WIT, TASTE, AND FEELING
PODHORETZ, JOHN
WIT, FEELING, AND TASTE So, What More Do You Want from a Movie? By John Podhoretz Awarm conversation between two loving brothers suddenly turns cold and angry and then, just as quickly, turns...
...DeVito, who did a superb job with a similar part eleven years ago in Tin Men, is tender and touching...
...She is alone because her lifelong friendships couldn't be reconciled with the grand life she and her husband made together in the $2 million apartment and huge country house in Connecticut that are standard issue for the successful New York couple...
...When he blurts out to Judith that his daughter has died, she impulsively throws her arms around him, and an unusual friendship begins...
...She is rescued from despair by another member of New York's walking wounded—Pat (Danny DeVito), the night elevator operator in her building...
...These are moments—wonderful moments, and there are many more of them—in Living Out Loud, a new comedy about loneliness in New York...
...At the beginning of the movie, Pat's eighteen-year-old daughter is dying of cancer, and he tries to grease a nurse's palm to get the girl special attention...
...Judith, who was a medical student when she and her husband married, became a nurse instead...
...A furious husband, adamantly denying that he has been having an affair with a woman in his office, pauses to correct his inquisibletive wife: The woman she's asking about is not thirty years old but thirty-four—and with that very specific detail, he gives the game away...
...He thinks they're falling in love, but she explains that the loneliness has gotten so bad for her that she can't sleep...
...By John Podhoretz Awarm conversation between two loving brothers suddenly turns cold and angry and then, just as quickly, turns warm again...
...Her husband didn't want children, so they didn't have any...
...Unable to sleep, she turns on the TV news and fantasizes reports of her own death: Upper East Side divorcée jumps out of window and lands on ex-husband and new wife, killing them too...
...An elevator man in a ritzy Manhattan co-op is treated with rare kindness by a tenant—and while he is deeply moved, he also owes a bookie $200 and makes up a cockand- bull story to get the $200 from the tenant...
...I don't remember the last time I saw a movie I loved as much as this one, which was written and directed by a screenwriter named Richard LaGravenese, whose previous work (The Fisher King and the screen adaptations of The Bridges of Madison County and Beloved) gave no indication he was capable of the wit, feeling, and taste he displays here...
...She takes to visiting Pat, wine bottle in tow, as he sits in a dumpy office off the grand Fifth Avenue lobby in the middle of the night...
...There's something triumphant about a Hollywood movie that takes up the cudgels for two little people who don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world...
...LaGravenese's script and direction are so sure-footed that the movie overcomes the central problem that Holly Hunter looks at least five years too young to play Judith...
...only to be rudely ignored...
...there hasn't been a better performance by an American actor this year...
...The ardent fan of a littleknown jazz singer goes to see her idol at an intimate club, and when the singer comes to the bar for a drink, the fan screws up her courage and says, “You were great...
...We watch these two characters and the people with whom they intersect over the course of a year, watch them stumble and then take the first, halting steps toward a new and better life...
...Nothing much happens by way of plot in Living Out Loud, and that is what is so wonderful about it...
...The new wife is a pediatrician...
...But the part is so good, and Hunter so accomplished, that she carries the movie anyway on her slight shoulders...
...At night, Judith goes to restaurants alone, hoping that somebody, anybody, might reach out to her, invite her to sit down...
...The director does nothing to telegraph Judith's pain at this discovery—no close-ups, no tears...
...He is fifty-two-years old, a dreamer and inveterate gambler who has been thrown out of the house by his wife of twenty-five years and is living with his responsible, world-weary brother in Brooklyn...
...We have gotten to know her so well by this point that we feel for her without being told to...
...Every single day of my life," the daughter responds wearily...
...She spends her days taking care of an old woman whose married children don't visit her and who therefore torments her single daughter with her neediness: "I raised you kids by myself without a husband, but did I complain...
...The breakup of her sixteen-year marriage to a prominent cardiologist has left her alone and purposeless, wandering through a huge, empty apartment that is shrouded in darkness most of the time, perhaps because Judith can't afford to pay the electric bills...
...Judith (played by Holly Hunter) is a fortysomething Fifth Avenue matron in the midst of an emotional crisis...
...She takes revenge by throwing pieces of a muffin at him during a real-estate settlement...
...One of the most powerful moments in the movie comes when Judith runs into his new wife, who is visibly pregnant...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
