On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen From Bad to Better By Raphael Shargel Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, Robert Altaian's Dr. ? and the Women, and Spike Lee's Bamboozled were all released in the United...
...Even when Joel Grey makes a tap dancing cameo as a retired movie idol, Trier hides his footwork from us...
...They fail utterly...
...When the comedy reaches the small screen, the stars' servile posturing unexpectedly delights black and white viewers as well as most critics...
...The protocol at Selma's trial is laughable, even by the silly standard of most American courtroom dramas...
...The prosecuting attorney seems primarily interested in condemning the defendant as a Communist and—in an accusation that seems to provoke her death sentence—a selfish person...
...The chief figures of both movies are saintly, childlike women who escape into worlds of fantasy...
...In fact, he has composed a virtual remake of his last art house triumph, Breaking the Waves...
...Only Dee Dee learns what she must do to find happiness: She abandons her fiancé and rekindles her romance with lover Marilyn (Liv Tyler...
...His games with the camera seem self-defensive, a director's desire to distance himself ironically from the banality of his story...
...Dancer in the Dark is supposed to be a musical...
...When she tries to get it back, he pulls a gun on her and is shot during the ensuing struggle...
...Selma, always clenched, appears to belt out the directionless songs against her will, as if she's been possessed by the same demon that took hold of Linda Blair in The Exorcist...
...He begs Selma to finish him off...
...Both fall under the spell of disturbed men who inexplicably convince them to perform acts that violate their moral nature...
...In the course of bombarding us with images of African-Americans from old pictures and movies, he inadvertently demonstrates the ideological anachronism of his satire: All his clips date from before 1950...
...They offerrealistic, full-blooded recreations, brightly daring us to find their antics enjoyable...
...you are as certain to hit your mark as you are to make a mess...
...When Sully finally meets an independent woman, he is immediately and understandably smitten...
...Most ridiculously...
...She does, and is subsequently tried and convicted for his murder...
...T both also attempt to revive a defunct movie genre, but their ironies are far simpler than Lee's...
...Afterward she refuses to entertain a second la\vyer's readiness to reopen her case because it would mean spending the money she has saved for her son's surgery...
...One day...
...After befriending her -! landlord, a suicidal policeman named Bill (David Morse), she reveals that she is losing her eyesight and will be blind within the year...
...Blackface is one of the most resilient taboos in modern entertainment...
...it is something Douglas Sirk might have made between Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life...
...Travis' spoiled patients adore him because he gratifies their desire to be relieved of responsibility...
...Spike Lee does the same in Bamboozled, which contains some of his best moments but suffers from needless digressions and excessive length...
...He creates a show that seems bound to fail, a variety hour modeled on minstrelsy...
...Deneuve, who is worth watching in anything, is serious and gritty, but still too glamorous to be credible as an expatriate factory worker...
...If only there were some point, some idea, some thought behind all this apparent irony...
...We meet most of them prancing hypochondriacal^ in and out of his office between shopping sprees...
...The twist here is that the film portrays the cost of relying on such a figure...
...Shooting in widescreen with a handheld camera and frequent jump cuts is like firing buckshot at the side of a barn...
...and the Women, and Spike Lee's Bamboozled were all released in the United States at about the same time...
...Trier made the film in Sweden and it shows...
...He lacks either the will or the ability to temper his technical displays with Altman's control of the mise-en-scène or trust in his actors...
...The dissonant responses his minstrelsy inspires within the viewer make Bamboozled an important work...
...A magnificently filmed tornado that strikes Sully's car may blow into the film as an homage to Hunt, who starred in the silly Twister, but it also functions as an unconvincing baptism that leads to a needlessly conventional ending...
...But outside these attacks on Hemingwayesque machismo, Sully is virtually the only man in a movie populatedby very busy, very flighty, very needy women...
...Contrary to most critics, however, I think Dr...
...Altman's collaborations with Anne Rapp, who also wrote Cookie's Fortune, can be distinguished from the bulk of Altman's work because they center around an ingratiating, well-meaning male figure...
...In a few interludes, a triad of sportsmen accompany Sully on hunting trips...
...Trier's film, winner of the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, opened in New York to enormous fanfare and has had a successful run in art house theaters across the country...
...The lens picks up the figures we need to see, but its frequent burps and zigzags are enough to give us motion sickness...
...Though set in Dallas, Altman frequently alludes to the Italian master's collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni...
...Lee might have made Bamboozled more relevant by setting it in the days of minstrelsy, or at least in an early Hollywood that approved of the stereotyping he attacks...
...Bamboozled introduces us to Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), a despairing television executive and the only African-American on his studio's creative team...
...Though they cynically depict the failure of all heterosexual relationships, Altman and Rapp deserve credit for taking on such an unusual subject, and for their lovely satirical jabs at the decadent American aristocracy...
...But the movie casts only the shadow of sophistication...
...Quirky and unconventional, it bears the stamp of a satirist who, unlike Trier, can delight in the joys as well as the foolishness of his characters...
...For many long minutes, Trier lingers gratuitously over his writhing star...
...If only there were some reason to stomach this ordeal of a film...
...Racism still simmers so deeply in the American psyche, Lee is arguing, that contemporary audiences would not recognize the hit show's offensive panderings...
...As in Pennies from Heaven, these tiresome interludes may have been meant to represent an imaginative alternative to ugly realities...
...His stars are black actors wearing blackface (as some performers still did in the early 20th century...
...Richard Gere is perfect in the role of gynecologist Sully Travis...
...is not one of Altman's masterpieces, but at 75 he remains adept at pushing against the boundaries of commerce...
...In those movies the protagonist, flung into a city of females, tried and comically failed to fulfill elaborate sexual fantasies...
...Trier clothes his film in dreary blacks and browns, and photographs it in pseudodocumentary style...
...By contrast, Sully spends every day in his boutique of a medical practice touching the intimate parts of wealthy and beautiful women, but has practically no erotic interest in them...
...Despite its title, the film owes more to Fellini than Anita Loos...
...RELIEF abounds in Robert Altman's Dr...
...This newly repellent form of highbrow pornography mistakes emotional rape, the mere representation of suffering, for cinematic greatness...
...The women at home mirror those at work...
...The dancing is only marginally better than the parodic choreography in the opening...
...Sister Peggy (Laura Dern), who has lost her husband and moved into Sully's house, is an alcoholic...
...Bill spots the box in which she places her cash and takes it...
...The international accents of the cast further unhinge the film's credibility...
...The condition is hereditary, but she has not dared to tell her teenaged son what is in store for him...
...The film does take a few wayward turns, particularly toward the end...
...I can't think of any film that spends so much time dwelling on the helpless histrionics of its heroine...
...Never much interested in plot, here he resorts finally to the old elementary school technique of concluding his story with the sudden murder of his lead characters...
...The other two played briefly in commercial venues and largely disappeared...
...His case is compromised, however, by the film's lack of subtlety...
...His most effective scenes depict the production of the variety show itself, not least because Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson are so good in the leadroles...
...The star of the earlier film ministers to a husband who has been paralyzed and insists that she prostitute herself...
...Selma adores Broadway shows (but never learns the proper words), and is fortunate enough to live in the only rural town in America whose local theater screens Busby Berkeley movies to an almost empty house...
...The few who protest are Delacroix' assistant Sloan (JadaPinkett Smith), members of a militant group and, in a brief scene, A1 Sharpton and Johnnie Cochran...
...In fact, it is unlikely that a minstrel show would catch on with modern audiences...
...Daughter Connie, who works as a tour guide recreating John F. Kennedy's last mile, spends the rest of her time jealously trying to destroy the happiness of sister Dee Dee (Kate Hudson), a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader...
...Fed up with his outrageously condescending boss(MichaelRapaport) and half wishing to get himself sacked, he reinvents a plot by Mel Brooks...
...Tbreaks down that era's myth of the muscular protector...
...While chronicling the evils of minstrelsy, he has his white actors behave in such a despicably broad manner that no white in the audience will see himself reflected...
...He tries instead to embody their vision of a caregiving superman whose wise advice can lead them tenderly through changes in life and fear of disease...
...But Trier caters exclusively to the contemporary appetite for empty catharsis...
...His only opening credit superimposes the modestly sized title of the film against his name in type so huge it fills the screen...
...all fail to hit a single bird...
...But Trier's approach to these numbers is just as languid as his visual perspective in the rest of the film...
...Viewers would need hearts of stone not to be moved by the suffering countenances of its fine performers...
...The performers keep jumping ahead of the camera...
...Where Dancer in the Dark aspired to be a harshly low-tech revision of the 1950s woman's film, Dr...
...Selma saves every cent she can, hoping that the doctors at a nearby clinic will be able to correct the boy's condition...
...She fears that worry will hasten his fate...
...Dancer in the Dark fails to capture any nuance of rural American life...
...By the end of Dancer in the Dark, Selma is led to the gallows so crippled by fear that she has to be strapped to a plank...
...As her life deteriorates, she drifts into plot-stopping fantasies where she confesses in song to listeners who smile and dance to her beat what she has been incapable of articulating in the real world...
...It begins with Selma and Kathy rehearsing a scene from The Sound of Music at a local theater...
...G and Bamboozled are far more creative and original than Dancer in the Dark, which wallows in grotesque and misogynistic melodrama...
...Selma not only empties Bill's pistol into his body, she also bashes his head and torso dozens of times with a strongbox...
...Why she doesn't put her cash in the bank remains a mystery...
...Indeed, its basic story would perfectly fit Jane Wyman or Lana Turner...
...He cannot captivate a strong-willed, industrious lover...
...Blackface becomes a new fad, and audience members attend live tapings in dark makeup and lipstick...
...I can almost see the aloof Trier sadistically smiling as he methodically strips agonized souls of their dignity...
...Such techniques force us to acknowledge the director as an observer in each scene...
...Lee shares Trier's pyrotechnic, self-referential impulses...
...Sully is as much a stranger to a match of equal partners as the other figures in his life are to survival on their own...
...Moreover, the film's weaknesses notwithstanding, these scenes symbolically demonstrate the limitations black performers continue to work under...
...Sully's wife Kate (Farrah Fawcett) has been so profoundly pampered that she retreats into a childlike state and is committed to a mental institution...
...A Stella Dallas in spades, she will not ever again see the child for whom she has sacrificed her life so that he can avoidher descent into darkness...
...he could have used a far less talented dancer and we would never have caught the difference...
...Trier clearly enjoys announcing himself...
...Dancer in the Dark and Dr...
...Altman takes aim at the contemporary ineffectuality of a Cary Grant or a Kirk Douglas, and Gere is one of the few working actors who can project the ease and charm of the legendary stars...
...That is not to say that the import lacks power...
...They sport names like Mantan, Sleep 'n' Eat, Topsy, Aunt Jemima, and Lil' Nigger Jim...
...Consumed with finding extra employment, she spurns the romantic attentions of timid Jeff (Peter Storemare) and turns to friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) only at desperate moments...
...As they laugh, joke, dance, and sing while trapped behind their makeup, the viewer cannot help but recognize how this genre straitjacketed genuine talent...
...In the film, Selma, a single mother (Björk, playing a Czech émigré), takes a job as a steelworker in the Pacific g Northwest...
...Bree (Helen Hunt) becomes his lover, but his promises to protect and provide for her fall on deaf ears...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
