On Screen
BROMWICH, DAVID
On Screen TERROR IN THE JUNGLE BY DAVID BROMWICH "THIS MOVIE makes me want to go out and..." With most films, the sentence is easy to complete. Speed, a lightweight thriller of urban terrorism...
...It is the wicked usurper-lion, Uncle Scar, a silky Oxonian relativist, who announces "the dawning of a new era in which lion and hyena come together...
...Point taken...
...Go it,' I almost cried aloud, 'and go it stronger!'" The sense of exhilarated welcome...
...It is about the threat of atrocity and the pressure to respond to it, almost impersonally...
...The songs of The Lion King are a saccharine pastiche of the Fifth Dimension and Elton John...
...It doesn't matter, it's in the past...
...Speed catches this habit of mind in an audience-pleasing moment when the bus leaps across a 50-foot gap in a freeway overpass and a passenger shouts, in the true manic spirit of the disaster binge, "Yes...
...I'm so hungry, I just gotta have a wildebeest...
...Ouch...
...This terrorist is simply a man with a grievance who knows how to make bombs and wants some money fast...
...does not compute...
...Jeremy Irons, the voice of Scar, suggests an ease in the inner reaches of lolling, languid cruelty, as accomplished as if he had spent 20 years in a cave with James Mason...
...I preferred a quieter moment, when the woman driving the bus weeps with shame at her own gladness in being still alive, after a passenger has been killed trying to get off, and Reeves comforts her: "We all feel that way...
...We're way out of control...
...And Mufasa explains: "We are all connected in the Great Circle of Life...
...Speed, a lightweight thriller of urban terrorism directed by Jan de Bont, short-circuits every question more abstract than "Where will this end...
...The plot has the sort of excess one associates with farce, three hijackings laid end-to-end: an elevator, a bus, and a subway train...
...The grownup note in Ford—the suggestion of someone smart enough to be crooked if he wanted to—isn't available from Reeves...
...An unsavory influence on the lion child, the hyenas are countered with pluck by the king's counselor, a bird named Zazu who carries on the Jiminy Cricket tradition of sage sexagenarian airborne sidekick...
...6) a dramatic focus that keeps the maniac far from the center of action and never flirts with his point of view...
...The wart-hog, Pumbaa, a cross between Mrs...
...The social contract of cooperative suffering requires that we appear as spectators of the very horrors we are casualties of...
...The real music is in the words of Mufasa spoken by James Earl Jones—the irresistible father, for good or evil, in this genre of movie?whose inflections prove him deeply versed in the superego...
...The solution is to become very small and hope the inevitable explosion will somehow spare oneself...
...2) plenty of low-angle shots from the rear of the bus forward, or from wheel-level forward as the bus plows ahead...
...Audiences have talked about the second because it lasts longest, and because a subway in L.A...
...3) music that presses, but not too hard...
...After the elevator blows up, and before the train charges through a street-level barrier, a bomb is rigged to go off when the bus does less than 50 miles per hour...
...Not only does nothing else succeed, nothing else is possible...
...The emotion is well known to everyone, yet I can't recall ever seeing it in a movie...
...The message is delivered succinctly by Mufasa, the good king of the lions, who tells his son and heir Simba: "Everything you see exists in a delicate balance...
...So many disasters must be dealt with instantly, and so many have, somewhere behind them now, technology whose workings ordinary people can never hope to penetrate...
...Why'd you do that...
...Speed, which skims vulgarity but never sinks, has something of the same quality...
...4) rapid cuts between the problem-solving at headquarters and on-the-scene maneuvers by Reeves on the bus...
...where this time...
...For half an hour or so the film now climbs to a pitch of genuine invention...
...From his home in Palo Alto, James' response to the first distant shake took him by surprise...
...some of the means employed are: (1) an early, apparently pointless, smooth and disorienting 360-degree shot, circling around two cops as they get out of their car...
...There's more to see than can ever be seen,/ More to do than can ever be done"?though we are spared a set-piece as drawn-out and insipid as "A Whole New World" in Aladdin...
...The maniac is typecast as Dennis Hopper...
...It will be a "nice little job" to renew the pridelands, as one character ruefully observes...
...But with Simba's guilt expiated, his uncle cashiered at a single stroke, and the hyenas back where they belong, nature is ready to be reborn...
...Here, he curbs the sadistic overtones, which could only weight the story with an unmeant earnestness...
...a hefty chorus of zebras and giraffes agree, and it would be churlish to dissent from this harmony, coming as it does from the silent middle of the food chain...
...The brainwork doesn't matter...
...and of the victims: "Well, our turn was bound to come...
...He has shown his face in parts like this—in Dead Ringers and Reversal of Fortune—but too seldom and too sparingly given the resonance of his gift...
...Quite as matter-of-fact is the assumption that the proper temper for meeting disaster is extreme passiveness...
...The film betrays a touching assent to the popular Tory creed that any disruption in the order of things will draw down violence, sudden plague and the wide waste of anarchy...
...All the creatures know this...
...Why are we dangling at the bottom of the food chain...
...That pressure—a potent element in a normal fantasy of the way modern life could go wrong—the film renders very effectively...
...With Speed, I suspect the hidden answer is never think, ever again...
...Modest and suggestive as it is, Speed sent me back to William James' essay on "Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake" of San Francisco...
...yielded later to a pleasure in the way a human society improvised itself out of the chaos...
...But he is convincing at the outer edge of the required somatic exertions: a scene in which he cracks with frustration, then pulls himself together as he sees the faces of the people who depend on him...
...What will strike anyone who watches Speed is how reduced our admirable "readiness" has become...
...Keanu Reeves, as the bomb squad cop who saves the bus, is not yet an actor, but in Speed his upper arms and generous smile are exactly what is wanted, and he will surely be the successor to Harrison Ford in action pictures of the coming years...
...You gotta put your behind in your past," he sweetly admonishes Simba, and the prairie dog Timon cuts in with exasperated tenderness: "No no no no...
...Much of this readiness was American, much of it Californian," says James...
...They are the most finely drawn of the animals...
...Yet Speed is not about the man who commits atrocious deeds...
...They bring him to a region of lush forests and waterfalls, and nurture him to adolescence in their—relatively—lotus-eating way of life, subsisting on insects and slugs ("slimy yet satisfying"), and teaching postmodern apothegms ("The past doesn't matter...
...In the older Disney pictures, the songs were occasionally memorable and the lyrics were permitted to be clever—more so at times than the script...
...After a lost-ark allusion for the groundlings, the plot turns around with Zen economy as Simba, still intractable, mutters "The past doesn't matter," and the baboon cracks him on the skull with a walking-stick...
...Real cute and watchable," the person beside me murmured...
...Mufasa is set up by Scar to be killed in a stampede, and young Simba, convinced that one of his practice-roars caused the disaster, retreats to the parched earth outside the pridelands...
...alongside the regular elevators in large buildings, or the puzzle of mapped but unbuilt stretches of freeway...
...These day-at-the-office narratives of urban terror, meanwhile, are adapting us to something well worth not getting adapted to...
...The last omission lends the film an unexpected civility—the quality partly squandered by In the Line of Fire, a comparable thriller with more human depth, which took on a nasty edge from John Malkovich's seductive portrait of the assassin...
...The rest is editing, done with conspicuous virtuosity and no cheating...
...He has played versions of the same part memorably, from Blue Velvet to Red Rock West, and now stands every moment at the brink of nonstop mugging...
...The predictable reaction of the police becomes: "Oh, another...
...Or rather, how cramped are its few heroic occasions...
...As Mufasa warns, you just don't do that with hyenas...
...The Lion King, an ecological-paternalist romance from Disney, is witty and generous in unexpected ways, and registers the influence of (in no particular order) Kipling, Caravaggio, United Airlines, Sergio Leone, Leni Riefenstahl, and several generations of Disney pictures...
...They accept as a fact of experience the presence in our society of a high proportion of maniacs...
...The terms 'awful,' 'dreadful,' fell often enough from people's lips, but always with a sort of abstract meaning, and with a face that seemed to admire the vastness of the catastrophe as much as it bewailed its cuttingness...
...The land of Simba's father has changed, under the hyena-rule of Scar and his minions, from a Great Circle of Life to a heap of charred stumps and rotting bones...
...The city's odd and galvanizing rhythms—of avenue crossed by street and park, and freeway passing into freeway?give the film its natural pace...
...It is a curious development, and symptomatic of the climate in moviemaking today, that both films show the crime being solved and the killer traced by brain work, yet both close out as shootem-ups...
...People cared for each other spontaneously, but they also took charge as specialists, without having to be appointed...
...My only regret was that the last fight of Simba and Scar is done in slow motion, in the manner of football highlights and Sam Peckinpah—an evasion on more than one count, since a battle of wits, as well as claws, has been promised that the lions never perform...
...At rest, they annoy each other with miscellaneous dietary grouses and cravings...
...This movie makes me want to go out and...
...We're way out of control...
...With their dark eyes, sharp ears and small, mean heads that almost touch the ground when they snuffle and run, these creatures recall young Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, who bellied into the same crazed skids of laughter...
...The pastoral interlude closes with a baboon-trickster discovering Simba in exile and reminding him of his duties with the aid of history, anecdote, riddle, and a shamanistic invocation of his father...
...cargo elevators that operate (for whom...
...Zazu is crafty and reserved—he, too, knows his place in the Great Circle—but he urges preemptive action against Scar: "He'd make a very handsome throw-rug...
...Zazu is glimpsed pining away in a cage—actually a ribcage made from an antelope carcass—singing "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen...
...Why don't you lie down before you hurt yourself...
...Malaprop and Ernest Borgnine in one of his benigner roles, turns out a daily quota of worthy but twisted platitudes...
...5) attention to the uncanny properties of public places, e.g...
...This has now altered in what seems a premeditated decision by the studio...
...How it will end is clear all along, from the tone of distinctly circumscribed mayhem...
...Simba is rescued by an oafish, good-natured warthog and his master, the African equivalent of a prairie dog...
Vol. 77 • July 1994 • No. 7
