover to his wife when he stumbles upon some sex tips in the back of a prenatal handbook...
...If you're looking for a perfect example of a comedy that deals with self-deception without being tainted by it, check out The Snapper...
...In Frears's work, there has always been a mixture of grit and quicksilver...
...Chaplin's decline as a comic genius begins in Limelight precisely because he becomes 16: 25 March 1994 .infatuated with his own hero...
...Not the "reality" of serious drama a la Arthur Miller and William Inge, with their dark home-truths wrung from the soul in the midst of Oedipal warfare, but the ongoing reality we all deal with every day, the mess of life, its pettiness, its squalor, its stubborn refusal to become high drama or significance or anything other than mess...
...They are convinced that their characters have unfathomed depths but the moviegoer can't wade out of the shallows...
...Fair enough material for a romantic comedy, but the creators of this one seem to think that they're carrying the standard for Generation X. Take, for instance, the putative filmmaking talent of the Ryder character...
...It actually benefits from the commercial butchery...
...The turning point of the movie comes when the executive, having optioned Ryder's documentary for his M.T.V.type network, tarts the video up with a lot of editing and computer-graphic clich\'es...
...At first, she simply doesn't remember, but when she finally does, she can't abide the fact that she had sex with such a drip...
...In fact, nobody completely believes Sharon's lie but few completely dismiss it, either...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 18: 25 March 1994...
...Perhaps the scene works simply because you're allowed to fall in love instead of being badgered into it by filmmakers cooing over their cinematic progeny...
...Her girlfriends sigh over her romantic exploit and compare it to Letter to Brezhnev (the popular British film about a girl who takes a Russian sailor as a lover...
...Ryder's outrage at this helps propel her from Stiller's arms into Hawke's...
...Her father, Dessie, sarcastically sings "Popeye, the Sailor Man," as his daughter and her ballooning belly waddle past him in the kitchen, but he too would rather believe his daughter than deal with the real father, a man he's always dismissed as a nerd...
...Talk all you want about global villages or information superhighways, in Barrytown everyone knows which village really matters...
...The movie deals with what happens to a bunch of kids just out of college during their searches for work and love...
...True, Childress has written some scenes in which Hawke is chided for—guess what—not committing himself...
...Precisely because the world outside is so ready to judge and sneer, it is only in the family that a person can get support and even a chance to grow...
...So she invents a one-night stand with a Spanish 25 March 1994.17 sailor...
...Dessie often regards his pub mates as small-time lagos, and there's always a next-door neighbor ready with a sarcastic crack or sneer...
...It's limp, boring, utterly amateurish...
...Or was he Portuguese...
...Malvolio can kid himself into thinking that he's God's gift to women but Twelfth Night would have crumbled into incoherence if Shakespeare had bought into the steward's fantasy...
...What helps her is that her invention is so much more attractive than reality to a neighborhood that is starved for glamour...
...You can almost smell the rooms his characters live in, yet the spring-heeled editing always keeps the naturalism from congealing...
...When done well, this method gives a loose, Sundayafternoon feeling to the material that helps conceal the script's manipulations...
...But then the musician's father dies offstage, the lad undergoes a spiritual conversion (also offstage), the lovers clinch, soft rock music cozies onto the soundtrack, the camerawork goes soft focus, and All Is Well...
...Director Stiller and scriptwriter Childress really seem to think that an artist has been betrayed and that therefore she is right to throw her yuppie lover over for the feckless but pure rock poet...
...Or Greek...
...This is believable enough but the filmmakers have made a dreadful mistake: they let us see much of Ryder's documentary...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
