On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen GENDER AND GENRE BENDING By Raphael Shargel Halfway Through G.I. Jane, Master Chief John Urgayle (Viggo Mortensen) interrogates Lieutenant Jordan O'Neil (Demi Moore) in a rather...
...In G.I...
...Both movies center on enigmatic female figures trying to get back at their absent husbands by flirting with strange men...
...Her fellow trainees look like male models, and they have so little personality that they are barely distinguishable from one another...
...Caring little for overall consistency, he aims for a minute-by-minute emotional jolt...
...Francine and Gordon, the film's moral voices, at first support his activities but later accuse him of turning against his people, of encouraging black-onblack crime...
...We did not need further evidence that only John Cassavetes could successfully make a John Cassavetes film...
...The whites who do similar work in his territory, however, are all beneath contempt...
...One particularly gratuitous scene shows the Master Chief quizzing O'Neil while she stands naked in the shower...
...Still, the movie allows her to triumph only through physical humiliation in a torture scene photographed with graphic, leering gusto...
...In fact, the men's military experiences appear rather exciting...
...In an intense war game the recruits are playing, the Master Chief is acting the role of a vicious POW camp captain who has imprisoned O'Neil and her unit...
...Here is a revisionism that is much more interesting than Scott's...
...Johnson convinces Francine that his racket employs thousands of black workers who have been impoverished by the Depression...
...Nevertheless, at the end of this ghastly sequence members of the audience cheer...
...The most arresting scene comes early, when black gangster Bub Hewlett (Clarence Williams III) strides down a Harlem street and claims the neighborhood for his boss, the Jewish Dutch Schultz (Tim Roth...
...Garcia is an intelligent and understated Luciano...
...When they make fun of him because he buys cheap suits, we are expected to take their disdain at face value...
...Not since 1971, the year of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, has a mainstream movie dwelt so long over the spectacle of a male torturing a female...
...Jane characters give O'Neil their support, withdraw it for no good reason, then inexplicably give it again...
...But at the end of the film, after he and his new coalition have made a truce with Luciano and executed Foley and Schultz, he enters a church...
...But here it is...
...And both, after a deliberately paced first half that covers a few days, leap abruptly forward in time...
...Later in the film we learn that the Irish police officer, Captain Foley (Richard Bradford), is working for Italian mobster Lucky Luciano (Andy Garcia...
...But the Master Chief has other motives for beating the Lieutenant so brutally...
...Jane Scott prefers to depict his heroine training out of uniform, in tight, revealing underclothes...
...The film is based ona screenplay John abandoned in the 1970s that bears strong superficial resemblances to his masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence...
...AFRESH LOOK at a familiar genre is proposed as well by Hoodlum...
...She's So Lovely director Nick Cassavetes pays homage to his father, John, the legendary filmmaker who died in 1989...
...The twist here is that the central character is a woman, the first to train as a Navy SEAL...
...John Cassavetes, capable of arresting shots, just as often settled for fuzzy focus, sloppy composition and continuity errors...
...In contrast with the low-key, well-spoken Italian and black gangsters, he has a thick New York accent, wolfs down apples and pastrami sandwiches with loud sucking relish, talks dirty, gestures wildly, and often loses his temper...
...Luciano and Johnson continually refer to Schultz by his real name, Arthur Flegenheimer, spitting it out as if it were a curse...
...during a fierce argument with Francine, he throws her Bible at her...
...Hoodlum doesn't simply depict 1930s New York as a place of racial and ethnic diversity...
...Yet his erratic, unconventional style perfectly suited the anger and pain of his characters and situations...
...his camera work is professional but sterile...
...Foley and Schultz are so cartoonishly evil that we can hardly blame Johnson and his gang for wanting to kill them...
...When O'Neil tries to fight back, the Master Chief, infuriated, pummels her with such force that she can hardly stand...
...it suggests that loyalties in a mixed community do not always conform to the culture or color line...
...Finally, the movie abandons all the plot threads it has strewn about by sending its troops into war with Libya...
...As far back as 1979, Alien, the second film he made, was touted as the first to feature a female action hero, though at its climax a 10-foot extraterrestrial insect with two nasty sets of jaws chased a scantily clad Sigourney Weaver around the interior of her spaceship...
...Both include a character who suffers a mental breakdown, is institutionalized, and is released without being fully rehabilitated...
...Though St...
...The result is a dully gorgeous, antiseptic work...
...They seem to think their roles require them to do no more than effectively mimic a New York accent or convincingly lose their tempers...
...Duke's heavy-handed symbolism implies that Johnson has become a true crusader, has murdered hi s way into sainthood...
...Scott learned his craft making television commercials, and his films also cater to audiences with a short attention span...
...Except when he is tormenting O'Neil, Scott has little interest in making us feel the trainees' suffering...
...Jane, Master Chief John Urgayle (Viggo Mortensen) interrogates Lieutenant Jordan O'Neil (Demi Moore) in a rather unconventional fashion...
...His face-off with O'Neil is a battle of wills, a last attempt at getting her to resign her commission...
...Where A Woman Under the Influence was an exquisite blend of comedy and tragedy, satire and realism...
...Jane has the subtlety and panache of a department store catalogue: Its gauzy tinges make every room seem freshly upholstered, every body toned and glistening, every face devoid of blemish...
...Since Scott favors heavily filtered lenses, G.I...
...Supposedly wise, poetic, authoritarian, and ruthless, Johnson remains a cipher throughout, even as he undergoes apparently radical personality transformations...
...Jane, is skilled at such two-faced compliments to feminism...
...Johnson spurns Christian teaching from his very first scene...
...But despite its very real pluses, Hoodlum proves to be as crass and meanspirited as the worst of its characters...
...He stands under a stained-glass cross and looks up at it in awe...
...Jane, a movie about military training, is the latest entry in a genre that includes popular patriotic hits like An Officer and A Gentleman and Top Gun...
...Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, John Travolta, and others in the big-name cast have little grasp of the people they are playing...
...Director Nick is not much help...
...His relatively recent Thelma and Louise depicted the victimization of women in a male world by picturing a legion of panting men single-mindedly devoted to raping and killing its sexy protagonists...
...She's So Lovely is jarring and incomprehensible...
...Clair, Schultz protests that he cannot be the devil because he does not have horns...
...He believes that women have no business in combat...
...He then walks out into the open air and a soothing, healing rain falls on his face...
...Part of the problem is that Duke and Brancato undercut Fishburne's talents by refusing to explore Johnson's heart and mind...
...By paying lip service to the idea of a strong female protagonist, the director gives himself license to indulge in high-toned exploitation...
...She's So Lovely, despite a few nice moments, is primarily interesting as an exercise in how conventional Hollywood moviemaking can destroy an intriguing screenplay...
...Clair is in the same ruthless business, she replies, "But you do the devil's work...
...If the film's narrative is meant as an analogy to life in the contemporary inner city, if it is proposing a solution to today's drug traffic and racial conflicts, its message is corrosive indeed...
...In addition to Williams, Laurence Fishbume as the gang leader Bumpy Johnson, Chi McBride as his best friend Illinois Gordon, Vanessa Williams as his lover Francine, and Cicely Tyson as the racketeer Stephanie St...
...Clair all give gripping performances...
...Duke does not ask us to forget that Johnson is a criminal, but he does insist that some criminal activities, including murderous revenge, are justifiable and actually noble...
...Director Bill Duke and screenwriter Chris Brancato populate their movie with distinctive individuals who bring out the heterogeneity of urban life, particularly in the black community...
...Ridley Scott, the director of G.I...
...In G.I...
...Dutch Schultz is an even more loathsome stereotype...
...While Johnson's methods do not seem to have changed, the filmmakers want us to see him as an epic figure, akin perhaps to The Godfather's Michael Corleone, whose mob involvement costs him his soul...
...He ties her hands behind her back, slaps her repeatedly across the face and rams her body through a door...
...Foley is a despicable stock figure, a fat, blond sadist who is constantly touting his superiority to the blacks...
...Her refusal to back down, punctuated by an obscenity she bellows out at the end of the sequence, cements the film's conviction that women ought to perform military service on apar with men...
...Combat in Libya, shot in a frenzied manner that combines extensive Steadicam closeups and quick, jarring zooms, is about as threatening as a music video...
...In the scheme of the film, uplifting the race, even within a criminal mob, even at the cost of lives, is a sacred act...
...Brimming with sarcasm, he remarks, "I didn't realize you people had such rhythm.'- At a meeting between Schultz and St...
...The usually dependable Anne Bancroft, miscast as a Texas Senator, stands out only because she rants more convincingly than anyone else...
...But where The Godfather despaired that gangland activities created ever widening circles of violence, Hoodlum allows its hero to redeem himself through actions more barbarous than the ones he has already committed...
...Amazing Grace" plays in the background...
...We catch the Master Chief reading J. M. Coetzee, Pablo Neruda and D. H. Lawrence, but his taste for strong male writers hardly explains the intensity of his misogyny...
...At one point Johnson catches Schultz ineptly attempting to dance...
...Ultimately, Hoodlum maintains that the racial coalitions portrayed at its beginning are oppressive horrors and should never be tolerated...
...Scott cannot bear to make anything look ugly, not even ugliness...
...Johnson's chief nemeses are an Irishman and a Jew who are not allowed a jot of integrity...
Vol. 80 • September 1997 • No. 15
