The Indian in the Cupboard Smoke
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva REEL PEOPLE, REAL PEOPLE 'Indian in the Cupboard' & 'Smoke' Han there be such a thing as an ascetic children's movie? If so, it's called The Indian in the Cupboard. What...
...The rest of the cast is adequate, except for David Keith...
...Can there be such a thing as a morally serious kid's movie that succeeds at the box office...
...Omri soon receives some grim lessons about the consequences of action...
...With a sort of probing casual-ness, he lets us see curiosity or pleasure or disgust fill an actor's face for several seconds before he finally, even reluctantly, shows us what is causing the emotion...
...by assuming Paul's name, Rashid is out to find the father who abandoned him...
...But like a cureless tic, his instinct for writing persists and is the one thing that gets him through each day...
...Kids are talking about this movie (and copies of the book are disappearing from library shelves) because it gives them something to care about...
...So, why should Paul repay Rashid for saving something Paul no longer values by sacrificing the activity that justifies his otherwise miserable life...
...Paul Auster's storytelling is intricate without being precious, and his dialogue is terse, funny, and poignant...
...His leathery face has become a study in profane, fallible goodness, and it sums up the humanity of this profane, forgiving movie...
...This device creates subtle suspense in situations where other directors would find banality...
...But it is the face of Harvey Keitel delivering that monologue that will probably linger longest in my memory...
...These diminutives aren't engendered by the transformation but have been preternaturally plucked from the past...
...Maybe, but...
...The Bat had-in Variety parlance-no "legs" at the box office...
...This sacrifice of spectacle in favor of emotion keeps the focus where the drama really is: inside Omri's head...
...This Lynn Reid Banks story tells of Omri, a boy who discovers that one of his birthday presents, an antique wooden cabinet, can transform toy figures into actual-though miniaturized-people...
...The poet-explorer simply subtracted the number of ounces of a smoked cigar's remains from the weight of the cigar in its pristine state...
...That's why he nearly walked into that truck...
...that painful consequences can issue from benevolent intentions...
...But is the result really the weight of smoke...
...So Boone the Texan is shunted out of 1879 still riding his horse...
...It's just about the only movie portrayal of a writer that ever convinced me that the character up there on the screen really was creating literature...
...that justice doesn't exist on earth, but we must keep striving for it anyway...
...This cupboard stuff is better than virtual reality...
...Ingenious...
...All of the acting is at least good and William Hurt's honorable and irritable Paul may be the best work of this actor's career...
...And how do you weigh other things, even less tangible than smoke...
...The grandest special effect in this film is the look of wonder in the eight-year-old hero's face...
...Early in this film, a writer named Paul (William Hurt), so damaged by his wife's accidental violent death that he drifts about in a stupor, tells some guys in his friend Augie Wren's (Harvey Keitel) cigar store of how Sir Walter Ralegh attempted to weigh smoke...
...The grief-numbed Paul is jerked out of the path of a truck by a homeless kid who calls himself Rashid (Harold Perrineau...
...Quite a Spartan achievement for a children's movie...
...The role of the cowboy is a caricature but, instead of skirting the cliches of twangy folksiness, Keith transmutes them with comic brio...
...How Paul's name helps the boy win back his parent, and how the bag of money helps Paul's pal, the cigar-store owner, Augie, win back a piece of his past, while Paul gets a beating, a charming girlfriend, a new lease on life, and some great material for a novel, I will let you discover when you see Smoke...
...But The Indian has wings...
...And these toys of flesh and blood carry real weapons, can shed real blood, and have been taught by experience to use quick and deadly force against traditional enemies...
...Omri may at first treat Little Bear as a pet, telling him to "go to bed now" at the end of the day, but the Iroquois is a dignified warrior who, at the moment of his rapture, was helping his nephew through a tribal initiation...
...The grateful Paul offers his apartment as a temporary crash pad for the teen-aged vagabond, but shows him the door when his presence interferes with the writer's concentration...
...Keitel, so out of his depth in The Piano that he couldn't figure out how his character should speak, so much in his element in Reservoir Dogs and Mortal Thoughts that he coasted on old tricks, here has a role that uses everything he can give and a director who has pushed him into giving a bit more...
...Omri's face, which seems to preside over the entire film, is the face of Hal Scardino, an unbeautiful, snaggle-toothed kid who communicates entrancement unaffectedly...
...Wayne Wang's direction is a model of tough love...
...that joy can emerge from danger...
...Soon, Little Bear and Boone are at war with each other...
...Keitel delivers a ten-minute monologue in medium-close-up with very few cuts to his audience (Hurt...
...And he takes something with him: Paul's name...
...But these playthings aren't virtual reality...
...the suspense is produced by keeping the camera on Omri's anguished face as the boy awaits the outcome...
...But Rashid leaves something behind: a paper bag containing thousands of dollars...
...But perfect justice, after all, is as elusive as smoke...
...I can only report that numerous children I know aren't talking about Batman Forever, which, after its record-breaking opening success has now fled the multiplexes because word-of-mouth established it as the joyless idiocy that it is...
...Right...
...Rashid has stolen from a thief and he's stashing the loot in the apartment...
...Vile ingratitude...
...What might have been an orgy of special effects obstinately remains human and humane, and proceeds to a climax determined by neither lighthearted slaughter nor multihued explosions but moral scruple...
...Scenarist Melissa Matheson (who must be considered the doyenne of juvenile movie scriptwriters after The Black Stallion and E.T...
...Then, one of Omri's playmates, let in on the secret, decides that if you've got a live Indian, you gotta have a cowboy to go with him...
...since his wife's death, Paul hasn't valued his life...
...That's my (warped) reasoning, not Paul's, but part of the fun of Smoke is the way it provokes you into considering such unmathematical equations...
...Having learned from the Indian that all human life is precious and that all ac-tions have their consequences, Omri will doubtless go on to learn more complicated things: that though we must not trifle, we must occasionally interfere with the lives of others...
...Though it is mostly Keitel's wonderfully shaded, impeccably timed delivery that makes the scene work, just before the end of Augie's story Wang brings the camera slowly, slowly up to Keitel's face, finally zeroing in on the storyteller's mouth...
...He lets every scene breathe but never hyperventilate...
...and director Frank Oz haven't skimped entirely on good cheap thrills, but The Indian never becomes Honey, I Shrank the Kids...
...Having transported an Iroquois brave from 1761, Omri must soon whisk a cockney medic off a battlefield of the Great War to tend to the Indian's wounds after Little Bear is attacked by a bird...
...What fun...
...For instance, Little Bear's final encounter with the pet rat under the floorboards of a bedroom isn't even shown...
...Expect happiness, not perfect justice at the conclusion...
...Your own life, for instance...
...This single camera movement underscores the words better than any offscreen music could...
...They are reality...
...Omri could learn these lessons simply by living, but if he wants a crash course, he can get his parents to take him to see Smoke, written by Paul Auster and directed by Wayne Wang...
...Obviously, much of the fun comes from the Gulliver factor: an eight-year-old is a giant to Little Bear, and Omri's everyday fauna of birds, dogs, and pet rats become an onslaught of monsters...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 15
