On Screen

...he good news is that Jack Nicholson is back After squandering his talents on inconsequential parts in such forgettable films as The Fortune, Corn' South, The Missouri Breaks and The Shining, he attacks the role of Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice with all the gusto of a gourmet served haute cuisine after years of nothing but junk food The bad news is that the film is a terribly misconceived and mishandled adaptation of James Cain's famous 1934 novel Except for Nicholson's performance, there are so many things wrong that one scarcely knows whether to blame the director, Bob Rafelson (whose previous work includes Five Easy Pieces), the cinematographer, Sven Nykvist (Ingmar Bergman's longtime collaborator), the screenwriter, David Mamet (whose stage plays include American Buffalo), or the leading lady, Jessica Lange (King Kong's girlfriend), in the role of Cora Papa-dakis, Frank's lover and the wife of Nick, played by John Cohcos, who meets his untimely death at the hands ot the other two The easiest faults to enumerate are Langc's Trapped by the fear ot poveity in a Depression-era marriage of convenience to an immigrant California truck-stop owner, Cora is supposed to be a beast of barely suppressed desires that burst from her in passionate declarations and impulsive actions When Frank shows up at the lunch counter one day, her antennae start quivering, although she doesn't miss a beat at the griddle This role of a wife hungry for adultery and seductive enough to entice a man to murder made a star out of Lana Turner in the 1946 Postman But Lange lacks even Turner's limited acting skills To begin with, she simply does not know how to use her body to signal Cora's frustrated longings In one scene, with Nick gone for the dav, Cora wanders into Frank's room, ravenous for sex yet guilt-ridden As she awkwardly toys with a cigarette, instead of getting a sense ot the character s uneasiness we are aware that the actress simplv does not know what else to do with her hands Matters are worse when Lange opens her mouth With hei thin, high \oice she sounds like a little girl, an impression reinforced b\ her buck teeth and bee-stung lips Despite a \oluptuous figure, she is about as erotic as the ironing board at which Cora seems to spend an inordinate amount of time Bv contrast, Turner's first appearance on screen, clad in virginal white, was a shocking and perfect vision of the '40's femmefatale Throughout the new version, Lange slumps about, her marcelled hair flopping over her eyes, so that she looks like a lewd Barbie doll whose dreams of debauchery spring not from within her debased soul but from offscreen somewhere In fairness to Lange, it must be admitted that a great deal of the problem is Mamet's screenplay Because he fails to make a plausible, let alone internally consistent, character out of Cora, her behavior is completely arbitrary At one point Cora and Frank decide to run away together to Chicago, independently, both think better of this and return separately to the truck stop before Nick discovers their absence In response to Frank's questioning, Cora defends her decision with the feeble excuse that Nick "would of found us anyway " Yet in her very next speech, although nothing significant has happened in the interim, Cora turns to Nick and says out of the blue, "I got to have you I'm tired of what's right and wrong " Such lllogic plagues the entire script, which is simultaneously infunatingh elliptical and crashingly obvious One night, following much hasty, unexplained preparation (a waiting automobile, a conveniently placed ladder), Frank and Cora decide to murder Nick while he is in the upstairs shower Their clumsv assault leaves a certainlv unconscious and possibly dead Nick bleeding in the bathroom Several scenes pass betore we learn that the\ botched the iob So when a doctor at the hospital Nick was taken to tells Cora more tests will ha\c tobeconducted.wedon iknow whether he is trying to help Nick sta\ ah\e oi speaking ot an autopss to discover the cause ol death \ subsequent interlude ol caretree adulten tort ora and Frank is bi ought lo a mwenous hall b\ her announcement that she doesn't want to make lo\ e, e\ en though it is iheu " last night For what9 Are they splitting up9 Is Frank leaving9 No, in the next scene it turns out that Nick has returned from the hospital more or less recovered from a split skull There he is, dancing around at a welcome-home party full of Greeks who suddenly popped up in California just to hear him declare, in all his good-hearted stupidity, that Frank saved his life by getting him to the hospital in time This announcement to a whole roomful of friendly witnesses is such a thumb-in-the-eye plot device that we can hardly be surprised when it comes m handy to Frank's defense after he and Cora go on trial for actually murdering Nick later in the film Sven Nykvist adds to the confusions created by Mamet's compressed script For the first hour of The Postman Al-waysRings Twice I thought I was watch-lngaBergmanfilm Thecmematograp-er has the interior of the Twin Oaks cafe/filling station resemble a cabin in the woods, the characters are carefully half-lit, and the resulting dramatic shadows make them look as though they were in an angst-laden existential drama rather than a Depression-era crime melodrama The exteriors are all strangely murky and green and damp during the first half of the film, too, never mind that the truck stop is supposed to be on an isolated back road, not in another universe But the characters also act like aliens, thanks to Bob Rafelson Frank and Cora's discussion about right and wrong occurs during a pouring rainstorm as she is taking down her laundry from an outside line And when the couple first make love, if you can call it that, Rafelson stages their coupling like some kind of bizarre wrestling match With no apparent provocation, Frank suddenly forces Cora down on top of the kitchen table, where she had been calmly rolling dough True to that most laughable of fictional conventions, interminable grappling slowly melts into desire "Wait a minute," Cora gasps, and then sweeps all the dough and bread onto the floor before inviting him with her legs apart, "Come on " The sex proceeds in an even stranger fashion, with closeups of much awkward groping Finally the consummation comes amid grunts and groans and complicated changes in position, all uncomfortably executed on the small table top The amount of time Rafelson devotes to this is astonishing, especially since virtually no skin is shown and the whole sequence is about as sensual as a scrimmage between two linemen Surely Rafelson did not intend it to be erotic, raising the question of what he was up to The answer, in case you haven'tguess-ed, is that the bond between Cora and Frank is sadomasochistic When they finally do succeed in murdering Nick, for example, they decide to beat each other up to make it appear that they were victims as well of the auto accident that has supposedly killed him Standing on a hillside near the smashed car containing Nick's body, Cora whacks Frank with a liquor bottle and he slaps her around—just enough to cause her to he back in the brambles, spread her legs and hike up her skirt in invitation Bleeding, and grunting once more, they celebrate the success of their joint endeavor T JL~ hese episodes may be lifted straight out of the novel, but Rafelson and Mamet do not seem to recognize that reading about violent sex is one thing, while watching it is another The first, no matter how crudely, engages our imagination and thus invites our complicity, the second, conjuring up images of two rutting animals, only repels us Ironically, Rafelson has undermined his own enterprise by exploiting the "freedom" offered filmmakers today He appears to have thought that since sadomasochism was what the story was all about, he ought to really show it In the process he destroyed the brooding erotic tension that is needed to keep the plot in motion, and, as the 1946 The Postman Always Rings Twice clearly demonstrated, depends on not being explicit The censorship that limited the activities of Lana Turner's Cora and John Garfield's Frank actually intensified the rich texture of innuendo and physical suggestiveness In the new Postman, once we have seen the two lovers coupling on the kitchen table—fairly early in the movie—most of the tension required to advance the story has dissipated Throughout this muddled remake, however, Jack Nicholson acts with an intensity and assurance that I almost thought he was no longer capable of While age has made his face puffier, his eyelids heavier, his hair thinner, somehow all this contributes to a look of sullen desperation that fits the character of the drifter But the actor is not simply coasting on easy physicality, m The Postman Always Rings Twice there is none of the frantic rubbery mugging and exaggerated gestures that have made so many of his recent performances so disappointing Nicholson builds the character of Frank through the accretion of small, revealing details Notice how, five minutes into the film, he swipes a pack of cigarettes from Nick with the grace you would expect from a character who has spent years hustling Unlike Lange, he always knows exactly what to do with his body Of course, given Mamet's writing and Rafelson's directing, even Nicholson cannot render Frank wholly plausible Still, his character—a man who gets in over his head when his emotions overcome his good sense—is inherently more believable than that of the irresistible woman driven by passion who only seems to exist on screen and in pulp fiction Moreover, it is a genuine pleasure to watch an actor who knows how to bring to life a broad range of feelings—from lust to fear (when acop almost stumbles on the first murder attempt), to hypocritical modesty (when Nick thanks Frank for saving his life), to sheer joy (when he learns that Cora is pregnant with his child) If you must see this new version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, go for Nicholson's performance Butdon'texpectmuchfromthe rest of the film...