Paradise Road Night Falls on Manhattan A prisoner-of-war drama shows Australian director Bruce Beresford at the top of his form Sidney Lumet, with yet another New York City thriller, reveals signs of fatigue
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva DIRECTORS AS WRITERS Beresford's 'Road' & Lumet's 'Night' the women (Glenn Close) intercepts her by saying, "Don't be absurd." Obviously Close could have uttered something like,...
...The very gorgeous-ness of nature rebukes the cruelty of mankind...
...Ron Liebman is obnoxious as the D.A., but that's not the same thing as playing an obnoxious man vividly...
...Police corruption...
...But the director refuses to end this excruciating scene on a note of mere shock...
...Now they all meet for the first time in nearly two years and some for the very last time on earth...
...Obviously Close could have uttered something like, "Don't lower yourself," but "absurd" is the mot juste...
...Only trouble is, he can't make the delivery...
...Frances McDormand amazed me with her portrayal of an ambiguous German doctor, blending compassion and steeliness as she did in Fargo but with an acrid flavor of Mitteleuropa that can't come easily to an American actress...
...Surprise...
...The best performance is by the dauntingly named Sheik Mahmud Bey who, as the killer, is like a bomb ticking quietly...
...Elizabeth Spriggs, a reliable portrayer of stuffed shirts on the British stage for three decades, delicately limns one more, but this time with a heart embedded in the stuffing...
...The rigors of the POW camp are sear-ingly presented...
...Our last sight of the execution is an extreme long shot with the camera looking down on the camp and taking in the beauty of the surrounding Sumatran landscape...
...The faces of the singing women are so intent on the precision the music needs that we feel these captives-trammeled by filth and brute force-have momentarily attained transcendence...
...Though a master of spectacle (an aerial attack on a transport ship is an inducement to fibrillation), he is really at his best using the resources of film to impinge upon the nearly inexpressible...
...The meaning of this...
...feeds it by having the murderer prosecuted by the son of one of the downed policemen...
...But beauty in this film does more than rebuke...
...Instead, he overlaps shots of one group with the other and merges the two...
...In Paradise Road, this talent is unstintingly on tap in service to the movie's theme: beauty as preservation and certification of sanity and civilization in the face of unremitting cruelty...
...Example: When Japanese officers tempt some of the starving women to prostitute themselves for food and softer living conditions, and one of them steps forward in capitulation, the unofficial leader of ble, absurd...
...There's no such compelling figure here, so the central evil is merely verbalized...
...Close, conducting her "vocal orchestra" (not a choir, as she firmly insists), seems to sculpt the lovely sounds in the air with her hands...
...This wonderful Swedish actress has so purified her diction that she doesn't come across as Swedish-American or Anglo-American or Anything-American...
...When the women are being driven from their camp to a more remote one in the face of MacArthur's advance, their convoy passes the Japanese officers' quarters, in front of which, taking lunch, are those former camp inmates who accepted the bribery of relative comfort and are now concubines...
...But though Beresford has done skillful adaptations of plays such as Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant, he has never been a photographer of talking heads...
...and revelations that fizzle or get qualified out of existence (the hero's father may be a dirty cop, then he isn't, then he is, but only a little bit dirty and for an honorable reason...
...the press is hungry and the D.A...
...Of all leading American film actresses, Glenn Close has turned out to be the best steward of her own talent, finding role after role in the last decade that forced her to take talent-stretching risks...
...This is film artistry of a high order, executed with finesse and informed by compassion...
...You would never guess it from the opening half-hour in which director Lumet is at the zenith of his powers...
...clearly the women who refused prostitution made the harder, better choice...
...Some guards, rushing up as usual to break up any assemblage, stop in their tracks as the first notes of the first concert are sounded...
...She's the Shiksa from Another Planet...
...Nevertheless, there is a ghostly sense of sisterhood here...
...But by losing this character too soon, the movie disarms itself...
...Andy Garcia is smudgy as the hero...
...They look dazed and alienated from themselves...
...The lack of any accent, of any vocal flavor whatsoever, renders Lena Olin's performance as Garcia's lover eerily empty...
...Sidney Lumet's new movie is called Night Falls on Manhattan, but it's really just Rainclouds Scudding over Gotham...
...Always we are kept aware that any moment of respite from labor-a quick nap, a brief chat-can be canceled by blows or much worse...
...He continues to write-with images-long after the dialogue stops...
...Without much help from the script, he makes it clear that his character is a humane intellectual pressed into abetting a savagery that every cell in his body knows is wrong...
...Lumet's last movie on the same subject, Q&A, was flawed but held together and was galvanized by its villain, Nick Nolte at the top of his form, who embodied and dramatized police corruption...
...This performance is an example of the actor as writer...
...All have been abused, all in some sense manhandled, and all long for escape and home...
...No moral parity is suggested...
...If it is to be regretted that some of the supporting roles are insufficiently written, at least the actresses in them make us want to know these women better...
...This enterprise could have been portrayed entirely as an example of British pluck, for so it is, but both Beresford and Close insist on much more...
...Before the film is ten minutes under way, it becomes clear that scriptwriter Beresford understands director Beresford very well, caters to his strengths, incites his visual power, and, when need be, keeps out of his way...
...Beresford writes good, flavorsome, pointed dialogue...
...Beresford can wrest horrible beauty from the most egregious sights...
...But the trial, which should have been the centerpiece of Night, is wrapped up in a few minutes of screen time and the remainder of the film is devoted to our young prosecutor unraveling the facts behind the shooting...
...And, as viewers of Black Robe know, this filmmaker has a pronounced talent for visualizing the extremes of cruelty and compassion...
...To sell one's body for the sake of preserving one's body is for her unthinkable, impossiBruce Beresford's Paradise Road is about the struggle of female prisoners-of-war- Brits, Dutch, Australians, a few Americans and Asians, and one German Jew-to stay alive and to remain civilized in a Japanese POW camp after the fall of Singapore in 1942...
...Since they cannot physically embrace, Beresford magically, cinematically, lets them mingle...
...After witnessing so much cruelty and squalor, we too drink it in...
...often he doesn't seem to know where the true climax of a scene is and so simply explodes at random...
...The arrest of a drug dealer is bungled...
...The actresses in this film, without exception, respond to Beresford's direction with the same devotion that the prisoners bring to the music...
...And what does he discover...
...You can see this acknowledged in the faces of women in both groups...
...Like Paradise Road, this is a movie written by a director who usually labors on the screenplays of others, and once again the scriptwriter knows exactly what his directorial alter ego wants...
...Become a priest...
...Meryl Streep, an even greater actress than Close, has had no such luck...
...When an Asian woman is burnt alive for illicitly obtaining quinine for the sick, her body, for one heartstopping instant, seems to plunge out from the flames like a surfer riding a wave...
...But does Beresford cross-cut from concubines to resolute captives in order to italicize the shame of the former...
...Assisted by a missionary friend who's had musical training, Close drafts several of the inmates into performing works by Elgar, Dvorak, Ravel, and other composers...
...And these discoveries unfold in a series of scenes distinguished only by dialogue that is imitation Clifford Odets ("You want clean hands...
...These brutalized and brutalizing men have been virtually smitten by beauty and are soon sitting on the ground to drink in more of the voluptuousness...
...We too are smitten...
...And though Lumet's eye for composition and action is better than ever, his instinct for choosing and guiding actors (usually his strong suit) has gone awry...
...And a special accolade must go to the Asian actor (alas, I don't have his name) who plays the camp interpreter...
...Richard Dreyfuss is perfect as a liberal gadfly lawyer, but how could Dreyfuss not be perfect in such a role...
...Close's almost too perfectly chiseled, high-cheek-boned face, a bit given to smugness in her earlier roles, here believably takes on the radiance of a woman battling hatred and death with discipline and love...
...cops are killed or wounded...
...The staging of this film is incisive and hot, the material diffuse and tepid...
...And Bruce is an example of the director as poet...
...I offer only my interpretation, for this scene has the rich ambiguity of poetry...
...One adjective encapsulates a code of honor...
...Lumet serves up such a blazing canvas of street violence and political conniving that you could swear Victor Hugo had been reincarnated as a filmmaker...
...Ian Holm struggles to some good effect with the role of Garcia's father, but he doesn't seem comfortable with his Irish-American accent, and this detracts from what comes close to being a fine performance...
Vol. 124 • June 1997 • No. 12
