Three That Don't Play

...hello," she replies...

...Just thinking of the time and money squandered on Shepard's half-baked ideas about bonding and homelessness makes me weep...

...And the whole movie seems faked, the painstaking authenticity of the locations in Lebanon and Israel notwithstanding...

...Brought before a mock tribunal of Kurtz and his assistants, Charlie (Diane Keaton) is stripped of her pretensions and confronted with the fact that her political and other beliefs are cheap and absurd...

...Maybe film is too impatient a medium to handle Shepard's peculiarly languid sense of timing...

...Still, he has managed to construct a recognizable oeuvre around this limited material...

...The two of them don't find true happiness, of course— once you've lost it, you've lost it—yet Jane does weepily reclaim her son...

...After enticing the girl, Joseph abducts her for interrogation...

...in the course of two hours I couldn't bring myself to believe that Keaton had not been miscast...

...Alas, Falling in Love is afraid of actually posing the dilemma and settles for two hours of evasion instead...

...Keaton has never struck me as terribly dazzled by the opposite sex...

...It does have some good performances, some translucently beautiful shots of dust and the gifted Ry Cood-er' s soundtrack, which almost succeeds at weaving together the holes drop-stitched into its fabric...

...Seconds later we see the man, his wife and their child in a freeze-frame shot in the kitchen, on the verge of being blown to bits...

...Frank and Molly collide trying to wedge their way out of the Rizzoli bookstore in the middle of the Christmas rush...

...Her two cuddly young sons move her to gruff affection: "Whose idea was it to have children...

...And yet, it is easy to see why Falling in Love must have been appealing on paper: Its theme of denied passion probably was seen as evoking more interest in our age of ceaseless libidinal yielding than in the 1945 Brief Encounter, whose plot the makers of Falling in Love unabashedly lifted...

...I may be less generous...

...he asks...

...Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) doesn't utter a word in the first half hour of the movie—not to the semi-Good Samaritan who medicates his wounds and gives him shelter or to his brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), who comes all the way from Los Angeles to fetch him...

...The assumptions are quietly moneyed: Everyone in this movie has obscure exhibition posters decorating the walls of their homes, and when Molly frantically tries on the entire contents of her closet before a date with Frank, all her clothes look as if they had been purchased last week—there is not an outmoded style or a worn piece of fabric in the lot...

...I don't want to give away the ending, but here's a hint: There will always be a Rizzoli...

...Klaus Kinski's psychopathic smile, for instance, plausibly depicts the ruthless-ness of Kurtz but not his humanity or dedication...

...Give any halfway-conscious theatergoer a bare-bulbed room, a couple locked in mute combat and lighting that simulates the flat prairie sun, and he or she probably will name the playwright...

...Nothing else is right, either...

...Nor is there much dialogue...

...On Christmas morning Ann receives a shiny coffee-table volume on sailing, and Brian opens his present to find an equally shiny coffee-table book on gardening...

...As Dorothy Parker said of the young Katharine Hepburn's affective range, the emotions that preoccupy him run the gamut from A to B. "Attachment," "Loss" and "The Frontier" (literal and metaphorical) are the themes that sound, like gongs, in every Shepard play...

...Thus we see her stomping around in long skirts, trying to emote in an accent that Ibsen would have winced at...

...Harry Dean Stanton, one of those loose-jointed actors beloved of trendy film goers, seems perfectly suited to Shepard's purposes: Inglorious and stumbling, he gives Travis an edge of dull impenetrability...

...I can imagine the potentates at Paramount reading the script and saying, "There isn't a lot of action, but if we could just get Streep and De Niro...

...Molly suffers a nervous breakdown after her father's death, and the two resolve to part...

...Hi ya," he says...

...Sure, I caught on quickly enough to the less-than-pellucid logic of the Shakespearean submotif—"the play's the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of Israeli or Palestinian...

...The Little Drummer Girl resembles an armchair traveler's conception of the Mideast: It is neither accurate enough to hold our attention as a document, nor resonant enough to serve as a morality tale...

...she apologizes sweetly to the diplomat and pauses to chat up his young son...

...ThewomanFrank is destined to mumble his way into love with is, like him, well-heeled and happily married...

...In this movie, trussed up in her padded shoulders and baggy trousers, Keaton looks too old and too odd to command the sort of romantic / sexual presence her role demands...

...Charlie is supposed to be a youngish American, the unshining star of a provincial English repertory company...

...This sort of movie requires lugubrious, grainy treatment: the British approach, Michael Caine reluctantly seeing through Senta Berger's duplicity in The Quiller Memorandum...

...The movie takes its own sweet time telling us how Travis resolves his confusion about this most basic of distinctions —between the image of reality (Paris, Texas) and the reality of images (Paris, Texas, again...

...the photo realistic styling is not unalluring, and in contrast to the rest of the film it is consistent...

...I couldn't see why well-adjusted Hunter would leave the cozy room he had in the home of Uncle Walt and his wife to go on the cockamamie Holy Quest Shepard cooked up, but then there is a lot in the movie I didn't understand...

...It goes on for two and a half very long hours, and while not quite deadly it is moribund...

...So they got Streep and De Niro —and there still isn't any action...

...The handling of all this seems oddly luxurious, not to mention expensive: Joseph is forced to cool his heels on a beach in Greece, where Charlie is shooting a television commercial, and he seems in no rush to quit his sun-tanning...

...What it doesn't need is George Roy Hill's vigorous, unthoughtful direction or the volatile, nervous acting of Klaus Kinski and Diane Keaton...

...The Little Drummer Girl seems to concern itself more with the psychology of individual egos and the poetics of warmongering than with the drama of realpolitik...

...Do you work in the city...

...Now Shepard, with the collaboration of German director Wim Wenders and additional writing by L. M. Kit Carson, has transferred this stark atmosphere to the screen in Paris, Texas...

...In a university audience listening to a Palestinian spiel, she puts some dilettantish radical point to the speaker, and immediately I thought, "Come off it, Diane...

...Adorable, right...

...In the ensuing confusion the gifts they have chosen for their respective spouses get mixed up...

...Maybe the kinetics of the stage show to better advantage the primal bursts of expression—"I need you," "don't leave me"—he imposes on his otherwise taciturn characters...

...Frank's wife, Ann (Jane Kaczmarek), is a hearty gardening type given to making such un-lyrical statements as "Nobody's in love anymore...

...As if this weren't burden enough, she is also supposed to be an inadvertent femme fa-tale...

...Perhaps in the book Charlie is selfconsciously sexy...

...His mother, it seems, was born in the town, though his father liked to tell people she was from Paris, France...

...De Niro gets to flash that uneasy goofy smile of his, and Streep gets to glow and duck behind her fall of shiny blonde hair...

...The screenplay must also have struck the producers as a promising vehicle for Two Hot Stars...

...The cinematography is relentlessly Pop: Everything—from the deserted bar Travis first stumbles upon to the hotel room where Jane waits to see her son—is campily overstated, recalling Roy Lichtenstein's renderings of the tear-sodden heroines of True Confessions comics...

...The fact is she couldn't possibly be a hooker, especially an unchic hooker...

...Shattered, evidently, by the breakup of his marriage to Jane (Nastassia Kin-ski), Travis abandoned his son and went on the road in search of Paris, Texas...

...The Little Drummer Girl recounts the efforts of a crack Israeli intelligence team to track down the PLO leader responsible for these killings...

...The interesting thing is that we never really learn this figure's identity...

...This does more to establish the human cost of terrorism than the rest of the film...

...At least the art director, Kate Altman, clearly had a sustained notion of what she wanted...

...When he does start talking, his opening comments don't have nearly the import of, say, Hellen Keller's tremulous articulation of the word "water," but he does allude indirectly to the circumstances that led him to disappear mysteriously four years earlier...

...En route to the climax he is reunited with his seven-year-old boy, Hunter (Hunter Carson, L. M. Kit Carson's son) and the two drive cross-country in search of the lost Jane...

...The main attractions on screen are a big bilious locomotive disgorging puffs of steam and Meryl Streep pulling out her usual bag of technical tricks...

...They don't know this at the beginning...

...Made to feel inauthentic both personally and professionally, she agrees to pose as the vengeful lover of Khalil's younger brother, whom the Israelis kill once they are sure they will have Charlie's cooperation...

...How can anyone be expected to give a damn—much less, care deeply—about a movie whose main characters are a train and a bookstore...

...nonetheless, she works hard at it...

...Initially, Travis seems dim-witted...

...They commence by sending an agent, Joseph (Yorgo Voyagis), a dashing Mediterranean type, to pose as a Palestinian revolutionary and thereby pique the interest of a muddleheaded left-wing actress they want to use as bait to hook Khalil...

...To find the wily and furtive Khalil (Sami Frey), Kurtz' group dreams up a strange—yea, improbable —scheme...

...can't believe The Little Drummer Girl would have seemed much better to me had I read the reputedly brilliant John Le Carre novel, but not having read it certainly didn't help...

...That is how Pauline Kael explained it...

...At first, Falling in Love emits an air of competence...

...A pretty blonde pretends to be the vacationing housekeeper' s friend...

...And a train...

...She is subsequently whisked off to a Palestinian training camp, where she marches around, saluting and clicking her rifle in Annie Hall-type battle fatigues...

...The real point, in this profoundly blurry movie, is that Frank is rich—nice rich, not a robber baron or anything you might hold against him...

...His sandals are muddy, and he is too tired to speak...

...Only this time there is no rabbit in the hat, merely those honed features working themselves to death in search of a character to fasten themselves on...

...Molly's husband, Brian (David Clennon), is a tight-spirited young doctor apparently depleted of emotion by his wife's miscarriage—or perhaps it's her constant sighing that's done him in...

...He blinks mournfully in reply to his brother's questions, and he indicates his discomfort with the rudiments of socialized life by refusing to fly back to Walt's house or to ride in a strange car...

...He promptly beds her, enamored of the same invisible quality of seduction that topples other men, and the Israelis get their quarry...

...everything ultimately recedes into a message of silence and space...

...Molly, a free-lance illustrator, comes into the city to show a few doodles but mainly to visit her sick father...

...Whoever thought of placing the camera behind her, focusing on the graceful sweep of her back inside a scooped-out dress, should be commended: Kinski's back is a sight to behold, better than most people's fronts...

...Travis eventually discovers his estranged wife in Texas, working behind mirrors as a whore in a remarkably literary version of a peep show—no sex, all talk...

...The clearest indication of the movie's soulessness is the way its characters keep wishing one another "Merry Christmas"—"It's Christmas," "Jesus Christ," "Yeah, that's what I mean" —as though the phrase had a hidden profundity...

...Or maybe the truth is that Sam Shepard is a fashionable hoax, best appreciated alongside Jessica Lange on the pages of glossy magazines, a testament to lean and arrogant beauty...

...you might say that he is beyond speech, vocalizing being a debatable virtue in Shepard's universe...

...Paris, Texas opens, tellingly enough, with a sweeping view of a barren Southwestern landscape...

...The movie's starting point is the bombing of an Israeli consul's residence in West Germany...

...she is a relatively neutered actress, and that, combined with her shy good looks coming at you as something of a surprise, may explain her appeal...

...Weeks later, Frank and Molly meet again on the train and take their first baby steps toward conversation...

...Falling in Love, in its subtle signaling, is worse than innocuous...

...Until one year later...

...I was rarely able to make head or tail of the plot, and to the extent that I did it seemed comical...

...Frank (Robert De Niro) and Molly (Meryl Streep) are two Westchester residents who make the same commute to Manhattan...

...Hunter Carson is so effortlessly engaging that you pity his getting trapped in all this hip artifice...

...Suddenly, a human figure attired in a pin-stripe suit and a red baseball cap intrudes upon the untranquil stillness...

...Pretending to extol virtue triumphant, it really celebrates the triumph of material goods, the right places to eat and the right stores to shop at...

...The name of the town was not simply concocted as a catchy title, a la Butter-field 8. It is a real place that Travis wants to find, and he has a photograph of the house he hopes to buy...

...I suppose you could call it an existential thriller about the imperatives of Good and Evil, rather than their effects...

...But the original could count on the sort of audience identification the new version will not enjoy, and without that no sparks can be struck...

...That last is the best bit of dialogue in the movie...

...You see, he is a bearded, deep-looking fellow, a wanderer...

...She is almost affectedly unfeminine, hardly the sort of woman that a macho Arab or Israeli would fall for...

...Led by Kurtz (Klaus Kinski), the counterterrorist operation appears to have greater interest in the esthetics of maneuver than in actual results...

...his pretty home in Dobbs Ferry and the chichi restaurants he chooses to have lunch in suggest an elegant architect...

...Oh, we do, in a way...

...Nastassia Kinski's Texas accent blinks on and off like a faulty light, and her bleached orange hair looks inconceivably garish atop her elegant face...

...As the minutes creep along, Frank and Molly eventually try, and fail, to make love in a lair that belongs to Frank's philandering friend (Harvey Keitel...

...Although she makes a desperate attempt to see Frank before he leaves for a new job in Houston, the two of them lose contact...

...But nothing can fully disguise the nullity at the heart of Shepard's vision...

...No, I'm married," she says...

...You can understand, can't you, why Travis' difficulties began long, long ago...

...Even so, it isn't the awakening of moral sensibilities or Mideast politics that is at issue here...

...According to the press notes, Frank is something called an architectural engineer, a confusing hybrid profession—people who have seen this movie seem to be evenly divided on which half he is—that enables the screenwriter to depict him inconsistently: Rustling blueprints and wearing a hard hat in his rickety little office at a building site, Frank seems to be a man of the people...

...Papers on his person reveal that he is called Travis...

...Um, yeah, hi...

...My problems with The Little Drummer Girl began very early into the film —the moment Charlie appears...

...The reviews I've read suggest that, initially, many critics had the same reaction and decided Keaton had intentionally provoked their resistance...

...Today that sexual fidelity is regarded as more curious than proper— a film on the subject would have to be doubly urgent...

...When the doctor in Brief Encounter decided not to have an adulterous romance with the housewife he had been meeting, the outcome must have seemed sincere even if the viewer did not consider it implacably right...

...Writer Michael Cristofer and director Ulu Grosbard have created a seamless pastel fantasy of romance that takes place inside a pastel fantasy of life...

...Several birds hop on and off a telephone pole beneath a wide blue sky...

...it takes a while to realize that competence balanced on a void is its essence...

...Whatever the case, Paris, Texas doesn't play...

...the audience, however, does: We see them rushing separately and sleepily to catch the train as it stops at their neighboring stations...

...Nothing much happens...

...When she proves her mettle by not flinching as the Israeli agent covering her is killed in front of her nose, she is at last brought to Khalil...