Concepts in Hollywood

...Koch (author of the original novel), David Williamson and Peter Weir...

...His career and marriage, to a Tammy Wynette-like singer named Dixie Scott (Betty Buckley), were destroyed many years ago by his drinking...

...The deliberately slender slice of life he offers is perfectly formed...

...The higher the concept, the briefer the pitch from writer to agent, agent to producer, producer to studio executive...

...The Third World emerges as a playground for lovers who dabble in politics and revolution...

...And watch how Beresford uses the screen door of the motel office/house as the tangible divider between Rosa Lee's domestic yearnings and Mac's never completely suppressed urge to hit the road...

...A recent example: "A gentle extraterrestrial being, stranded on Earth, is befriended by a young boy who helps him return to his native planet...

...Tender Mercies is a very small-scale film: a short story, if you will, not a novel...

...Then in a rush there's a suicide (Billy's), a savage beating (of Guy), the long-awaited uprising (at last, some action...

...Now that's what I call a "high concept"— brief and to the point...

...Andy Warhol captured the situation better 15 years ago, when he remarked that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes...

...I was so astonished when I saw Tender Mercies, I went back to see if it was as good the second time around...

...A film has a "high concept" if its plot and commercial appeal can be summarized in a single sentence for those without the time or brains to read a 10-page treatment, let alone a 110-page script—a group that includes almost everyone in the movie capital...

...And I thought part of an intelligence officer's job was to feed stories to the press...

...Its vision is acute, rather than broad...

...Her silent fears are contained behind that wire mesh as she gazes out from within the security of her home...

...Their romance is manipulated, for reasons that remain obscure, by an uncanny dwarf named Billy Kwan (portrayed by a woman named Linda Hunt...

...I can only guess that Beresford's familiarity with the Australian outback enabled him to understand how the vast countryside figures in its inhabitants' lives...

...But their life together is disrupted when Dixie performs in a nearby town and Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin), Mac and Dixie's daughter, now a young woman, pays a call...

...The film never goes beyond that single idea...

...Ah, those inscrutable Orientals...

...After all, irrationality does fall into recognizable patterns that enable neuroses and psychoses to be diagnosed...

...His precise direction and Duvall's and Harper's subtle, quietly moving performances make Tender Mercies a genuine work of art...

...Equally unexplained is the rich girl (Sandra Bern-hard, an incredibly unpleasant and unfunny comedienne) who becomes his accomplice in the kidnapping and simply disappears 10 minutes before the end...

...Anyone unfamiliar with Sukarno before seeing this movie will come away believing his chief contribution to Indonesian history was the introduction of wraparound sunglasses...

...Only, one imagines, through the persistence of Duvall and Foote, who together produced the film in the face of what must have been considerable commercial difficulties...

...Mac and Rosa Lee soon marry...

...Weaver is Jill Bryant, a jaded military attache (and possibly a spook) at the British Embassy...

...Yet these limitations are the flip side of the strengths of Horton Foote's script...

...I don't want to exaggerate its virtues...

...you'd think she'd never dealt with a reporter before...

...She was genuinely worried about his safety, you see, while he was concerned solely with his career...

...The author of the screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird, Foote is unerringly attuned to the minute rhythms of the rural Southwest...

...When Sue Anne dies in a car crash, Mac finds the strength to continue from the sustaining love of Rosa Lee and Sonny, and— though this note is not sounded too loudly—from his guarded faith in God...

...It's hard to figure out the script by C.J...

...Gibson plays Guy Hamilton, an ambitious Australian reporter...

...Their doggedness is surely among the tender mercies one must be thank ful for...

...I can imagine dollar signs flashing in front of the moguls' eyes when they heard this one: "A would-be standup comedian, frustrated by repeated rebuffs, kidnaps aTV talk-show host and demands a guest spot on the program in exchange for the release of his hostage...

...They gradually fall in love in the tentative, fumbling way of folk unaccustomed to venting their emotions, much less talking about them...

...Nor do we learn how he can afford the expensive sound equipment he uses to rehearse his shtick at home...

...Perhaps he and Scorsese, whose direction is utterly undistinguished, thought they were illustrating the lure of fame for the proles and the notion of renown that comes straight from TV and People magazine...

...Why it turned out so badly is another question...

...several summary executions, and a final race to the airport (and safety) that is daring for its shameless triteness...

...In the hands of the wrong director, Foote's script could have degenerated into small-town sentimentality...

...Or: "An out-of-work actor dons a dress to land a part on a soap opera and finds that changing clothes changes his outlook on himself and the women in his life...

...Meanwhile, Mac slowly resumes his career, writing for and singing with a local band...

...And the harder the sell from marketing department to moviegoer...

...The "high concept" of this film seems to have been merely to plop two rising stars, Mel Gibson (Gallipoli and The Road Warrior) and Sigourney Weaver (Alien) into the middle of an armed uprising in an exotic locale...

...It presents its characters' ragged edges, modest ambitions and hopes, and tragedies with true empathy...

...The year is 1965, the place is Jakarta, and the Communists are planning the coup that will eventually result in Sukarno's downfall and the takeover of Indonesia by Suharto...

...Slowly, Mac and Rosa reach a cautious accommodation: If he stays off the bottle, he can stick around and help run the place for two dollars an hour plus room and board...

...Leaving aside more complicated matters like the story's coherence (or the absence of it), these are a few of the many holes that suggest Zimmerman's complete inattention to necessary details...

...With a hook catchy and succinct enough, any project can bemade to seem "bankable" to money men uninterested in grappling with the intricacies of plot and character development...

...Billy also has a hand in local politics that is murkily symbolized by displays of native shadow puppets...

...So I don't wonder how Martin Scorsese's The King ofComedy came to be...

...every action is animated solely by the will of the screenwriter, Paul Zimmerman...

...With stunning visual accuracy, he fixes the characters in the landscape and thereby shows us how their surroundings always dwarf and color their feelings...

...There isn't much going on beneath the steamy atmosphere of The Year of Living Dangerously, either...

...So how did it ever arrive in local theaters...

...For more than an hour we are subjected to boring embassy balls, boring journalists' barroom banter, boring local color, boring love scenes...

...Yet we never discover how Rupert, who supposedly earns a meager living as a messenger, finds the time to hang around the offices of talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), pestering the receptionist and trying to peddle his routines to the program's producer...

...The drama is supposed to hinge on Jill's sense of betrayal when Guy treats her confidential warning of the impending insurrection as a hot tip for an exclusive story...

...How awful for her...

...Their hodge podge tries to pass off mud-dleheadedness as mysteriousness...

...If only the natives weren't so restless, Weir seems to say, the settlers could get on with the serious business of fooling around and accumulating money...

...Yet Bruce Beresford, the Australian who directed Breaker Morant, is somehow as honest about and sensitive to the nuances of rural American life as Foote is...

...Not exactly a plot-heavy movie, and not a profound (much less high) concept: Life must go on...

...He isn't a character, though, only a cipher in the service of the "high concept ." Nothing he does results from believable motivations...

...Their awkwardness and his reticence are magnified by the empty prairie looming, intruding into the silence between the words...

...Still, Tender Mercies isn't a simple film...

...It was...

...The pathos of Rosa Lee and Mac is expressed to a very large extent in what they don't say, and Beresford's visual scheme helps us perceive what they feel...

...The screen serves a similar purpose at the end of the film, too, as Sonny leaves her behind to play football with Mac across the road—a rite of passage, another departure of one of her men from her shelter...

...When the local band members first stop by the gas station to recruit Mac, for instance, they haltingly address him in the driveway from a distance of several paces...

...c ^?ometimes (unfortunately not often) my amazement that a film has been made reflects appreciation instead of disgust...

...But Rupert's behavior shouldn't seem totally arbitrary...

...Robert De Niro tries earnestly as Rupert Pupkin, the self-styled king...

...After trivializing the horrors of war in Gallipoli, Weir's directing turns The Year of Living Dangerously into a new low in Western attitudes toward the East, another cruel variation on the white man's burden...

...The life in question belongs to Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), a down-and-out drifter who wakes up drunk in a small-town Texas motel/gas station run by Rosa Lee Wads worth (Tess Harper), a young widow with a little boy, Sonny (Allan Hubbard...

...Although movie people are notoriously long on buzzword talk and short on substance, their meaning here is not hard to grasp...

...Screwballs do follow their own logic...

...Just as gradually and without fanfare, we learn that Mac was once a well-known country singer and songwriter (in the mold of George Jones...

...Unlike the two dreary and rambling hours of The King of Comedy...

...The two warily circle around each other, losing themselves in domestic details...

...Learning that one of his new songs has been rejected by his former manager, Mac storms out of the house, and Rosa Lee anxiously watches him drive away—to go drinking, she suspects...

...The last time I was in Hollywood, my puzzlement was resolved: Apparently all that is required to get a film off the ground is a "high concept...