Screen:
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN PAUL NEWMAN PERFORMS HE'S'NOBODY'S FOOL' wonder if Garrison Keillor has seen Nobody's Fool and, if so, what he thinks of it. Though it's set in upstate New York rather than Keillor's...
...That brings up another problem...
...Pass the watercress and sandwiches...
...It's defined by a moment early in the movie...
...At that very moment, Tandy looks out a window and sees a familiar sight: a senile neighbor is wandering obliviously into the street...
...but one also sticks by friends in the best and worst of times, though the best and worst of times may be indistinguishable from each other...
...Just as Garrison Keillor tells his mundane-magical yams in a lulling, self-effacing manner, director-scriptwriter Robert Benton mounts this Richard Russo story in a seamless fashion...
...It's a work of good intentions, and these intentions seem to have leached every last ounce of originality out of Singleton and much of his intelligence of well, I can't think of any recent film that extolled so highly the benefits of knowledge and yet displayed such ignorance in every frame, every line of dialogue, and each turn of an utterly mechanical plotignorance of the academic scene, ignorance of what makes a drama compelling, ignorance of life itself...
...And that rally that opens this movie-what's going on there...
...The office of the professor played by Lawrence Fishburne doesn't took like a teacher's office but an admissions department...
...The late Jessica Tandy, who never irritated me, is radiant as the landlady...
...HERO: Who do I have to prove myself to...
...And how do people convey intelligence in this movie titled Higher Learning...
...or to a friend who passed away or to a kind of paradise...
...Directors often sharpen their visions of what their projects should look like by screening whatever classic has inspired them for their collaborators...
...Why can everyone see through him, except you...
...I particularly liked the way Benton turned hitherto irritating traits of some of his actors to good account...
...It stands...
...But note that Passage's director, David Lean, in a stroke of genius, put in a seemingly irrelevant detail: Miss Quested fastens her gaze for one moment on an onlooker's shoe...
...The simple back-and-forth from talking head to talking head (each face lit with gelid beauty by John Bailey) works because we hang on every banal phrase, or rather let ourselves be bobbed along on the currents that move under the banalities...
...Just consider the campus that Singleton presents us with: it's just a hunk of ground on which the director got permission to shoot...
...When one student, trying to study, is driven out of his dorm room by the blasting stereo of his roommate, he never thinks of going to the student union building...
...The only sign left of the Singleton who made Boyz is in this movie's propulsion: he's still enough of a filmmaker to keep our eyes on the screen, but that won't stop any viewer who's lived a little from wincing at the callowness he sees there...
...This movie is turning a profit at the box office, so John Singleton will work again...
...Though it's set in upstate New York rather than Keillor's Minnesota, the film evokes a town very much like Lake Wobegon: small, wintry, so uneventful that little scandals and playful vendettas mark off epochs...
...But how could be, since Singleton doesn't give this campus a student union, though such a building is usually the center of campus life...
...We wear the chains we forged in life," Sully's landlady is fond of quoting to her tenant...
...RICHARD ALLEVA Lee Oser Mosaic Days Pieces of mosaic, the days lie scattered on the table, sparkling in their dust...
...Here he uses that very quality to limn the fatuousness of Carl Roebuck, Sully's indispensable enemy...
...Sully's landlady (Jessica Tandy) is being urged by her banker son to throw her boarder out of the house for being a deadbeat and a furniture-singeing midnight smoker...
...In the male lead, Oscar Epps, though not particularly memorable, has vigor and snap, but all the other young players are just so many blobs...
...HEROINE: Yourself...
...At intervals a pink light is on everything, or a shadow stretches endless fingers touching you like the sun...
...This is my husband, Sully...
...But Brando's Kurtz was meant to be as mysterious as the moon, while the skinhead is an obvious thug with no evil resonance whatsoever...
...A kind of heroism is possible in this place and Sully possesses it...
...And the characters are remarkably like Keillor's: superficially or thoroughly hard-bitten but capable of kindness, stoic, quietly mischievous, aware of the pettiness of their town's life but disdainful of, or oblivious to, the possibilities in the larger world, holding old grudges as dearly as old friendships, sometimes unable to distinguish old grudges from friendships, steered into each other's affairs not so much by nosiness as propinquity...
...For all I know, the campus mall may be a real mall but, judging from what we see on screen, he could have used a stage set...
...Sully finally dons those chains with honor...
...Melanie Griffith has annoyed me for a decade with her baby talk and her all-too-winsome smiles, but here all her mannerisms seem absorbed by the character and she really is charming...
...And so you disappear and reappear stepping through streets like so many photographs like aerial shots from different eras...
...Instantly, the landlady summons Sully to rescue the wanderer, though her son is present, able-bodied, and reasonably wellmeaning...
...He's nobody's foot...
...The actor fully supports and "feeds" his fellow players but makes Sully a resident of a different universe, a world compounded of memories, dreams, and regrets that the other characters cannot see...
...In being both utterly unostentatious yet riveting in its tiny unpredictabilities, Newman's creation both animates and epitomizes the film, yet somehow transcends it...
...But the movie must finally stand or fall on Paul Newman's performance...
...And, by the end of the story, Sully will display much greater heroism: he will merge his life with that of the son he abandoned thirty years ago...
...hat numbly noticed, inconsequential shoe perfectly conveys the young woman's fearful state...
...A skinhead making nefarious plans is given the crescent moon lighting that Brando received in Apocalypse Now...
...Singleton's tracking shot, by contrast, is just a film-school tactic, mechanically executed and devoid of surprises And the acting...
...A pregame bacchanal...
...When the heroine slowly weaves to a microphone at a feminist rally (lots of rallies in this movie) to declare herself a rape victim, the camera's slow track forward representing her point-of-view is a steal from Passage to India: Miss Quested's reeling progress to the witness stand to testify about her alleged rape...
...Singleton has been looking at too many movies lately...
...It is Sully, the official failure, and not her son, the successful moneyman, who has the knack of setting things straight in a jiffy, of fixing, for the nonce, the perennially broken...
...The cutting in the early scenes is quick, as if Benton were balancing the uneventfulness in his material with a fast cinematic pulse, but the tempo slows down as Benton senses that we have been hooked by North Bath's people, by their crotchets, joys, and idiocies...
...You arrange them with gladiolas or bowls of silver rain and the wind flutters round like a voiceless bird...
...He should have been blasted with harsh light, not bathed in antsy-fastsy shadows...
...So Fishburne gets to pronounce "peppermint" as "pepper ment...
...He will be more stuck in the wintry muck of North Bath than ever...
...Paul Newman, the sexy wise guy of the fifties and sixties, has become the most incorporeal of actors, the great gray ghost of the silver screen...
...Quietly, through doors and locks, they return at night to you...
...Commonweal 24 February 1995: 55...
...Stuck" is the operative word for North Bath...
...Sully (Paul Newman), a half-broken-down construction worker and handyman, calls his employer-enemy "Dummy," but the epithet, though always tinged by contempt, is, after years of use, just a nickname that has stuck...
...This is what constitutes heroism in any place like North Bath, for the very day-to-day existence of the town seems improvised...
...Higher Learning, his new movie about sexual and racial tensions on campus, is not only sociology, but the most naive, flat-footed sort imaginable...
...North Bath is the sort of town where the hero, Donald "Sully" Sullivan, can sue his former boss in the afternoon and then sit down with him in the evening for a game of poker-a game soon to be joined by the plaintiffs lawyer...
...HERO: I want power...
...The supporting cast is excellent...
...A political protest...
...This movie even has some of Keillor's faults: a certain cutseyness creeps into the telling, and a tendency to wrap up a real mess with a single phone call or one heart-to-heart talk...
...Though Bruce Willis has more versatility than critics have acknowledged, he also has a tendency to smugness...
...There's no there there...
...But Singleton hasn't absorbed the classics from which he's trying to draw sustenance...
...A welcome party for freshmen...
...One is stuck there, and one becomes a stick-in-the-mud by being there...
...the son complains...
...54: 24 February 1995 Commonweal Vif When I went to John Singleton's feature debut, Boyz 'n the Hood, I was expecting sociology, but what I got was a work of art...
...Also, the abandoned females in this movie-Newman's ex-wife and his son's estranged spouse-verge on caricature, a large fault in any story that seeks to tell us that a return to family is a return to reality...
...Not only is Riefenstahl an undigested influence but so are Coppola and David Lean...
...The days may hasten to Jerusalem, or to a wife, a city herself speaking a language you hardly understand...
...I saw cheerleaders twirling, but Singleton shoots the scene as if it were Hitler's Nuremberg party congress as captured by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will...
...Sully is a profane and sometimes vulgar man, but whenever a thought takes hold of him, Newman's face becomes luminescent...
...Scorsese showed his colleagues Hitchcock's The Wrong Man before beginning Taxi Driver, and The Heiress was the model for The Age of Innocence...
...He doesn't know who he is...
...Worse, Lawrence Fishburne, one of the best American actors alive, has saddled himself with an accent meant to convey that his character is third-world born but Oxbridge-Educated...
...PRomssoR FiswauRNE: Information is power...
...But he's in bad trouble anywaythe worst sort of trouble an artist can have...
Vol. 122 • February 1995 • No. 4
