On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen Last Minute Pleasures By Raphael Shargel For serious filmgoers, December is usually the kindest month. Not last winter though. Indeed, throughout 2000 we reaped such...
...To cement our understanding that they are attracted to one another, Davies has them kiss passionately...
...However, Kaufman and scenarist Doug Wright, who cleverly adapted his play for the screen, do not allow Sade or anyone else to voice the most compelling defense of his literature...
...Director Steven Soderbergh casts his net so wide he seems to be a little daunted by his multiplotted film...
...Patti LuPone, his luminous wife...
...In his early scenes with Anderson, the two simper and ogle at one another with such abandon that they might as well not be speaking the author's lightly teasing lines...
...Rush and Winslet are extraordinary, and with the exception of an inane visual rhapsody in red toward the beginning, the story is economically directed...
...and some of the addicts, who choose to help themselves by entering rehab...
...Still, the film is consistently riveting...
...The troubled relationship between Wakefield and his wife played by Amy Irving, and the camaraderie between agents Luis Guzman and Don Cheadle are memorable as well...
...Although Quills is set in early 19th-century France, Sade (Geoffrey Rush), imprisoned in an asylum, articulates such commonplaces...
...While Chicago-born Kaufman filmed his French tale with a predominantly British cast, Terence Davies, a British director, properly decided on American actors for his adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth...
...I favored the melodrama, the unspoken love of stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, which differs heavily from the passion of a younger couple...
...The industry, having thrived on John Woo's bloodfests and the Farrelly brothers' dismantlings of the female anatomy, has tried to convince the public that fictional representations of perverse acts never tempt anyone to commit them...
...GIUSEPPE TORNATORE'S Malèna and Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me also deal with the plight of independent women...
...To help the audience out, he unnecessarily photographs contrasting sequences with different film stocks, often indicating transitions by attaching an orange or a blue filter to the lens and shooting entire scenes through them...
...Charles Durning, the town's sycophantic Mayor...
...Soderbergh's despairing politics embrace family unity and vigilantism as the sole viable solutions...
...We barely hear her speak for the length of the picture...
...Even his well-regarded Unbearable Lightness of Being and Right Stuff struck me as pretentious and silly...
...Their bond is strong, but their ideas of adult propriety, particularly with regard to raising young Rudy (Rory Culkin), have diverged to the point where they can barely stand to live under the same roof...
...government can do nothing to prevent cocaine from being transported to and disseminated within this country...
...With a title borrowed from Preston Sturges andaplot loosely drawn from The Odyssey, this is the Coen brothers' sketchiest entertainment thus far...
...Davies' deep-toned style resurrects a number of cinematic traditions common to black-and-white films of the 1930s and '40s...
...It doesn't help that Eric Stoltz plays the character without Wharton's mystery or restraint...
...They believe the little community is full of folk as simple as the characters in the screenplay they are producing...
...Linney (who also has a significant role in The House of Mirth) and Ruffalo register intense personal depth, trying to live amicably together even as they cannot resist rebelling against the circumstances of fate and their working-class existence that have consumed them...
...Gillian Anderson is simply not up to the part of Lily Bart, Wharton's troubled heroine...
...It is also difficult to believe that drug czar Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) could have taken his position knowing so little about the trade in Mexico...
...By the time its credits roll, The House of Mirth has matured into a haunting experience...
...He uncovers the callous machinations of her manipulators...
...and Mexico, drawing local cops, mob bosses, the FBI, individual addicts, and the President's newly appointed drug czar into its scope...
...I hardly dare hope that I'm as wrong to dread these undertakings as I was the latest from Kaufman and Lee...
...He goes to monstrous lengths to pen one more tale of defiled virgins...
...The first, set in a small Italian town during World War II, concerns the local beauty, a solitary figure who, like Davies' heroine, falls victim to the desires and abuses of others...
...The descent of Wakefield's daughter into cocaine addiction is frightening and terrible...
...agent, who appears willing to break the law to defeat his foe...
...The best include a pair of historical films adapted from literary sources...
...Orphaned at a young age, Samantha (Laura Linney) remains grounded in a steady job and the responsibility of raising her child, while Terry (Marc Ruffalo) drifts penniless from place to place...
...It represents well-meaning law enforcers as blindly powerless...
...the gulls always fly in formation...
...If you ask Hollywood insiders about the movies that will make the biggest splashes in the months to come, they will cite potentially woeful prospects like Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes, Steven Spielberg's A.I., an attempt to realize Stanley Kubrick's final project, and the adaptation of the first Harry Potter book by Chris Columbus, director of Mrs...
...Even though his screenplay retains much of Wharton's dialogue, it clips her sentences to the root, making everyone sound like a poor imitation of Harold Pinter...
...The fullness of the novelist's vision is crushed...
...The real battle here is between two types of storytelling...
...The streets of the seaside town always sparkle...
...Finally, Traffic, the most ambitious film of the winter, binds at least four distinct plots into a coherent whole...
...Mamet thus affords himself plenty of opportunities to contrast the contemptuous cosmopolitan mentality of Los Angelinos with that of Eastern rural types...
...Shot in wide screen, this is the most visually stunning work of the season...
...Davies and Andersonmute her enterprising nature, so the film's treatment of her is more sympathetic but far less intimate than Wharton's...
...He never claims he is teaching valuable truths...
...The only figures who make headway against the traffickers are the Mexican police, who know their own turf...
...Their subsequent separation seems less like a tragedy than a foolish whim...
...Because the outcome for most of them is so bleak, I'm tempted to call Quills an R-rated treatise that fans of the Book of Virtues can love...
...His use of key lighting to illuminate Anderson's face so that it swims in the relative darkness of rooms that seem to be closing in on her, is a particularly effective metaphor...
...He gives his best overall performance to date, but the brilliant interpretations of Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona and Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski cast a long shadow...
...two bright comedies...
...The captivating supporting cast includes Alec Baldwin as a famous star with a Lolita complex...
...Wharton's heroine is the victim of a society that tortures beautiful and single penniless women...
...It rails against NAFTA for permitting Mexican truck drivers to penetrate our borders with the freedom of UPS...
...The out-of-towners are not all bastions of belligerence, nor are the Vermonters exclusively of the down home, "aw shucks" variety...
...In fact, the film portrays him as compulsively addicted to his obscene trade...
...The deepest moments of its screenplay offer nothing more than platitudes that sound like Star Wars appropriations of Eastern philosophy: "nothing in this world is real...
...Yet Quills is not only beautifully acted and technically accomplished...
...Traffic is a somber piece of work, but it is the first American film in many years to depict the ravages of our drug crises...
...It may be another 11 months before there is any good news to report from the film front...
...MORE ELABORATE albeit less resonant are two engaging comedies...
...In an era of blaring, telegraphic movie scores, the past December's successes showed welcome aural restraint...
...and two dramas that unfurl a vast canvas of interrelated plots and complex characters...
...It is hard to recognize the style of Ang Lee—who gave us the boring Sense and Sensibility and the turgid Ice Storm—in this film's amazingly fluid camerawork and lush production...
...be true to yourself...
...Sarah Jessica Parker, a sexy starlet who schemes to force the studio into raising her salary another million dollars...
...None of these releases deserves to be called a classic, but many are colorful, touching and full of surprises...
...I have never been a fan of the director...
...She can effectively laugh, cry and look awry, but she captures none of the character's fascinating contradictions...
...It tells the rather simple story of a brother who moves in with his sister and her 8-yearold son after a long period of separation...
...Many of the brothers' favorite actors, including John Turturro, John Goodman and Holly Hunter appear, but they are not in top form...
...Equally good is Catherine Zeta-Jones as the spoiled wife of a wealthy importer...
...Yeoh radiates wisdom and longing with such subtlety that her performance is worth the price of admission...
...Everyone who becomes enraptured with Sade's fiction is drawn to lewdness and ruin...
...and William H. Macy and David Paymer, a ruthless producer and director, respectively, who get to spout the script's funniest insults and threats...
...In today's Hollywood, it is de rigueur to insist that life never imitates art...
...The director offers nothing to explain Lily's revulsion...
...she suffers through his arrest and the realization that he is a high-class criminal...
...Tornatore, the winner of an Oscar in 1989 for Cinema Paradiso, again creates a romantically nostalgic vision of his protagonist's childhood...
...Ultimately, everyone participates in an act of magnanimousness that is disturbing because it helps to both erase the memory of their hideous behavior during the War and to unite them as a community...
...the beach remains perennially clean, despite the hero's constantly littering it with trash...
...I'm not sure Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will stay with me...
...The Marquis acknowledges that his work has no literary merit...
...No one emerges as fully realized...
...George Clooney, in the lead, embodies a type that Coen aficionados will find familiar—a fast talking, comical hick...
...Sexual situations in his more recent films have so often resembled the frustrated pipe dreams of a prep school boy that when I heard his latest was about the last days of the Marquis de Sade, I expected an incoherent narrative dotted withpointless disrobings and bottom slappings...
...Madeleine, Coulmier, the others in their circle, and even the lunatics are inspired to echo the excesses of his wanton fictions...
...There is generally a two and a half year wait between their films, so it is always disappointing when these talented craftsmen are not up to par...
...can nevertheless be recommended for its many funny moments and a wonderful soundtrack of old-time country tunes...
...Perhaps Davies' biggest hurdle was finding a palatable way to represent the sinister Simon Rosedale, who dogs Lily at every turn...
...He insists the pornographic scrawlings he is famous for simply describe natural corporeal urges...
...The grotesque twist at the very end may remind you of a Roger Corman horror movie or Kaufman's own remake ofInvasion of the Body Snatchers, but it does not mar this arresting picture...
...Wharton describes him as a "plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type' who rises in society because he manifests all the sneaky instincts of his "race.' Anthony LaPaglia's impersonation dodges any charge of anti-Semitism and surfaces as a handsome, livelier, more interesting suitor than Seldon...
...The drug parties thrown by wealthy high school teens are only a stone's throw from bits inBeverly Hills 90210...
...The plot concerns a group of Hollywood movie people who descend upon a small town in Vermont to make a film...
...Happily, there are no false steps in the remarkable You Can Count on Me...
...For the first time in their career the brothers have created a predictable storyline...
...two works about women trying to make it on their own...
...The movie is a picaresque tracking of the wanderings of three convicts who escape from a Mississippi chain gang in 1937...
...Erika Christensen is marvelous as the willing victim of her sex-starved boyfriend...
...Curiously, at the very end, Tornatore prefers to devolve into cliche, but Malèna succeeds almost in spite of itself...
...Julia Stiles, the current object of his affection...
...For all his fantasizing, the narrator is too self-obsessed...
...Not surprisingly, it has been touted for the extensive fighting sequences that imitate the techniques of Hong Kong action cinema...
...But the action of the film belies their theories...
...The second engaging comedy is ? Brother, Where Art Thou...
...And Malèna herself, friendless and alone, becomes the paramour to the Nazi soldiers who eventually occupy the town...
...Doubtfire, Stepmom and Adventures in Babysitting...
...So drink deeply from today's oasis...
...The portrayals are so vivid, I found myself worrying about the protagonists as if they were people I knew personally...
...The film disturbingly insists that the U.S...
...As Malèna, Monica Bellucci is the perfect love goddess, reminiscent of the gorgeous stars of Italy's cinematic golden age...
...State and Main is the latest David Mamet film entry, and it is his lightest, most assured work to date...
...This time around, just as the award givers began to polish their statuettes, a group of films actually worthy of accolade popped into theaters and should be playing throughout the country well into 2001...
...Charles Durning plays the Governor...
...Unfortunately, his selections leave a good deal to be desired...
...With good reason...
...But since the director tells her story from the perspective of a worshipful teenaged boy, a peeping torn too cowardly to help or even speak to her, he puts us at a great distance from her...
...This character piece is so impeccably well done that it may be the best film of the year...
...Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), the priest in charge of the madhouse, agrees that the Marquis' compositions can be therapeutic...
...Indeed, throughout 2000 we reaped such a blighted crop of pictures that I was preparing to call the year that just ended the worst in the history of the cinema...
...Quills is so engrossing, one almost doesn't care that it has little to do with historical reality...
...The film's glossiness grates against its narrative, which lacks a single sympathetic character...
...Some scenes fail to convince...
...When her husband and father die, she is forced into the company of lecherous men and turns finally to prostitution...
...She says that by reading racy prose, she is able to restrict her savage impulses to her fantasy life...
...Madeleine (Kate Winslet), the beautiful laundress who smuggles his writings to a publisher, echoes another modern saw...
...After an awkward beginning, his picture builds powerfully, especially once Stoltz' appearances become less frequent and Lily falls into financial distress and moral despair...
...That dubious distinction, I am thankful to report, remains with 1999...
...Quills and The House of Mirth used music very sparingly, and You Can Count on Mepunctuated its action with modern country songs (Loretta Lynn seemed practically a secondary character...
...Regrettably, that brand of jokey combat, dismissing every imaginable law of physics, is quite jarring in a tale that asks us to take seriously a twisting plot of separated lovers, irrepressible adolescents and long-awaited revenge...
...In the novel, Lily—beautiful, unmarried and in her late 20s—is desperate to find a husband who can satisfy her expensive tastes...
...But at the minimum it is good, empty entertainment...
...Culkin, Samantha's comically repressed boss (Matthew Broderick) and the rest of the supporting cast are superb...
...In the movie, Lily's rejection of lover Lawrence Seiden, a man of modest fortune, is inexplicable...
...The town's other figures are depicted satirically...
...One of the pleasures of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, too, is the cello playing by soloist Yo-Yo Ma...
...Dealing with the war on narcotics, it crosses the border of the U.S...
...Brother, Wltere Art Thou...
...it is also a wonderfully complicated treatment of the problems of censorship...
...But he avoids the usual banalities...
...Philip Kaufman's Quills caught me off guard...
...after his turn as the Mayor in State and Main, one wonders whether he will now be typecast as an obsequious official...
...a renegade U.S...
...The closing voiceover offers little awareness of this...
...This Chinese epic is, like Quills, a remarkable effort by a director I had dismissed...
...Davies does manage to credibly present some aspects of Lily's plight...
...On the contrary, the cleverest creature is native Ann Black (Rebecca Pidgeon), who gives crucial aid to screenwriter Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman) when he finds himself embroiled in the moral crisis that inevitably surfaces in a Mamet script...
Vol. 84 • January 2001 • No. 1
