Mighty Aphrodite Goldeneye Woody Allen deftly preaches the gospel of blissful ignorance, and James Bond keeps the Union Jack flying
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN
Richard Alleva
TWO SMOOTH CHARACTERS
'Mighty Aphrodite' & 'Goldeneye'
In one of his letters to Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost insisted upon the essential cowardice of comedy, its function...
...Asked to reveal one of his dreams to her, this knucklehead responds with a fantasy about being borne aloft in the talons of a giant hawk and dropped into a field of snow...
...Judy Cum, is tracked down, she turns out to be a genetic nightmare...
...She's dumb and tasteless, feckless about health and morality, and phallically obsessed...
...And-in an inspired moment of lunacy that rivals the Marshall McLuhan episode in Annie Hall-when the chorus members raise their hands to the lord of Olympus and beseech his intervention, they are met with a distinctly modern response...
...Some critics have complained that Goldeneye is rather un-Bondian...
...Amanda decides to revive her marriage precisely on the day when her husband's fidelity is faltering...
...Linda's happiness drops out of the blue, a literal deus ex machina...
...But, as his own marriage to an ambitious art galley manager, Amanda, deteriorates, Lenny seems headed for a fling with Linda and the sort of fate meted out to Emile Jannings in The Blue Angel...
...Comedy lovers like myself who believe that the form confronts truth in its own way may find Frost's notion perverse, but you can at least grasp his point by viewing Mighty Aphrodite...
...Lenny is able to bribe the pimp because the latter is a sports fan and our hero just happens to be a sports writer with access to season passes...
...An adoring adoptive father, he becomes obsessed with finding the birth-mother of his child, partly for reassurance that there's nothing genetically wrong with the boy but mostly because Lenny feels he will know his son better if he understands the nature of the mother...
...What's the matter, James...
...Or is he...
...No one goes too far...
...Finally, it carries on, hilariously and unashamedly, one of my favorite Bond traditions...
...The romantic interest here is no babe but a keenly intelligent and humane computer programmer who also puts Bond in his place as merely one of those "boys with toys" who periodically blow up parts of our planet...
...Campbell and his cinematogra-pher use a darker, richer palette, and the camera constantly darts in on the action like a skilled surfer cresting giant waves...
...At first, Aphrodite's hero, Lenny (played by Allen), seems a shmuck version of a tragic hero as he pursues the truth regardless of the consequences...
...Is Bean too commonplace to represent a super villain...
...For Woody Allen's latest isn't just a comedy but an antitragedy...
...Happy coincidences abound...
...But in this regard Brosnan's sensitivity serves the movie well, and his stricken look in the face of her outrage soon has the couple lolling in love on Caribbean beaches...
...A Greek chorus, magically transported from ancient Greece to Lenny's consciousness, keeps warning our hero to beware, not to go too far, not to know too much...
...I'm told that everything we hear in Woody Allen films is written by him and never improvised by the actors...
...Oh well, let him have two assistants to supply the requisite garishness: a female sadist who reaches orgasm by crushing men to death between her thighs, and a Russian techno-nerd who exults, after each of his online coups, "I am in-veen-cible...
...Lenny doesn't go too far...
...It's an astonishing moment that believably prefigures how the boy's love of purity will lead him to reject Linda...
...Less inspired, often pedestrian, is Allen's writing of the realistic passages, what Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman, called the "dirt of life": marital quarrels, would-be seductions, everyday social encounters...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva TWO SMOOTH CHARACTERS 'Mighty Aphrodite' & 'Goldeneye' In one of his letters to Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost insisted upon the essential cowardice of comedy, its function being not to confront harsh realities but to elude them with laughter...
...Who needs its dire warnings when the universe is so resolutely untragic...
...Subdued Brosnan may be in manner, but that doesn't stop the scriptwriters from having him mow down the usual squads of enemies...
...Is the heroine a little too three-dimensional and, as embodied by the extremely talented Izabella Scorupco, altogether too poignant for an assassin like Bond...
...This is one Bond movie that is lithe as well as noisy and, unlike even the best of its predecessors, it doesn't sag in its last quarter hour...
...The one conversation that contains something truly unexpected is a passage between Linda and her boxer-suitor...
...But not to worry...
...Yet what a superbly slaphappy chorus it is...
...Its chief villain is no titan of evil like Auric Gold-finger but a rather life-sized former colleague of Bond's, 006 in fact (Sean Bean), with a perfectly legitimate, historically grounded grudge against Great Britain...
...Certain things are better left un-thunk...
...The scion of a long line of idiots and criminals, she's a talentless would-be actress working as a hooker and porn performer...
...It celebrates the one thing tragedy always destroys: blissful ignorance...
...James Bond, who has never hesitated to stick his neck out-along with other parts of his anatomy-is back...
...Maybe this movie is onto something...
...No pithy comeback...
...No glib reply...
...Sean Bean taunts Pierce Brosnan...
...Gone is the travelogue look that made almost all previous Bond movies too laid-back even when the technology was blasting away...
...Mighty Aphrodite is, on the whole, a diverting testament to the mingy wisdom of keeping your secrets to yourself and sticking your neck out only so far...
...Its speeches and strophes bring out the old, sly New Yorker Woody Allen who once seemed the heir of S. J. Perel-man and Robert Benchley...
...Not to worry...
...This alone draws the story closer to Len Deighton's or Adam Hall's territory than Ian Fleming's...
...He even confronts her furious pimp...
...And fate proves benevolent, acting more like a celestial sitcom writer than the harsh taskmaster of the Greeks...
...He does sleep with Linda once but is glad to reconcile with his wife, who in turn has fended off an adulterous relationship with a business associate...
...That's what the movie keeps telling us over and over...
...yet much of the language might just as well be improvised since it lacks either hilarity or bite...
...the masked figures intone, sinking to their knees...
...Her living room shows that she raids sex shops the way others do antique stores...
...And feminism has made its influence felt: "M" is now a woman (well played by Dame Judi Dench with her purring mezzo) who verbally skewers 007 for his male chauvinism...
...It's all enough to make any self-respecting Greek chorus consider a career change...
...But Allen's overall plotting and his direction of camera and actors are deft...
...Rule Britannia...
...Like all his predecessors, he keeps a poker face, but an actor's poker face needs something in the eyes to serve as counterpoint, and Brosnan lacks Cannery's glint of menace and Roger Moore's insouciant twinkle...
...The Lenny-Linda scenes come off best, kept afloat by Allen's confident direction and Mia Sorvino's piquant acting, but even they would have been better with fresher dialogue...
...All the usual advice that Greek heroes ignore...
...Britannia, rule our dreams!ia, rule our dreams...
...Indeed, Brosnan does more silent brow-furrowing and less wisecracking than any Bond to date...
...Feeling protective, Lenny attaches himself to Linda without telling her he's adopted her child, and he tries to get her out of the sex business and into a relationship with an equally good-hearted and dumb boxer...
...And let it also be noted that Martin Campbell's direction is a triumph...
...Fleming always referred to his mother as "M...
...But she's also good-hearted, as emotionally fragile as she is physically robust, and, in her own way, honest...
...Allen needs more surprises like this in his writing...
...Yet the movie easily surmounts these problems through blithe inconsistency...
...But when Linda Ash, a.k.a...
...Lenny never tells Linda that he's adopted her son and, when that one moment of carnality with our hero makes her pregnant, Linda never tells Lenny about it but finds a husband for herself (the boxer having retreated) who will accept her checkered past...
...When Lenny confronts the pimp, he doesn't dare physical heroics but simply pays off the bully with a season pass to the Knicks...
...Once again, the British Secret Service is portrayed as the arm of an ubiquitous and spectacular global power, a political and economic colossus bestriding the lesser breeds while the United States (represented by a hick CIA operative) serves as a bumbling sidekick, huffing and puffing in England's wake...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 22
