DOWN EASY STREET
Seitz, Michael H.
MOVIES Down easy street Michael H.Seitz viewing of the American mov-IB ies released toward the year's ¦ end might convince the filmgoer with an awareness of history that we are, indeed, bound for...
...But while he derives from these sources a vision of the good life, it is a vision which, for reasons quite unknown to him, he is never able to realize...
...While awaiting the Big Score, he does his best, taking advantage of whatever credit he is offered, to surround himself with those appurtenances which are the sine qua non of lower-middle-class respectability...
...Variety's list of the "50 Top Grossing Films" thus brings depressing news to partisans of film realism...
...It is as though the director placed little faith in the camera's capacity to reveal and record the world on which it is trained...
...And Demme makes it easy for the viewer to accept the improbable by refusing to endow the Melvin-Howard encounter with dramatic emphasis...
...Ordinary People deals with more potentially volatile material—the emotional failures and incapacities of the American family—but it only occasionally manages to transcend the level of soap opera psychodrama...
...The sequence, as a result, unfolds so naturally that the question of its likelihood becomes irrelevant...
...the mother, Beth (Mary Tyler Moore), spends her time shopping or playing golf...
...He can't get along with his peers or his parents...
...Not long ago, shortly after the death of his older brother in a sailing accident, he had attempted suicide...
...As Dr...
...Melvin & Howard fashions an amusing and penetrating vision of the American Dream from seemingly unpromising material: the enigma of the so-called "Mormon will" of Howard Hughes...
...The camera then pans across the scrubbed faces of the white high school chorus...
...Despite the initial appearances of order, this is a family, it seems, with a problem—and the problem seems to be Conrad...
...Mother Beth, who is utterly terrified by the prospect of change and of relinquishing emotional control, packs her faun suede luggage and departs for an extended vacation...
...Melvin & Howard is not organized around tightly constructed dramatic situations...
...There are, however, two films released this fall—Jonathan Demme's Michael H. Seitz teaches film at Rutgers University and reviews films regularly for The Progressive...
...Just about everything that we are given to see (and hear) in this film is charged with dramatic significance, which makes it stagey, theatrical...
...Just as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the "product" currently coming out of Hollywood is, for the most part, escapist entertainment, with little bearing on the way Americans actually live their lives—movies, in short, quite thoroughly removed from contemporary social and cultural realities...
...Current offerings also include historical drama (The Elephant Man), nostalgic romance (Somewhere in Time), comic fantasy (Oh God—Book II), movies about making movies (Stardust Memories, The Stunt Man), teen exploitation flicks (Times Square), and a large number of porno films...
...The film's opening views of this suburban sanctuary would make any real estate agent proud...
...In desperation, Conrad takes up his father's offer to try psychotherapy (twice weekly, at the ordinary price of $50 a session...
...They live in a home which cost, probably, upwards of $300,000, in an exclusive residential community along the Chicago area's North Shore...
...By way of compensation, however, the film concludes with a receding crane shot of reunited father and son, tearfully embracing each other on the doorstep of their now motherless-and-wifeless home...
...And like everyone else, they are susceptible to emotional trauma...
...Although the notoriety of America's most eccentric billionaire (wonderfully portrayed by Jason Ro-bards) may attract many viewers to this film, they will find that the film is not about Howard, but about Melvin (Paul LeMat...
...Her cramped fastidiousness is indicated by a close-up of three neatly rolled dinner napkins in a drawer, each in its meticulously polished silver napkin ring...
...One boy has dark rings under his eyes...
...and the adolescent son, Conrad (Timothy Hut-ton), goes to an immaculate high school where all the students are white and clean-scrubbed...
...The mother, who seeks only to preserve appearances and walks around with a perpetual rictus smile, is a monster of control...
...He has recently returned from a stay in a mental hospital, but is unable to adjust to normal routines: He avoids the country club and no longer derives any enjoyment from practicing with the swimming team...
...The target, if there is one, is not Melvin but a system which holds out huge promises to the Melvins of America and then reneges on fulfillment...
...The father, Calvin (Donald Sutherland), is a well-to-do tax attorney...
...Melvin & Howard and Robert Redford's Ordinary People—which are distinguished by the effort they make to represent the world we live in with some degree of authenticity...
...And while Redford is attentive to physical detail in portraying the emotionally cramped world of his troubled family, the details are revealed in such a way that they do not seem natural elements of the dramatic context but artistic contrivances...
...rather, it permits us to view its hapless protagonist Melvin as he attempts to cope with the ordinary activities of life: as a consumer of popular culture, as a worker and family breadwinner, as a husband, and as a father...
...The derelict says his name is Howard Hughes...
...MOVIES Down easy street Michael H.Seitz viewing of the American mov-IB ies released toward the year's ¦ end might convince the filmgoer with an awareness of history that we are, indeed, bound for hard times...
...Rather than attempt to investigate the validity of Melvin's claim, the film simply accepts it as a working hypothesis...
...As in his earlier Handle with Care, the director purchases our belief through loving observation of the physical realities of his characters' unstable lives...
...Melvin doesn't believe him, but he befriends the man, drives him to Las Vegas, and gives him the last bit of change in his pocket...
...This is the story which Melvin Dummar later offered to the courts, when asked why he should have been named in Hughes's will...
...Berger might have said, they lack rachmanas...
...The title of the film, one cannot but note, is more than a little misleading...
...In the end, thanks to his shrink, Conrad is salvaged...
...He had similar difficulty holding on to his wife (Mary Steenburgen), a sometime go-go girl who has dreamed of being a French interpreter, and who leaves him twice in the course of the film...
...Such an approach may work successfully in less realistic film genres, but it saps Ordinary People of all authenticity...
...The will named hard-luck gas station operator Melvin Dummar as the principal heir to Hughes's fortune—to the tune of $156 million...
...The film begins (and ends) with a framing sequence representing a chance encounter between Melvin and a derelict whom he picks up one night alongside a road in the Nevada desert...
...Melvin's world is built upon the values and dreams propagated by television game shows (he's a devoted follower of "Easy Street") and consumer-oriented advertising...
...Sometime worker in a magnesium plant, sometime milkman, sometime gas station operator, Melvin is a perennial optimist who is also a perennial loser...
...Obviously, something is wrong...
...In other hands the material of this film might have been treated satirically, and Melvin with snide condescension...
...It's to the film's credit that it does not opt here for a facile resolution of the unresolvable...
...But he is continually unable to meet payments, and his cherished accessories are repeatedly repossessed...
...The father is well-intentioned, but really doesn't want to know what is going on...
...The contrivance is heightened by Redford's constant manipulation of viewer attention—with jarring close-ups, rack focusing (pulling the focus from one plane to another), obtrusive framing, and so on...
...Hollywood, it is true, has never had much concern for the texture of reality, but what little concern there has been seems to vary in inverse ratio to the national sense of well-being...
...As Conrad begins to make some progress under the guidance of his extraordinarily perceptive Jewish therapist, it becomes obvious that it is not Conrad who is the problem, but the emotional barrenness and psychological vacuum at the heart of the upper-middle-class WASP family...
...He sulks alone in his room at night...
...From such an unlikely premise one would perhaps expect a narrative developed in the direction of social fantasy, but Demme is more an attentive observer than a yarn spinner, and he endows his film with a rare sense of the nap and fabric of life...
...But Demme portrays his protagonist with benign amusement and tenderness...
...But in most other respects this family is rather exceptional...
...It is autumn, and the trees in the spacious yards around spacious houses are in full color...
...All appears to be in order: a WASP paradise...
...The family whose interactions make up this drama is ordinary only in the sense that its members are subject to the intrusive workings of fate, just as are all other human beings...
...As in the 1930s, the horror film, which some critics regard as a thermometer of national anxiety, is flourishing, as witness Hotel Hell, Fade to Black, Terror Train, and a re-release of John Carpenter's stylish Halloween...
...The boy is Conrad, and it soon becomes clear that he is unusually nervous...
Vol. 45 • January 1981 • No. 1
