Stoney End
Geier, Thom
Movies Stoney End By Thom Geier In the 1992 Hollywood satire The Player, a studio bigwig played by Tim Robbins endures a pitch from an auteur wannabe for a prospective work titled Habeas Corpus,...
...Just as her appeals are about to expire and her termination appears imminent, along comes Rick Hayes (Rob Morrow), a dissolute law-school graduate who has spent the last couple of years burning up his trust fund on world travel...
...The only thing missing is Bruce Willis toting a tommy-gun and blasting some life into the thing...
...It's a hilarious scene, inviting viewers to cluck to themselves: You know, that's just the sort of thing Hollywood would do...
...Just how has his character been transformed by his experience with Cindy and his brief foray into the real workaday world...
...They have taken an issue treated so intelligently by Tim Robbins (as director-writer, not actor) just a few months ago in Dead Man Walking and turned it into Hollywood boilerplate-Dead Woman Limping...
...Movies Stoney End By Thom Geier In the 1992 Hollywood satire The Player, a studio bigwig played by Tim Robbins endures a pitch from an auteur wannabe for a prospective work titled Habeas Corpus, about a woman on death row and the district attorney who falls in love with her but is unable to save her...
...The movie's premise, aside from being laughable, significantly gums up the works dramatically as well...
...And I wonder what the rest of that film would be like...
...Bruce Willis machine-guns his way into the gas chamber to unstrap inmate Julia Roberts just as she gets the juice...
...He falls in love, though we're thankfully spared any hanky-panky in the pokey...
...The Player concludes with a three-minute sequence from the completed film, in which D.A...
...She shuns TV, takes art classes by correspondence, and helps keep her fellow inmates in generally good spirits...
...That film featured Susan Sarandon as a nun who counsels convicted murderer Sean Penn to accept responsibility for his actions (and simultaneously accepts responsibility for the pain her prison ministry brings to the families of his victims...
...Wonder no more...
...The pitch represents a bid to stake a place for serious art in mainstream cinema...
...By presenting Cindy as a "reformed" woman, we are deprived of anything approaching character development...
...These black-and-white sequences suggest Stone's public defender blew it yet again: It appears Cindy was so strung out on crack that she not only committed two brutal murders but turned herself into a ghastly-looking brunette...
...In fact, aside from some cussin' and outbursts of bad attitude, one might mistake her prison for some kind of adult summer camp...
...One of the victims was the son of a heavy-hitting donor to the state governor, a connection that helps earn Cindy a death sentence...
...With an Oscar nomination already in her pocketbook, Stone here takes another stab at Serious Acting...
...Last Dance stars Sharon Stone as a death-row inmate in a garden-variety southern state and Rob Morrow as a preppie lawyer assigned to work on her clemency case...
...Where Robbins crafted a nuanced portrait of the death-penalty issue in all its moral complexity, Beresford seems more interested in a paint-by-numbers polemic...
...Not that Sharon Stone doesn't try to give Cindy some depth...
...As they stroll off into the sunset, the two trade a memorably inane bit of dialogue...
...His argument for clemency is premised on an interesting notion: If a convicted murderer can inspire even one work-phobic, bleeding-heart Democrat to discover the joys of gainful employment, then surely her life must be spared...
...Touchstone Pictures, a branch of the Disney empire, has concocted a feature-length remake of Habeas Corpus, complete with high-voltage stars, an implausible romance, and a story line every bit as preposterous as the makers of The Player imagined it to be...
...As he tells Robbins: "This story is just too damned important to risk being overwhelmed by personality...
...How this woman kicked her drug habit and became such a model citizen is left maddeningly unexplored...
...By the time we catch up with her, though, Cindy is less dangerous than your average guest on Donahue...
...Morrow, the other major player in this alleged drama, is similarly deprived of anything close to a story arc...
...Here's the bill of fare Beresford asks us to swallow...
...We are presented with a central character who has done bad things in her past but is introduced as a saint in frame one...
...She also appears in very little make-up and with stringy dishwater-blonde hair-except in brief flashbacks to the decade-old crime, when she appears younger and with long, straight brown hair...
...Thom Geier is associate editor at U.S...
...News & World Report...
...He pulls out all the stops, from crucifixion imagery to last-minute phone calls in the execution chamber...
...Of course, Stone isn't alone in looking ghastly...
...We know that she is Serious because she (a) struggles in and out of a southern drawl, (b) breaks down several times in tearful outbursts, and (c) wears unflattering prison garb instead of her usual form-fitting drop-dead couture...
...Traffic was a bitch...
...The record is painfully clear: He blows off his girlfriend, angers his brother, loses his job, and is seen in the final scenes in the midst of another transcontinental trip...
...Net character development: zero...
...But mainly, Morrow is in the movie to experience the sort of life-changing transformation he must claim his favorite death-row inmate has already undergone...
...Along the way, director Bruce Beresford and screenwriter Ron Koslow serve up more knee-jerk clich?s in 103 minutes than can be found in a week-long NEA convention...
...If this idea catches on, we might even institutionalize some kind of Head Start program for limousine liberals...
...He lands Cindy's case and sees in Sharon Stone what everyone else in the theater does: A movie star who definitely does not deserve to die...
...Forget for a moment how absurd it is to canonize such a woman, who never once mentions her victims or suggests any remorse for her crimes...
...Conveniently, he even finds a technicality that might justify a plea for clemency: Cindy's crack use was never introduced before her sentencing...
...Thanks to his big brother, the governor's Stephano-poulite chief of staff, he gets a job preparing cursory files for the state's clemency board...
...Since this is a satire, and a Robert Altman satire at that, things go awry...
...Amazingly, Last Dance seems to celebrate this kind of shirking of responsibility...
...In a late scene, Cindy even rejects the prayers of a man of the cloth-a direct contrast to the serious treatment of religion and prayer Robbins presented in Dead Man Walking...
...What took you so long...
...To prove his anti-commercial agenda, the sanctimonious director promises no stars and no "Hollywood ending...
...Sharon Stone plays Cindy Liggett, a woman who as a teenager got high on crack, robbed a house, and brutally murdered two teen lovers...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 34
