**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Toni Collette, Cameron Diaz, Richard Burgi, and Shirley Maclaine
Directed by Curtis Hanson & written by Susannah Grant, from the novel by Jennifer Weiner
2005
130 min PG13
“In Her Shoes” is a comic melodrama that follows two grown sisters (Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette), one a slutty, detestable flake and the other a workaholic lawyer. The flake avoids implosion through the discovery of a long-lost grandma (Shirley Maclaine), while the responsible one feels guilty about finally exploding on the flake. Speaking of guilt, when Collette finally erupts on Diaz, it’s kind of sick how good it feels.
Intellectually I recognize that “In Her Shoes” is good at what it’s doing, but I kept asking myself, why is this even a movie? It’s nothing but people talking about how they feel. Close your eyes, add a few brief descriptions, and it would work just as well on radio (and probably also works well as a novel). The whole purpose of the cinema is to have a visual experience—a mood evoked in pictures—and seeing nothing but people talk had trouble holding my interest.
The term “chick flick” is a pejorative description of a style, not a subject matter. If subject matter defined what makes a “chick flick,” then “Eyes Wide Shut” would be a “chick flick.” It’s not, because Kubrick found a way to visually represent relationships and feelings of personal and marital inadequacies. “Chick flicks” are seldom cinematic, except when a woman walks with her head up high or maybe runs up some stairs triumphantly. So then I asked myself, perhaps cinema is an inherently male art because men are stimulated visually and enjoy that mystery, whereas word-based media like novels and television are inherently female, because women are trained to explain everything to the smallest possible microbe.
And then I periodically stopped having these thoughts and returned to some charming bits involving the great and magical Toni Collette. The director is Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential”), who does find a few ways to liven things up. After an energetic title sequence, he does what he’s good at, which is giving his actors space, and especially enjoys watching them lope along. He also lets his gaze linger on the figures of his two leads, not in a fetishist way, but in the way women sometimes size each other up so they can feel inadequate. Cameron Diaz’s hindquarters are an obvious choice, but the girls’ footwear, and Toni Collette’s pudgy arms and fake buckteeth, are more engaging.
My opinion of “In Her Shoes” is far from set in stone; I can hardly call my viewing experience a happy one, what with the drunk girl (or Special Edna) talking on her cell phone and rattling her keys a few rows back. It was the Dollar Cinema and you get what you pay for. I think the unwritten etiquette at places like that is that the movie theater isn’t a silent sanctuary so much as a communal living room, and the shushing of my wife and me was as out-of-place as Catholic manners at an AME Church. She and I reached the conclusion that we would happy to see those unwritten rules written out and placed on a big sign on the front of the theater: “This is a talking movie theater! Answering cell phones and carrying on conversations is encouraged!” But I digress.
Finished Monday, December 5th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Charles S. Dutton, Bernard Hill, John Carroll Lynch, and Penelope Cruz.
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and written by Sebastian Gutierrez
2004
95 min R
Here we have an atmospheric and lushly produced ghost story-cum-mystery, in the vein of “The Ring” and “The Sixth Sense.” It’s nothing special, but will get the job done, with a few good jolts and athletic camera work. Just don’t let your expectations get too high.
A psychiatrist (Halle Berry) sees a ghost on the road one night, then wakes up three days later in prison for killing her husband (Charles S. Dutton). “Gothika” combines a hyper-sterile steel prison with burning ghosts, misused wood-chopping axes, psychobabble, and nights that are always stormy. We get to see rain fall up and down as time flows in opposite directions, which is neat. Halle Berry is run-of-the-mill as the buttoned-down, repressed professional, but appropriately freaked-out and frazzled for about 2/3rds of the film’s runtime. She’s a good screamer.
“Gothika” has an ambiguous attitude toward race: at first, it appears to be the white institution (literally, a prison, that looks more like the Dark Castle logo) keeping down two minority women (Berry and an inmate played by Penelope Cruz), one for being a professional, the other for being so sexually aggressive. That same dominant institution also wants to keep Berry away from the white shrink (a low-key, charming-yet-suspect Robert Downey Jr.) who clearly has the hots for her.
SPOILERS. But things twist when we discover that the killer is a black man with authority. He has abused his authority to rape and murder white women, and corrupt white men (specifically his accomplice). If the interracial couple formed by Berry and Downey is the “good” one, then the same-sex interracial couple formed by the killers (“confused sexuality” is thrown in with psychobabble) is the “bad” one.
It may just be coincidental casting, but the director is Mathieu Kassovitz (the male lead from “Amelie” and co-starring in Spielberg’s forthcoming “Munich”), whose film “Hate” chronicles racial tension in Paris. The film’s ending, by the way, is pretty ludicrous: we can believe a suspect being freed on “justifiable homicide,” but “justifiable ax mutilation with words written in blood” is a stretch. Maybe enough weird stuff happens that there’s a mistrial. Great title, though.
Back to home.