Summer summary
Cooper, Rand Richards
Rand Richards Cooper SUMMER SUMMARY 'Signs,' 'Greek Wedding,' 'Rain,' & more Home summer closeout reflections on movies I didn't get to talk about-and you might not have gotten to see-in recent...
...Rain is a beautiful movie, whose visual effects mirror its moral and psychological ones...
...In the film's own comic terms, it's a question of what kind of nourishment marriage is supposed to provide...
...Perched at the edge of childhood, Janey playacts at what lies ahead...
...While promised to Oki, Atuat loves Atanarjuat, and we watch their rivalry play out in a three-hour-long drama of desire, treachery, exile, and revenge, orchestrated to the whine of sled dogs and the scrump of snow underfoot, and painted with long shadows blue on the snow...
...I think I need to make a few more rules around here," her mother says in dismay...
...Rand Richards Cooper SUMMER SUMMARY 'Signs,' 'Greek Wedding,' 'Rain,' & more Home summer closeout reflections on movies I didn't get to talk about-and you might not have gotten to see-in recent months: First, the jury is still out on M. Night Shyamalan, the young filmmaker recently hailed by Newsweek as "the next Spielberg...
...It's a way of having her heartfeltness and mocking it too...
...finally flirts with Mom's boyfriend...
...This is no documentary, however...
...But I love him," Toula insists...
...Gibson dolefully endures the impromptu confessions of a teenaged pharmacy employee caught up in end-days hysteria...
...Please...
...but his notions of matrimony aren't exactly romantic...
...Shyamalan plays around with themes of alien invasion movies...
...The ending discloses a revelation that makes you reinterpret all that has come before...
...Despite its exotic locale, The Fast Runner gathers a timeless familiarity as it delves deep into the humanity of its characters...
...Newsweek's lion-ization notwithstanding, one can't help noting that while Spielberg's energies continually overflow boundaries of genre, Shyamalan has already made the same film twice...
...we're not actually on our own...
...I don't know...
...Jeffs and her photographer, John Toon, refuse to prettify adults, showing instead the desperation in their desire, the squalor in their pleasures...
...it's all geniality and warmth...
...Adapted from Nia Vardalos's one-woman show, and directed by Joel Zwick, it's a real crowd-pleaser, serving up heaping portions of immigrant-family hilarity...
...But it's hard to take seriously as a religious idea, and really it's all about a certain trick of film narrative-indeed, the same sly narrative trick that worked so niftily in Sixth Sense...
...A suburban house modeled on the Parthenon...
...Try to see it on a big screen for the full effect of its magnificent, cheerless vistas, which meld ice and sky in a horizonless prospect, highlighting the drama as if on a modernist stage...
...Set in the 1970s on a gorgeous stretch of New Zealand coastline, Rain introduces first-time actress Alicia Fulford-Wierzbic-ki as Janey, a thirteen-year-old watching her parents' party-hearty good times dissolve in unhappiness and infidelity...
...Her father (Michael Constantine) agitates endlessly for her to marry...
...one remarkable chase scene, for instance, brings to the tundra the same thrills we have seen countless times set on the streets of San Francisco or the plains of the West...
...Two antagonists, Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) and Oki (Peter-Henry Ar-natsiaq), rival one another for the same woman, Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu...
...Eat something...
...celebrations where people mime spitting on one another for good luck: there's no subtlety to Toula's family, or to the film's high-concept contrasts...
...She sips from Mom's drink, smokes Mom's cigarette...
...Is he from good family...
...Signs was noteworthy for its scary previews...
...My Big Fat Greek Wedding offers no surprises...
...Shyamalan has followed the huge success of The Sixth Sense with the pretentious tedium of Unbreakable, and now a third blockbuster venture into the supernatural-Signs, starring Mel Gibson as a widowed ex-minister whose wife's death in a car accident precipitates a loss of faith, and whose mysterious cornfield cuttings presage a global alien invasion...
...A far gloomier take on family life is on display in Christine Jeffs's Rain...
...We are all on our own"), and stray lines that vibrate with a Dada-like, throwaway absurdity: "Everyone in this house needs to calm down-we need some fruit or something...
...Marry a nice Greek boy, make babies, and feed everyone till the day we die...
...Toula's Mister Right is her parents' Mister Wrong-"a big xeno," her father moans, "with long hairs on top of his head...
...Homeric in its mythic structure, Shakespearean in its humor and its grasp of the deep obstinacy and self-pity of evil, the film arrives at the place where art, myth, and religion converge...
...Vardalos is smart enough to embroider such bromides with tassels of irony...
...Imagine Quentin Taran-tino doing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a touch of Our Town thrown in...
...Beneath the comedy lies an insight into how zealously immigrant conservatism values community as a way of knowing...
...Rain addresses the damage and danger of infidelity...
...In a lather of self-pity, Constantine rues his daughter's choice of fiance...
...a crazed army recruiter spouts manically about aliens...
...Despite the sometimes cloying cute-ness, Vardalos exudes friendly sparkle, and Lainie Kazan and Michael Constantine offer inspired comic turns as her parents...
...Ian's parents, pale wasps suffering along in stultifying boredom, writhe in agonies of embarrassment at a rowdy Greek family gathering, downing ouzo until they're blotto...
...her interest is the adolescent perspective, its mix of curiosity and judgment, and its unerring instinct for where adults are covering up, enjoying secret pleasures or hiding secret wounds...
...Don't let your past dictate who you are-but let it be part of who you become," Toula's rowdy brother advises her in a moment of uncharacteristic sincerity-then adds, "it's from Dear Abby...
...A blue pink and white baby monitor, held up to the clouds, picks up strange cosmic screeches...
...Jamming these divergent elements together lets Shyamalan keep us distanced-he won't quite let you connect with these characters, and ultimately, I don't think he's all that interested in them...
...Add the pulsing Hitchcockian music of the opening, the existential earnestness of Mel's crisis of faith ("There is no one watching out for us...
...but the heart-stopping trailers expunged a tongue-in-cheek humor that both augments and undercuts the suspense...
...Slo-mo shots of whiskey pouring into a glass, or a cigarette ash falling through air, create a dreamy mix of beauty and foreboding...
...Vardalos understands that the boundary between Us and Them encloses a realm of familiarity and thus of safety...
...raucous front-yard lamb roasts...
...Is he good boy...
...But how to make rules when you yourself are breaking them...
...At one party, boozy dancing leads to a drunken mass romp in the surf, and the flabby bodies lurching around in the moonlight is something we don't want to see...
...random details, from Gibson's daughter's habit of leaving half-emptied water glasses around, to his wife's cryptic dying words, are shown to fit...
...Finally, if you have to drive an hour to see one movie you missed this summer, let it be The Fast Runner, Zacharias Kunuk's epic tale of life above the Arctic Circle...
...I want to know the truth," she demands of them...
...The filmmakers understand their medium...
...The film leaves nicely unclear whether this kind of truth can ever set a child free...
...The story, based on Inuit folklore, follows two families suffering under a curse that sparks generations of ill will and moral mayhem...
...It is an astonishing extension and triumph of cinematic craft...
...I don't know...
...This is a strange hodgepodge of a film...
...Oh, Toula," her mother answers in consternation...
...The ensuing comedy of ethnicity and class invites us to agonize lovingly along with Toula at her family's garish tastes and over-the-top behavior...
...Jeffs offers little exploration of the parent's problems...
...Produced by an Inuit cast and crew, The Fast Runner pays close ethnographic attention to the daily details of Inuit life, from building an igloo to making a sealskin drum...
...My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of those happy indus- try successes-a small movie boosted by word of mouth into the multiplexes...
...Is he respectful...
...One day her Prince Charming walks through the door-a handsome, sensitive, artsy guy named Ian...
...Ian, of course, is not Greek...
...and that may be, well, a bad sign of things to come...
...but unlike, say, Adrian Lynes's Unfaithful, a recent Hollywood film on the same subject, it doesn't glamorize the perpetrators...
...Et cetera...
...Shyamalan gives this a metaphysical gloss: everything has a purpose and meaning...
...Nice Greek girls are supposed to do three things in life," Toula laments...
...Janey follows a thrilled instinct toward adulthood, even as she loathes where it has landed her parents...
...Varda-los plays Toula, a thirty-year-old toiling faithfully in her parents' Chicago diner...
...and that for first-generation Americans, entrusting your child to something as capricious as love is like casting her into the sea...
...There's also a curious folksy strain in Shyamalan's dialogue, like the police chief who spins country yarns and says things like "I'm gonna go back and get a cup of Edgar's coffee and try to think clear...
Vol. 129 • September 2002 • No. 15
