For January 2006
Body Heat (1981, 113 min, R) ***1/2 – Directed & written by Laurence Kasdan, starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Ted Danson, and Richard Crenna. Delicious concoction that’s one shot 1940s pulp sleaze and one shot 1980s pulp sleaze. The setting looks like a modern small town in Florida, yet is distinctly not: everyone smokes, even the joggers, and there isn’t a single air conditioner in the whole town. Into this steps a sleazy lawyer, just waiting to become a patsy, and the lusty wife of a suspiciously rich land investor. He’s William Hurt, trying to behave like he doesn’t know what kind of trouble he’s in, she’s Kathleen Turner, doing a fantastic Lauren Bacall impression, and the pitiable meanie between them is Richard Crenna. Arson, murder, altered wills—it’s all here. We know pretty early how all this is going to end, but the pleasure is the journey, not the destination, in watching everything unfold. Like all good film noirs, Hurt can’t help himself, no matter how smart he is, or how much he knows. The sex—lots and lots of sex—doesn’t feel excessive but necessary in showing what, exactly, is dragging Hurt to his doom.
Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, 125 min, R) ** - Directed by Brian De Palma, starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman. Brian De Palma and Tom Wolfe are awfully big names for a “black guys are like this, white guys are like that” comedy. Maybe my issue with “race comedies” in general is that there are, at most, 1 or 2 dimensional characters per movie, and everyone else is reduced to having the basest motives of his or her “type.” The WASPs are all uptight, phony, and painfully unhip. The blacks, when they’re not threatening the whites, are a mindless mob just waiting to be manipulated. The civic officials are all corrupt and self-serving and the alarmist media are consistently wrong about everything, or at least not entirely accurate. Fans of the Wolfe novel—unread by me—claim the book’s characters are not simple types, but individuals. Race comedies in general confuse and annoy me: they claim to be combating racism by making it look so ridiculous, but sometimes doesn’t it seem like they’re celebrating lives wasted by self-imposed typecasting? Or maybe it’s just that De Palma does everything a little too low-key. He plays “Bonfire” as mild farce when, if it’s going to be so shallow, it should be cranked up. De Palma has fun with his usual long takes, including an opening shot that goes for 5 or 6 minutes. But he also seems inert, as if all his flexibility only emphasizes how stuck-in-the-mud “Bonfire” is. The plot is like Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in reverse: a Wall Street WASP (Tom Hanks), whose life of luxury has left him with limited experience and choices, is thrown to an ignorant black mob when he flees the scene of a hit-and-run. In the end, because we see things from Hanks’s point of view, “Bonfire” essentially confirms every rich white man’s fear of driving into a black neighborhood. A self-promoting black preacher, two self-centered Jewish district attorneys, and faithless rich friends don’t help things. Bruce Willis, while not exactly “fleshed-out,” is probably the only character able to rise above his racial typing; he’s a drunken, mercenary reporter who is at first indifferent to Hanks’s plight, then begins to see it for real. As Hanks’s judge, Morgan Freeman, with his closing “what-we’ve-learned-today” speech, essentially recreates the Communist lawyer Mr. Max from “Native Son.” There are good scenes and good actors, including Saul Rubinek, an uncredited F. Murray Abraham, Melanie Griffith is Hanks’s floozy, “My Dinner with” Andre Gregory as a flamboyant, repetitive poet, and Freeman is as great as always.
The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001, 107 min, PG) **1/2 – Directed by Alan Taylor, starring Ian Holm, Iben Hjejle, and Tim McInnery. Gentle and well-meaning comedy of sighs and smiles that leaves you feeling “nice” but not quite like you’ve seen something. Think of it as “The Last Temptation of Napoleon Bonaparte,” in which the diminutive former emperor sneaks out of exile and has a vision of life as a common man. In this case, he’s a gourd peddler coupled with a friendly widow. Ian Holm plays Napoleon for at least the third time, after “Time Bandits” and a BBC miniseries. He is bottled up, intense, and just a little mad from at once always getting his way and at the same time losing all of Europe. The best scenes belong to him, not as Napoleon, but as the double brought in to take his place so he can sneak off St. Helena. The double would rather live in luxurious exile than get a real job. Much to the real Bonaparte’s consternation, he cranks out a bawdy and wholly inaccurate “autobiography,” in which much time is devoted to the rogering of Josephine.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, 109 min, NR) *** - Directed by Alex Gibney. Accessible and engrossing documentary about the rise-and-fall of the Houston-based company that tried to make commodities out of, well, everything. Visually, the movie combines television news footage with DV shots of gleaming-bright skyscrapers that shout “hubris!” Narrated by Peter Coyote and plenty of talking heads are interviewed.
Young Adam (2003, 97 min, R) *** - Directed & written for the screen by David MacKenzie, starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, and Emily Mortimer. Think of it as “Vera Drake” crossed with “Swimming Pool.” Like “Vera Drake,” “Young Adam” is an unhurried portrait of working class British life in the middle of the century: it follows two men on a river barge, one married (Mullan), the other a drifter (McGregor), as they work their way from one end of Scotland to the other. Like “Swimming Pool,” the sexual tension is almost unbearable in how it keeps edging towards violence. McGregor’s drifter is drawn to the boss’s wife (Swinton). But, as we see bits and pieces of his past life, we find that a lot of women are drawn to him, including the one that was found floating in the river. After the boss’s wife makes the mistake of trying to tie McGregor down, what starts as a mystery transforms into the study of a compulsive, almost thoughtless seducer. Big on sooty atmosphere and sexual tension, director/screenwriter MacKenzie keeps his canvas spare, mostly wordless, and has a thing for nudity involving gaunt, statuesque women that’s unusual for the movies.
Index of All Reviews.
Reviews in a Hurry for July 2005.