Love Crazed
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen LOVE CRAZED by robert asahina 10, the joke is on George (Dudley Moore), a middle-aged bachelor whose libido triumphs over his good sense when he catches a fleeting glimpse of Jenny (Bo...
...Otherwise, he just snivels a lot and wears a hangdog expression, failing to make believable George's ultimate rejection of Jenny...
...I know that Maria's hasty marriage during the blackest days of World War II, the disappearance and presumed death of her soldier husband, her affair with a black American GI by whom she becomes pregnant and whom she murders when her husband suddenly reappears, her husband's going to prison in her place, and her cold-blooded rise to power as the lover, assistant and finally successor to an industrial magnate are supposed to be allegorical of the Wirt-schaftswunder of postwar Germany...
...He later falls into a swimming pool, tumbles down a mountainside, splashes into the ocean, and burns his feet on the hot sands of a Mexican beach...
...In addition, she has eliminated Beattie's worst cliche: the charting of the characters' spiritual progress by quoting or alluding to popular music...
...the moments of brilliant film making (such as the opening sequence) mix too freely with the hackneyed (such as the nightclub sequence, when Maria first meets her GI lover...
...According to this reading, Maria's obsessive devotion to her husband, which supposedly lasts through the many years she goes without seeing him and is not compromised by her other involvements, represents the crazy spirit that animated the incredible sacrifices required of the German people (especially women), first in war and then in peace...
...Watching Heard, unlike reading Beattie, I could believe that Charles' romantic obsession owes its strength and its very existence to larger cultural forces of which he is only dimly aware...
...Apparently Beattie thinks that the artist's task is to record pure, undifferentiated experience...
...Unfortunately, her face is so smoothly expressionless that we soon get the feeling it has been molded out of wax, and this combined with her dead eyes disillusions us long before it does George...
...To be fair, part of the problem is Edwards' script...
...As a result, Head Over Heels has been unjustly and unfavorably compared to Annie Hall, a much inferior film...
...Some of my German friends have suggested that Maria embodies two contradictory but coexisting national traits: romantic idealism and hard-headed pragmatism...
...This is especially surprising because the novel is so excruciatingly dull and lifeless...
...When George invites himself to Jenny's wedding, for instance, he hides behind some flowers and is stung by a bee...
...Heard plays Charles, a disaffected civil servant who has loved and lost Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), an unhappily married woman who has returned to the husband (Mark Met calf) she had once left for Charles...
...And so on...
...The passive-aggressive type who suffers mightily, yet quietly gets his own way, is hardly one of my favorite characters, but Heard persuaded me that Charles is worthy of my consideration...
...Thin is okay.' "Sam cuts several thin pieces and puts them on Charles' plate...
...Hurt is terribly miscast as Laura...
...In Chilly Scenes of Winter, these mannerisms take the form of simple declarative sentences, in the present tense, piled one upon another to describe the most mundane-And therefore meaningful, presumably, to Beattie-events...
...an occasional boulder-sized symbol to make a dot-sized point...
...Still, if we hadn't heard a psychiatrist in the movie explain that George was experiencing male menopause, we'd never have known it from Moore's music-hall antics...
...A more serious problem is Edwards' transparently commercial attempt to have it both ways-simultaneously pass off 10 as a fantasy for dirty old men and a satire of their lecherous attitudes...
...Silver's direction is not as successful as her writing...
...Chief among these is her having Heard address the camera, a device that quickly becomes as tiresome as the Annie Hall-like fantasy sequences that she has also used...
...Ten songs are listed on the acknowledgements page of the book...
...And on...
...Andrew Sarris claims that the movie is a "masterpiece...
...Without such an ideal, all their hard work would have been for nought...
...without the work, the ideal would have been unrealizable...
...Beattie has gained a cult following for her New Yorker short stories, and Chilly Scenes of H inter typifies that magazine's fictional style, accurately characterized by Marvin Mud-rick as "a manner deliberately sleek and casual to imply dizzying unplumb-ed depths...
...On Screen LOVE CRAZED by robert asahina 10, the joke is on George (Dudley Moore), a middle-aged bachelor whose libido triumphs over his good sense when he catches a fleeting glimpse of Jenny (Bo Derek)-An "11" on a scale of 1-10...
...Yet the film strikes me as nothing more and nothing less than a confusingly scripted, reasonably well acted, intelligently directed, high-level soap opera...
...Andrews is good as Sam, and Webber, a supporting actor in countless second-rate television shows and movies, is unexpectedly even better as Hugh...
...John Heard gives a much more rounded performance as an obsessed lover in Head Over Heels, adapted and directed by Joan Micklin Silver from Ann Beattie's novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter...
...Despite its banal plot, the movie has a great deal of charm and truth in its characterizations...
...Although she is going to her wedding when he first sees her, George is undeterred...
...Meanwhile, Silver has done little to restrain Gloria Grahame, who delivers a hysterical, Shelley-Winters-style performance as Charles' nutty mother...
...Indeed, the drama is so arbitrary and the characters are so ill-motivated (the murder and its aftermath, for example, are completely unbelievable) that any explanation is likely to appear free-floating...
...When we finally see Jenny, as George does, in all her naked splendor, Edwards is clearly appealing to the same instincts he lampoons moments later when she begins to mouth the youthful inanities that supposedly extinguish George's lust once and for all...
...She has given form to the very raw material of the novel and pruned the weedy expanses of meaningless dialogue...
...My only problem with that interpretation is that it is ad hoc-jerry-rigged, if you will...
...Dee Wallace is much more appealing as Mary, the one-night stand George casually mistreats during his pursuit of Jenny...
...when George and Jenny finally crawl into bed together, their coitus is interruplus in the most contrived fashion...
...a predilection for childlike whimsy, wry irony, nostalgia, life's bitter mystery...
...For seven more pages...
...A little boy sitting on top of the next washing machine drops his toy into the water and Charles has to fish it out for him...
...he is willing to abandon his successful songwriting career, jeopardize his relationship with his long-suffering girlfriend Sam (Julie Andrews), and eventually to risk his life, just to meet her...
...Vincent Canby says that it is an "epic comedy," a laughable description...
...But when he finally gets to know Jenny, in the most intimate way, George realizes that his dream was preferable to the reality...
...By contrast, the cultural context of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun, though clear enough to me, never quite connects with the story...
...An extremely talented actress, she does all that she can with the part but simply looks too plain to account for Charles' obsession...
...He also has four teeth filled in one of the least funny dentist chair sequences I have ever seen on film...
...she writes what could be called a roman verite almost as if she has a screen adaptation in mind...
...Yet those good moments clearly indicate that Fassbinder is worth watching, and Hanna Schygulla delivers an appropriately deadpan performance in the title role...
...Thanks,' Charles says...
...The idea of a comedy about the trials and tribulations of male menopause is rich in comic possibilities...
...It won't cut thick,' he says...
...And there are some fine satirical portraits in 10, particularly of Sam and of George's lyricist, Hugh (Robert Webber), a homosexual whose adjustment to middle age is even more painful than George's...
...On the other hand, Silver has elicited very convincing performances from the supporting players, from Peter Reigert as Sam, and especially from Heard...
...In fact, he deftly sketches in the broader dimensions of the character that reviewers have claimed exist in Beattie's book and that I never sensed until I saw them on screen...
...His sheets are the only ones without flowers...
...And I don't think we can attribute this to Fassbinder's "irony" or "ambiguity...
...Derek, who has the exaggerated and elongated attributes of a centerfold model, initially seems an appropriate object of George's desire...
...His Charles is one of the spiritually disenfranchised children of the '60s whose disaffection in the '70s takes the form of a generalized feeling of superiority-to his life style, job and colleagues at work-disguised as ironic conformity...
...Moore, however, is less than convincing...
...for about half the movie, he wanders around with a grotesquely swollen nose...
...Indeed, both the character and the actress are so intelligent and attractive that George's rejection, meant to be unthinking and callous, is unrealistic...
...A dinner-table conversation between Charles and his best friend, Sam, proceeds as follows: "'Thick?' Sam says...
...Beattie's command of dialogue is scarcely better...
...Yeah...
...Regrettably, writer-director Blake Edwards undermines a potentially subtle comedy of manners with crude slapstick...
...For another two pages...
...For example: "He is the only man at the laundromat...
...Nothing about the movie convinced me that his intentions were complex rather than simply confused...
...Thankfully, Silver's screenplay has none of Beattie's preciosity...
...a pretext for the writer's sensibility (which is likely to seem feminine because displays of sensibility have been considered a woman's prerogative...
...I defy him to tell me what it is about...
...She has studded the movie with annoying tics that she seems to have picked up from Woody Allen...
...Please.' "Sam begins to carve...
...Lima beans?' "'Please.'" And so on...
...The Marriage of Maria Braun does have a bizarre, picaresque quality, but there is not one thing funny about it, apart from the various critics' reactions...
...the title comes from an album by the New Lost City Ramblers...
...His emotional displays are limited to the hysteria he expresses during all those slapstick gags...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 22
