The Revenge of an Educated Man

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed…. We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

There is something about unjust imprisonment that can bring out the greatness in a man. Dr. King in the Birmingham jail is an obvious example, there are thousands more. St. Paul, writing his great epistles from house arrest in Rome. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, carrying the messages from Gulag on the skin of his back. Anne Frank, writing in her attic, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Victor Frankl and Elie Wiesel and ten thousand other stories from the Holocaust. From a great evil, surprising good can come.

Edmund Dantes is part of that great tradition. Played by Jim Caviezel in Kevin Reynolds’s new movie The Count of Monte Cristo, Dantes is an unlettered French merchant sailor who is betrayed by almost everyone he knows, from Napoleon Bonaparte right down to his best friend. He is captured by the gendarmes, sent packing to the notorious prison of Chateau d’If, left alone in a dank cell with his thoughts, and beaten every year whether he needs it or not. It would be easy for Dantes to give into horror and despair, and that’s exactly what he does, at first, there not being much alternative. Fate takes a hand when the Abbe Faria (Richard Harris) breaks into his cell. Dantes thinks he’s seeing a hallucination at first, and it’s hard to blame him. Soon, though, he recovers his humanity and his purpose.

The first surprise in The Count of Monte Cristo is that it has something to say about the value of education. (Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise, though; Reynolds’s father is an educator, in fact, the chancellor at my alma mater, Baylor University.) Dantes and the Abbe don’t just spend all their time digging their way out of the Chateau d’If. Instead, they turn it into the finest academy there could ever be; one student, one teacher, some great books (Machiavelli and Adam Smith, and it’s a wonder that Dantes doesn’t turn into a nineteenth-century version of Lee Atwater), and all the time in the world. When Dantes makes his unlikely escape, he is not an uneducated, illiterate peasant, but a man, used to toil and hardship, schooled in patience and dedication, with a wide knowledge of language and sword-fighting and philosophy. If The Count of Monte Cristo does nothing else, it shows the value of a liberal education - “liberal” in the exact sense of the term, because it’s an education that liberates Dantes from his prison cell and frees him from the shackles of oppression and injustice.

Once Dantes is free, he is free to seek the justice that has been delayed him so long. His heart is filled with thoughts of revenge against the surly first mate who denounced him, the wily prosecutor who sentenced him, and the fiancée who left him for his best friend. His most intense focus is saved for Count Mondego (Guy Pearce), the childhood friend who orchestrated his downfall, married his love, and ruined his life. Dantes’s revenge is the revenge of the educated man, however. He spurns a comical request from his sidekick (Luis Guzman), who offers to murder the conspirators. Instead, Dantes chooses the revenge of an educated man; he sets out to use a newfound fortune to ruin and humiliate them.

The second surprise in The Count of Monte Cristo is that Jim Caviezel can act - more than that, that he can carry a movie by himself. Caviezel doesn’t have the showiest performance in the movie; Pearce’s loathsome aristocrat is far more entertaining and fun. At first, Caviezel doesn’t have that much acting to do; he has to be wide-eyed and innocent and stupid at first, and then hard-bitten and bitter in jail. However, when he starts his revenge plotting, his acting becomes more subtle, more interesting, more nuanced, until you realize that, without even noticing it, he’s becoming a big-time movie star right before your eyes.

It helps, too, that Caviezel is working with a director as talented as Reynolds. Say what you want about Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Waterworld, Reynolds knows how to construct impressive fictional landscapes. The Count of Monte Cristo looks as fabulous as anything else you’ll see on screen this year. Reynolds handles the prison cells and the ballrooms with equal skill and manages to give both locations reality and vigor. The costuming and the set design are sumptuous and satisfying, and the locations are gorgeous.

The third surprise in The Count of Monte Cristo is that it is actually short on swashbuckling and bodice-ripping; there are not nearly enough swordfights or narrow escapes to make the film an adventure classic. However, there are so many other good elements to the movie - the story, the psychology of the characters, the excellence of the acting - that there’s no need for the audience to feel shortchanged. What the movie lacks in action it more than makes up for in drama, suspense, revenge, and romance. And if there is a greatness that comes from unjust imprisonment, it is reflected to some degree in the overall excellence of The Count of Monte Cristo. It is astonishingly good. It is proof that out of a great evil, surprising good can come.

In The Arms of the Angels

Spend all your time waiting
for that second chance
for a break that would make it okay

It’s not especially clear in Enigma how long Tom Jericho has been waiting for his second chance, or whether he even wants it. Jericho (Dougray Scott) is a Cambridge mathematician who has been busily working away at German cipher traffic since the first days of World War Two. This led, directly or indirectly, to a breakdown that sent him away to rest for awhile. We see him first on a train, returning to Bletchley Park, the top-secret code breaking installation, home of the Enigma codebreaking machine. He has a haunted look in his eyes, he hasn’t shaved for a week, and he doesn’t look one bit happy to be back.

there’s always one reason
to feel not good enough
and it’s hard at the end of the day

There’s no particular reason for him to feel good about being back, either, as Bletchley Park is going through a hard spell. Jericho’s great achievement was the cracking of the German U-boat code known as “Shark”, which allowed destroyers to pinpoint the location of enemy submarines so as to allow convoys from the United States to escape destruction. Unfortunately, the Germans have changed their codes, and there is no easy way of getting them back. The situation is desperate, and will get even more so - unless Jericho and a collection of dweebs, com-symps, and misfit mathematicians can break the new code.

I need some distraction
oh beautiful release
memory seeps through my veins

Fortunately, Enigma is not really about the changing fortunes of the codebreakers; although theirs is a great and important story - kept secret for over fifty years - it is more suited to the History Channel than the big screen. (Or a PBS “Nova” episode.) It’s not even about how Tom Jericho breaks the “Shark” code, although that plays a big part in the movie. It’s really about a memory, and how that memory drives Jericho to distraction. It’s the memory of Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows), blonde temptress, who Jericho loved and lost, and who contributed to his mental breakdown. Jericho sees her everywhere in rose-colored flashbacks, and even goes so far as to break into her flat for a smell of her perfume. Unfortunately, he finds something else, that may or may not be a clue to her disappearance.

let me be empty
oh and weightless and maybe
I’ll find some peace tonight

Enigma takes place in the peaceful English countryside, on the grounds of a manor house replete with swans and orchestras, but it is a vital battlefield. Jericho is working towards peace by ending the war with his ciphers, but cannot find peace within himself. One of the few mysteries left in Enigma is what Jericho’s true motivation is. Is he committed to the war effort, or does that matter? Is he still in love with Claire, or has he accepted the fact of his rejection? More importantly, is the solution to the puzzles around him that weighs most cruelly on his mind? Scott turns in an outstanding performance as the wounded Jericho, showing us the character’s injuries but never letting us into the sealed-off chambers of his heart.

so tired of the straight line
and everywhere you turn
there’s vultures and thieves at your back

The primary vulture here is Wigram (Jeremy Northam), on His Majesty’s Secret Service, in charge of security for Bletchley Park. He has the Ed Harris role from A Beautiful Mind, the shadowy intelligence officer with a secret mission. Northam almost steals the movie as a British version of Alec Baldwin in a snappy fedora, always turning up at inconvenient times with inconvenient questions, all the better to stick the needle in poor Tom Jericho. It’s a fun part, and Northam (who did steal a big part of the woeful Gosford Park) has a fun, stylish time with it. He’s the most colorful thing about this grey, shadowy movie.

and the storm keeps on twisting
you keep building the lies
that you make up for all that you lack

If Jericho is going to escape the storm and work his way out of the various lies he tells Wigram (none of them very effectual), it helps to have someone in his life that is a little more stable and sensible, that makes up for his lack of these characteristics himself. He is fortunate to run into Hester (Kate Winslet), the former roommate of his dear departed Claire, and a fellow puzzle-solver. Winslet is magnificent in her small role here as a fiercely proto-feminist file clerk and the nascent love interest. A.O. Scott at the New York Times calls this her “Hermione Granger act”, which is true, but, durn it, I like Hermione Granger, and I don’t care who knows it. It’s not a colorful part (Winslet spends a lot of the movie in drab brown dresses) but there’s some really good acting here, maybe enough for the Academy to sit up and take notice again.

it don’t make no difference
escaping one last time
it’s easier to believe

The question about Enigma is whether or not it makes a difference. In fact, that’s a question asked by an impossibly sweet and efficient blonde servicewoman, spending her days listening to Morse code transmissions from the enemy which she is utterly unable to decipher. She asks whether what she is doing matters, and Jericho tells her that yes, it does, although he doesn’t seem terribly convinced by it himself. That same ambiguity is present in the movie. It’s a smart, well directed, well scripted movie, but it really doesn’t take much pleasure or interest in solving its puzzles. (And all the puzzles are solved, mind you, Enigma isn’t very Enigmatic at all.) It’s easy to believe in the movie as a piece of art, less easy to believe in its neat, pat conclusions.

in this sweet madness
oh this glorious sadness
that brings me to my knees

And then maybe here is the solution to Enigma; it’s a sweet, sad movie, but not nearly glorious enough to bring one to his knees. It is quite a nice little film, about an interesting episode in history, very well done, with some really good performances. But there are not many scenes that have a real emotional impact, and almost all of them are in flashbacks at the beginning of the movie dealing with Jericho’s failed relationship with Claire. Enigma is a perfectly fine piece of moviemaking, but it doesn’t pack the necessary emotional force needed to be truly glorious. Blame it on the stiff-upper-lip Brits, but there is precious little sweet madness or glorious sadness to recommend the movie on any other grounds. It certainly doesn’t have the lyrical punch of a Sara McLachlan lyric:

in the arms of the angel
fly away from here
from this dark cold hotel room
and the endlessness that you fear
you were pulled from the wreckage
of your silent reverie
you’re in the arms of the angel
may you find some comfort here

Every Time We Say Goodbye

The funniest scene in Evelyn is when our hero, Desmond Doyle, goes off in search of his lawyer, who has gone fishing. In order to get to the fishing hole, Doyle has to climb a barbed-wire fence, and is chased into the lake by two guard dogs. Nothing really funny about that, of course, except that Desmond is played by Pierce Brosnan, who in his other life as James Bond wouldn’t be caught dead in such a predicament.

But this is not a funny movie, naturally. It begins on Christmas Eve, in the small flat of the Doyle family, enjoying their last holiday together, Desmond explaining to his two boys that Santa couldn’t afford to bring any cars for their model train, and his wife eyeing the door warily. She takes off the next day, with her daughter Evelyn watching her go, clutching her poor, sad little cloth doll, watching her mother get in a car with a “fancy man” and leave her forever.

Sad, this, and wrenching, but it’s just the start of the movie. The Irish government moves in and separates the family, on the grounds that Doyle is unemployed and cannot support his children. The two boys - who we only see in montage scenes, mostly — are sent to a monastic school; Evelyn is thrown into the penguin house, a Catholic boarding school called St. Joseph’s. On the way there, Evelyn tells her grandfather that she’ll pray to St. Joseph that the family will be reunited, one of the many little moments in Evelyn that sneaks up on you, touching you by surprise.

The Catholic school is grim — although it’s not a patch on the school in Nicholas Nickleby and Evelyn must suffer the cruel ministrations of Sister Bridget, who beats her for interrupting the punishment of another student who could not say her catechism properly. Desmond, on hearing about this, breaks into the school to rescue his daughter, but is rebuffed. He finds a lawyer (Stephen Rea) through the recommendation of the local barmaid (Julianna Margulies, ER) and goes to court, but is rebuffed by the judges. It turns out that both parents have to sign the request to release the children from the custody of the Church, and as Evelyn’s mother is in Australia and can’t be reached to sign the release, Evelyn and her brothers cannot stay with their father.

As it turns out, though, there is a provision in the Irish constitution that upholds the rights of parents to enjoy the companionship of their children. Doyle’s legal team (an Americanized Aidan Quinn and a boozy Alan Bates) try a new tack, taking their case to the Supreme Court, claiming that the relevant provision of the Children’s Law is unconstitutional. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has, we’re told, never declared any sort of law unconstitutional before, meaning that Desmond Doyle’s case is sort of an Irish version of Marbury vs. Madison. As the film goes on, Desmond increasingly only sees his children in courtrooms, leading to a series of wrenching partings. “I’m tired of always saying goodbye to my children,” he says, and we see him start to work harder and stop drinking in order to be a better father for his kids.

Brosnan is, of course, terribly miscast as a lower-class painter, but he gets away with it by showing off his roguish charm and by not combing his hair that much. (But, as he’s a producer, and the movie might not have been made without him in the role, it’s easy enough to accept him.) Most of the other characters are flat and dull, bordering on the stereotypical. The big exception is Sophie Vavasseur as Evelyn, who exudes character, spunk, and a thorough sincerity. Vavasseur, in her first role, is the center of all the movie’s big sentimental payoff scenes, and does a splendid job.

Evelyn is a sad and sentimental picture, but it can’t be written off as a mere tearjerker. It has a substance behind it - the love of a father, the striving of good lawyers, the subtle workings of justice. It is a fine movie, tenderly directed by Bruce Beresford, and worthy of your time and attention.

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, and I Feel Fine

We are beginning to see signs that 2001 may be the year of the Cuisinart Movie. The year’s first big hit was Hannibal, which was a reprocessed version of Silence of the Lambs with some David Mamet thrown in here and there. Pearl Harbor whizzed around scraps from other, better WWII movies in with some CGI magic. The Animal mized in Saturday Night Live bits with forgettable 1980’s comedies and a star from “Survivor”. The repellent Swordfish consciously threw in Dog Day Afternoon and Sugarland Express into the blender, along with pieces of Battlefield Earth and The Matrix and Lethal Weapon, and set to puree. And you can make the same argument for Shrek, certainly, and The Mummy Returns, and 3000 Miles to Graceland, and Enemy at the Gates, and… well, that’s everything I’ve seen so far this year, but you get the idea. We have reached that stage of post-modern movie development where you can’t make a truly original movie. Instead, you have to construct your movie with parts from other movies, and your success or failure depends on what you put in the blender, and what speed you set it on, and what comes out.

So it shouldn’t be any surprise that Evolution takes elements from Ghostbusters and X-Files and Independence Day and Armageddon and Jurassic Park and, well, you get the picture, and mooshes them all up and tosses them in the blender and serves the goop that comes out on toast. What’s worse, all of the aforementioned movies were something of Cuisinart creations themselves, so what you’re getting here is third-generation goop. It’s certainly not good for you, whatever it is.

And yet, I liked it.

Evolution is not an exemplar of good directing or good editing or good special effects or good screenwriting or any of the lively arts of moviemaking. It is not particularly funny or particularly clever or particularly anything, and it’s not especially successful as a parody. The special effects aren’t. The movie’s scientific knowledge is suspect at best, with its big moment coming when someone makes a silly hypothesis based the periodic table, which happens to be featured on another character’s T-shirt.

And yet, I liked it.

The theory of Evolution is that good performances can redeem a bad movie. (Notice that I don’t say “good acting”, there’s a difference.) Evolution has three very good performances going for it, performances that are fun and lively and goofy, and those performances are just enough to make it worthwhile summer viewing. What Evolution lacks in almost every area is made up by the trio of David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, and Julianne Moore, who manage to turn a real howler of a script into a lighthearted comic gem.

Duchovny and Jones play community college professors at a small school in the Arizona foothills, teaching students who presumably can’t manage to make it into Arizona State, which says a lot. Duchovny’s narcoleptic charm is perfect for his role as a burnt-out scientist, and Jones’s amiable cluelessnes works perfectly in his role as a wannabe know-it-all. The two scientists discover a meteorite that harbors an alien life form (”Do you think they give you the Nobel Prize all at once, or in installments?” Jones asks); however, the life form is mutating at an alarming rate. (”Tell me again,” Jones asks, “how many cells are there in a single-cell organism?”)

Evolution works to the extent that it does because of the banter between Duchovny and Jones; it’s like nothing so much as the old “I Spy” TV series with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. (It is a little too early to draw comparisons between Orlando Jones and Bill Cosby, but the potential is there.) Their characters are a little dim, but the actors are smart, witty, and obviously having a terrific time playing their roles. Duchovny especially looks as though he’s been released from jail; he clearly relishes the opportunity to poke fun at his humorless X-Files character.

When the aliens get a little too big to handle, the federal government takes over, with endearingly clumsy Julianne Moore playing a top CDC scientist. (A scientist who appears to double as a lawyer; she’s got a great scene where she cross-examines a reluctant Duchovny on his scientific background.) She’s got the thankless Dorothy Lamour part in this movie, but her stunning smile and her banter with Duchovny make her an appealing character. (She’s probably just as happy as can be not to be in Hannibal, I expect.)

Unfortunately, as the alien cluster gets larger and larger, the laughs get fewer, and dumber. There’s a scene where the aliens’ cavern produces an apelike creature (no, not Dan Ackroyd, but good guess) that has to be destroyed before it makes its way to Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes set, and everything after that proceeds downhill. The smart comedy and good performances give way to cheap sphincter jokes, a novel (yet disgusting) product placement, and a lame happy ending.

Evolution is just another Cuisinart movie, I’m afraid, but there are enough good pieces in the mix to make it a worthwhile summer viewing choice. Enjoy it as much as you can. At the rate that summer movies keep de-evolving, this may be the best choice you’ll make for awhile.

Sympathy for the Devil

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” So says Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects, a far, far better movie than Fallen. Fallen stands for the opposite premise: that the devil walks among us and wants to convince us that he does exist. Or anyway, that he wants to convince Denzel Washington that he exists.

This devil’s name is Azazel, and he’s by far the most interesting character in Fallen, by virtue of being the only interesting character in Fallen. (In a movie like this, being interesting is a virtue.) Azazel is left-handed, enjoys injecting people with poison, and likes to sing a particular Rolling Stones song (no, not Sympathy for the Devil”, but “Time is on My Side”). He has spent the last few years in prison, possessing the body of a serial killer, and when the killer is executed, Azazel is free to walk among us, transferring his evil nature from body to body by touch.

Azazel’s motto, as one of the possessed tells us, is “maximum fun”. Fun for Azazel is tormenting poor homicide detective John Hobbes (Washington), the only man that he can’t enter through touch. So Azazel begins killing people in a style reminiscent of the recently-executed serial killer — crimes that the baffled Hobbes is called on to solve, and is eventually suspected of committing himself.

Fallen has two specific obstacles to face, succeding in one and failing in the other. The first problem — turning a powerful, invisible spirit into a movie villian — is handled quite well. There’s a couple of very nice scenes where we see Azazel transferred from host to host like the virus in Outbreak. Also, the people Azazel possesses carry around a Steadicam with some weird yellow filter on it, so the audience can see things from the demon’s perspective. And the people that Azazel possesses are extremely well-cast. They all have a demonic glint in their eye when they’re playing the part of Azazel.

The second problem is: how do you make all this interesting? Well, you don’t. The main problem with this movie is Washington’s character, who is written to be dull and plodding. Denzel, like the good actor he is, dutifully plays his part in a dull and plodding style — although he’s not able to outdo his partner John Goodman, who’s so boring he’s almost narcoleptic. And the movie ambles slowly along, following Detective Hobbes along the connect-the-dots plot of the gratuitous little clues that Azazel leaves strewn everywhere. There’s nothing in the movie to lighten its leaden tread.

Fallen is Moviemaking Light: a thriller with no thrills, an interesting premise with no substance, a decent twist ending that comes about a half-hour too late, featuring good actors trapped inside a mindless script. One wants to ask the writers and producers filmed this pointless, overlong story, but the answer seems guaranteed to be: “The devil made me do it.” The greatest trick this movie could pull off would be in making us believe that it never existed.

Ghost of a Chance

Siskel was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The mourners gathered, tears were cried. The balcony closed for a while, then reopened under new management. Old Siskel was as dead as a door-nail.

This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If he were here, up on the TV screen, or still writing for the Chicago Tribune, it would all be different; nothing about it would be in the least remarkable.

Once upon a time — of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve, in the early hours of the morning, I sat busy at my keyboard, trying to hammer out a review of the new Nicolas Cage movie, The Family Man, about a cocksure New York investment banker thrown out of his high-rise apartment and thrust unknowingly into the great suburban hinterlands of New Jersey. I had written the title, “The Family Man: Bah, Humbug!” and was preparing to finish the rest of the tale, taking special notice of every little thing I could think of that was wrong or bad or even indifferent. I was just writing how Danny Elfman should be should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart, when, suddenly, I saw on my computer screen, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change: not a incipient review, but Siskel’s face.

I blinked, then fiddled around with the screensaver software, trying to figure out what had happened. I turned out the lights in the room where I was writing; darkness is cheap, and I like it. And then, after a moment, I heard a loud clanking noise coming from below, as if someone were dragging a heavy chain through the cellar.

“Hang on,” I said, “this house doesn’t even have a cellar.”

The back door opened, and in walked in Siskel’s ghost, looking much as he did in life; receding hairline, professorial air, comfortable old jacket. He was carrying a long chain, wrapped around his middle several times, studded with movie reels wrought in steel.

“W-w-what do you want with me?” I asked, trembling.

“Much,” the spirit answered.

“This is some sort of dream, it must be. You’re not real. This is like something out of… out of…”

“Out of a movie?”

“Yes, something like that. So, I suppose that you’re here to tell me that three ghosts will appear to me tonight, all that good stuff?”

“No. Actually, they’ll be haunting Robert Downey Jr. tonight. I’m here to give you a hand with your review.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I’ve read your stuff, and it’s not bad, for an amateur. There’s lots of things that I like. You’re very tough, and I admire that.”

“Um… thanks. I appreciate it, really I do. But why are you here? Why now?”

He rattled the links of the chain. “This is the chain that I wove in life. It is composed of every bad review I’ve ever written; every time that I unfairly or unwisely criticized someone else’s creative effort another link was added. And you have a chain of your own in the nether regions; I’ve seen it. It’s not this long, but it’s long enough.”

“But… that’s what critics do. We criticize things. We point out flaws, we point fingers, we cast blame where it’s needed. We steer the public away from bad movies and point them towards the good ones. It’s our business.”

“Business!” cried the ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

I stared at him — through him, rather — open mouthed. “Sorry about that,” Siskel’s ghost said, “had to say it, it was in the script.”

“OK, got it.”

“You’re right, though. We’re supposed to do that, what you said. But we’re also supposed to recognize honest effort, and good acting, and good scripts, and we don’t always do that. Sometimes we let the things that we see wrong with a movie overshadow all the things that a movie does right.”

“Well, yes. And I was going to say some good things about this movie.”

“No you weren’t,” the ghost said. “You were just getting ready to write about how Jeremy Piven was written out of the second half of the movie, and about how it never resolves the thing with the sleazy neighbor.”

“Well, yeah. And I like Jeremy Piven, and Saul Rubinek, and they were just barely in the movie.”

“But the movie wasn’t about them, was it?”

“No. It was about marriage. It was about how married people always think that marriage is so great and wonderful, and how they think single people should just drop everything and get married, which is so wrong. But it’s also about how they secretly — and sometimes not too secretly — envy single people, envy our freedom, our ability to make choices. Look at how the Cage character reacts when Tea Leoni says that they can’t afford that suit he wants; how they’d have to take money out of the kids’ college fund to even begin to afford it. The regret he feels is powerful and real, even if it’s about something so superficial like a suit.”

“That’s a good point, but you’re wrong.”

“Well, then, it’s about the kids, then. And I get that. Really, I do. I loved the scenes with the kid actor, Makensie Vega. Very talented child actor; if she had been 70 years older, nobody would have heard of Shirley Temple. Those scenes when she and Cage are together are just magic, and I loved them. She’s so aware, so tender, so instinctive. And if you’re saying that having kids makes the Cage character a better man, I know that. I get it.”

“True, but that’s not it, either. Think about it. What was the truest thing about this movie? What’s the best thing you know to write?”

I thought for a moment. “I did like the opening scene a lot, for a small reason that’s maybe not so small. When it started, I was convinced that Cage was in a hotel room somewhere, don’t ask me why. And then he walked into that closet, singing that opera at the top of his lungs, and there were all those clothes there, and I knew that wasn’t a hotel room, it was his bedroom, and it was just so cold and impersonal. I thought that was a great way to say something about the character, at kind of a non-verbal level.”

“Keep going. You’re getting there.”

“And then he ends up in New Jersey (let’s not even talk about the goofy Don Cheadle scenes) and the first thing he does is go to New York, and do all the George Bailey stuff. And then he drives back, and I was wondering, how’s he going to find his way home? If he’s that panicked, there’s no way he’s going to find his house. And he doesn’t, he wanders the back roads of New Jersey with his map, and just gets lucky. I liked that; showed that they’d thought the script all the way through. That was smart. And then the way he had to ask his daughter where everything was, where he worked, without just assuming that he’d know all that stuff by reading the script.”

“That’s just minor stuff, though. Keep to what’s important.”

“Well, the symbolism? The opera that Cage sings, it’s “La Donna E Mobile”, which is about people changing their minds about things. And how the book that Cage picks up near the end is a Vonnegut novel, and how maybe he’s come unstuck amongst the different possibilities of his life, the way that characters do in Vonnegut books. And then there’s the whole thing with the Chris Isaak song, how it showed up in Wild at Heart, and how it shows up in the first love scene with Cage and Leoni…”

“You put your finger on it,” Siskel’s ghost said. “That’s what it’s about. That’s what it’s all about. It’s about love, and the way that people look at each other when they’re in love, and the sacrifices they make for each other. That’s what drives this movie; that one relationship, the back-and-forth between the characters, their intensity, and the fantastically good acting job they both do.”

“I like Cage. I’ve always liked him. And I was going to write how good he is in this part, and how his particular combination of deadpan hangdog stubbornness and manic energy work in the role. And I wasn’t going to be too hard on Tea Leoni.”

“Oh, yes you were. You were just about to write how you spent the whole movie waiting for an asteroid to fall on her, the way it does in Deep Impact.”

“Well…”

“I know. It is so easy to be cruel, so easy to make cheap jokes. But look at her! Look at her! Look at her eyes, the way she tilts her head, the way she looks at Cage, the way he looks at her. That’s what it’s about, that connection, the connection that they make with each other and the audience. And that’s what you should be writing about. Because that’s what matters; everything else is subservient to that moment when their eyes meet across the airport terminal.”

“I think you’re right. And I’ll try to do better next time. I won’t be so quick to jump on the faults of a movie, and I’ll try to do better to praise the things I like. And I won’t forget the human factor.”

“That’s all I can ask,” the spirit said. “You’ll do fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go scare the hell out of Ebert.” And he vanished, without a trace. And, much like Scrooge in the Dickens tale, “from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.”

Your faithful friend and servant, CDE

Grow The Hell Up

I am an amateur movie reviewer. “Amateur”, of course, implies two things — that I am not very good, and that I am not getting paid. (All those who wish to remedy this status, either by telling me how wonderful I am or by giving me money, are free to do so.)

But being an amateur, I have certain freedoms. I do not have to see every movie, whether it’s one of those arthouse flicks that gets hyped on NPR or one of those mindless teen slasher movies. I do not have to review every bad movie I see, which meant that I did not have to chronicle the multiple sillinesses in, let’s say, The Thirteenth Warrior. (Or, as they’re calling it at the studio, the Chapter Thirteenth Warrior.)

But most importantly, if a movie is really important for me, if it really speaks to me in meaningful ways, if I can’t write a coherent sentence about it because of the flood of feelings that come washing through me, I don’t have to write a review. I tried for weeks to write a Good Will Hunting review before I figured out that I could stop and go to the next review. I didn’t have to search my emotional thesaurus to fight the right words to describe how Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s script affected me.

And I thought, there for a while, that I wouldn’t be able to write a Fight Club review. I had the first paragraph done, but I got stuck. “Fight Club is a movie about men and manliness,” I wrote, right after I first saw the movie. “It is about blood and courage and recklessness. It celebrates the raw power of men beating the stuffing out of each other. It is a macho, savage movie with scene after scene of bloodletting and violence. These things are all true, to some degree, but they do not encompass the movie. The truest thing about Fight Club is its resonance, the way it tugs on the little harp strings in your chest that let you know when something is… is…”

I thought, there for a while, that Fight Club had a capital-M Message. A message specifically tailored for bored 30-year-old urban professional children of divorce. A message that would ring in our ears and inspire us. Somewhere in all that high-sounding bombast (”Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.”) there was something that was talking to us. Something that would be the final word for all of us lost, soulless Generation X slackers.

And I was right.

There is a message in Fight Club. And that message is: Grow the hell up.

The key scene in Fight Club comes very early on in the movie, and is, in the way, the pebble that starts the avalanche of silliness. Jack the Narrator (Ed Norton) starts the movie with a description of his life as a thirtysomething cog in a corporate machine. Cogs in machines don’t get to sleep, and neither does Jack, whose insomnia leaves him stumbling through life. Jack goes to see his doctor, begging for sleeping pills.

The doctor says no. (Incredibly, he doesn’t seem motivated by any desire to save Kaiser’s prescription plan a couple bucks.) The doctor tells Jack that he doesn’t need pills, that he’s really not going through any real pain. Go visit the testicular cancer survivor’s support group, the doc says, and see what real pain is like.

For a long while, I was mad at the doctor. How dare he be so callous? Just because Jack (or me) has trouble sleeping, or is depressed about work and life and the quality of the furniture in our apartments, doesn’t mean that our struggles and our problems and our sense of emptiness can be dismissed? Just because our pain isn’t as severe as people with cancer or parents of murdered children or Rwandan refugees doesn’t mean that it’s not important, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

Well, maybe it does.

What I think the doctor is trying to tell Jack is two simple, universal truths:

• Everybody’s got problems.
• Everybody’s got to deal with their own problems.

Jack learns the first part of this lesson, but not the second part. He begins to infiltrate support groups for diseases he doesn’t have, sucking up the grief of others like a sponge. It helps him to sleep, somehow, and gives him an emotional release. (Thankfully, it gives the audience some satiric fun, too.) But it’s not a real solution, as is demonstrated when another faker (Helena Bonham-Carter) starts haunting the same groups. And when the real world hits Jack with a real and very personal catastrophe, he can’t use the twelve-steps to sidestep his pain.

At this point, Fight Club opens the door for Brad Pitt’s nihilistic maniac Tyler Durden. After a brief meeting on an airplane, Tyler and Jack somehow form a relationship as balanced as the yin and the yang on Jack’s departed coffee table. Tyler doesn’t have any trouble sleeping. He’s a soap-making entrepreneur (you learn a lot more about the soap-making process than you want to), outside the system, outside materialism, outside any sense of right or wrong.

Tyler, himself a walking sartorial sight gag, lives in a trashed-out nightmare of a house that represents a fantastic step forward in the lively art of set design. This house would cause Kosovar refugees to turn up their noses and ask for a nice, dry tent. Martha Stewart would go mad with horror and fear. This is the kind of house that would make Bob Vila drop his tool belt and sadly walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity.

Together, Tyler and Durden found Fight Club, where men of all shapes and sizes can pummel each other senselessly. I said earlier that I thought that Fight Club was about men and manliness, which is 100% wrong. It’s about boys and boyishness. Men fight, but they fight for reasons, be it honor or protection of the weak or a multi-million-dollar pay-per-view purse. Fight Club is fighting for the sake of fighting, just the way it took place on the Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary School playground. The only thing different is that no one is stealing anyone else’s lunch money.

Fight Club eventually develops into Project Mayhem, which is more childish but is childishly creative as well. The men of Fight Club set up code words and play soldier and get to stay up all night smashing things. The audience can, and does, take some juvenile pleasure in seeing the world’s biggest bowling ball run over a Starbucks, but that’s it. No one in Project Mayhem is dealing with their problems, they’re blowing them up instead.

Fight Club itself has problems if its own that it doesn’t deal with, either. Fight Club is as nonsensical as a history lesson from Pat Buchanan or (to be nonpartisan) grand jury testimony from Bill Clinton. It is lavishly overproduced, with baroque touches like talking penguins and subliminal film splicing. Everything is laid on too thick, from the incessant, whiny narration to the blood flowing from Edward Norton’s nose to Brad Pitt’s tough-guy act to Helena Bonham Carter’s eyeshadow. The whole movie screams of excess. (The screaming, unfortunately, is loud enough to drown out a solid performance by Ed Norton and a dead-on Winona Ryder impression by Helena Bonham Carter.)

The final verdict on Fight Club is a split decision. There’s a lot to like and admire about the moviemaking skill that all parties (even Brad Pitt) display. If all you’re looking for is a fun, mindless movie, Fight Club may be for you. But just as there’s a message in Fight Club — a message that none of the actors heed — there’s also a danger. The danger in Fight Club, like the danger in nihilism itself, is that some people will actually take it seriously.

The Elements of Style

The problem with Finding Forrester is that it is about a writer. Two writers, actually; a reclusive one-hit wonder novelist and a young high school student. It seems like a wonderful idea for a movie at first blush, but it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because it’s almost impossible to make a good movie about writers.

Unlike doctors, or lawyers, or astronauts, or secret agents, writers have a lousy track record in the movies. I can’t tell you why, exactly, but Hollywood has this funny notion that writers are… well… weird. And neurotic. And, sometimes, psychotic.

Don’t believe me? There are three actors who have won recent Academy Awards for their portrayal of writers. Jack Nicholson won for As Good As It Gets, playing a romance novelist with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a symphony of weird, neurotic habits to go along with it. Nicolas Cage won for Leaving Las Vegas, playing a alcoholic writer with depression and suicidal tendencies. And Daniel Day-Lewis won for My Left Foot, playing Christy Brown, the Irish poet who was no ray of sunshine, either. Not to mention that three — no, wait, four, counting Sean Connery in this movie — of the contenders for Best Actor this year are actors playing struggling, neurotic writers; Michael Douglas dealing with writer’s block in Wonder Boys, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the deeply neurotic screenwriter in State and Main, and Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade in Quills, about whom the less said, the better.

And that’s just the top of the order. Woody Allen in Deconstructing Harry. The ditsy Kathleen Turner in Romancing The Stone. Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From the Train. Jeremy Davies in Saving Private Ryan Fred MacMurray in The Caine Mutiny. Philip Seymour Hoffman, again, in Almost Famous, and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, playing real-life gonzo journalists. And that’s just the performances I can think of off the top of my head. Special consideration, of course, goes to Anthony Hopkins and Kevin Spacey; Hannibal Lecter wrote articles for psychology journals, and John Doe in Se7en was a prolific diarist. (Two exceptions help prove the rule. Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love came off pretty good; a little frantic, but mostly a levelheaded performance. Denzel Washington’s Hurricane Carter wrote a book in The Hurricane,, but he wasn’t what you’d call a writer, primarily.)

In fact, the best way to show that a writer is at least relatively sane is to pair him with another character who isn’t. James Caan was superstitious and twitchy in Misery, but any mental problems he might have had were overshadowed by Kathy Bates’s character. And then there was James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams, playing a reclusive 1950’s novelist, obsessed with baseball, who defiantly wants to be left alone, paired with the mightily confused Kevin Costner. “You’re seeing a whole team of psychiatrists, aren’t you?” Jones asks at one point.

It is this last character that is the model for William Forrester (Connery), who we’re told produced the 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and never wrote another published word again. (Ernest Hemingway actually won the 1953 Pulitzer for “The Old Man and the Sea”. The Pulitzer committee didn’t give a prize for fiction in 1954; would have been much more respectful to Papa Hemingway to have chosen that year, instead. But I digress. I do that.)

Forrester lives in a decaying apartment in the Bronx where he watches Jeopardy!, collects his royalty checks when he remembers to, drinks J&B scotch, neat, and watches the songbirds fly and the young men in the neighborhood play basketball. And he writes a little; and reads a little. (Or at least I think so; I have a sneaking suspicion that the large pile of books on the table are volumes of the Federal Reporter; federal circuit court decisions are nobody’s idea of leisure reading.) And that’s about it.

Forrester is silent, withdrawn, mysterious; a South Bronx urban legend known as “The Window”. (One can’t help but wonder if the nefarious New York rent control laws have something to do with his continued residence in the neighborhood.) On a dare, young Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) breaks into Forrester’s apartment; he tries to swipe a memento but instead ends up leaving his backpack behind. The next day, the pack is thrown out the window; Forrester has made corrections and comments in a series of notebooks containing Jamal’s thoughts and writings. The two form a relationship, with Forrester commenting on Brown’s work.

This should have been a perfectly good basis for a movie. Unfortunately, the screenplay falls for one of the biggest traps in the movies today. It believes that drama derives from situations, not from relationships. The meat of the story of Finding Forrester should be the relationship between Connery and Brown. Instead of having faith in that relationship, instead of counting on the actors to handle the heavy lifting in the movie, the screenplay relies on a set of contrivances to create dramatic tension. The script has Brown attending an exclusive Manhattan private school and locking horns with F. Murray Abraham, who plays the sort of teacher who took to education only because it paid better than pulling the wings off flies. He ends up in a romantic entanglement with Anna Paquin. who may be thankful for her thankless part if only to get to play a relatively normal character for once. And he ends up playing the key role for the school’s basketball team in the Big Game, of course. Finding Forrester depends on these scenes for manufacturing dramatic tension instead of finding a purer, more resonant version in the dialogue between the reclusive old man and the struggling young writer.

What’s annoying about Finding Forrester is that director Gus Van Sant certainly knows better. Finding Forrester pales in comparison to Van Sant’s stellar Good Will Hunting, which handled the mentorship relationship between Matt Damon and Robin Williams with infinitely more humor, depth and caring. Furthermore, Good Will Hunting had the sense to keep its Bad Guy character — Damon’s abusive father — offscreen for all but one simple, effective moment; while the Bad Guy teacher in Finding Forrester consumes lots of screen time indiscriminately. Van Sant had faith in the relationship between Damon and Williams — not to mention the relationships between Damon and Ben Affleck, and Damon and Minnie Driver — and his faith was repaid ten times over. Here, Van Sant apparently has more faith in the meandering subplots than he has for the real story, the true heart of the piece.

None of the subplots are bad, necessarily, but they belong in another, lesser movie. The subplot with Paquin, for example, leads to one of the movie’s clunkier moments. Connery and Brown are talking about something or other, and Connery interjects; “So what about this girl you’re always telling me about?” Brown is silent, as well he might be; to the audience’s knowledge, he hasn’t said anything about the girl to Connery. But he has, though, and the audience just hasn’t been around to hear it. We’ve been left out of part of the conversation, we realize. Then we realize we’ve probably been left out of the good parts of the conversation, and feel somewhat cheated.

The parts of the conversation we do hear aren’t that great, and mostly don’t revolve around writing but around Forrester’s eccentricities. We get to hear why he wears his socks inside-out, and some of his personal story, and how he blackballed F. Murray Abraham from getting his book published. We don’t get to hear him really teach Brown how to write, though — we only get the barest hint of what either of them are writing about, even. We get to hear them discuss the language exactly one time, but it’s on a grammar rule; it’s a little like Strunk talking to White. (Actually, that would be a much better movie than Finding Forrester. Much.) Brown’s writing abilities — the elements of his style, if you will — are what draw him to Forrester, what draw him out of the South Bronx and into Manhatttan, what set him apart from his classmates, what attracts the enmity of Abraham. But there’s very little of it on display.

This is a shame, because that’s what the movie is supposed to be about, and it’s not about that. And it’s also not about the relationship between Brown and Connery, which it also should be about. (This is not the fault of the actors, mind you; Connery does a sterling job, and Brown more than holds his own.) Instead, it turns into a parable against racism — not even racism, really, but what our new President calls the “soft bigotry of low expectations”; its goal is to set up the loathsome F. Murray Abraham as a straw man and knock him all to pieces. It does that effectively, but that shouldn’t be all it does.

One of the central scenes in Finding Forrester has Brown standing at the free-throw line in the big game. He shoots the ball, and it goes a little long, hitting the glass, bouncing off the rim. Clink. Clunk. It’s more than a missed free throw, it’s a metaphor for the movie. Finding Forrester ought to have been an easy shot, but it bounces off the rim and falls flat on the floor. Clink. Clunk. Crash. Finding Forrester is a missed foul shot of a movie. And it’s all the more painful because it has many of the elements of style in place, but no idea how to put them together.

C’mon, Take The Money and Run

British humor — or, more accurately, humour — is well known for being dry, and for being largely inaccessible to American viewers. Therefore, it’s not too terribly surprising that American reviewers of Formula 51 have universally panned it; nobody told them that it was supposed to be a comedy. If you’re under the impression that Formula 51 is supposed to be some kind of gritty action picture, naturally you will see it as a complete waste of time, a totally botched effort. But if you’re aware ahead of time that it’s a spoof, an intermittently clever takeoff of all those gritty action pictures, then the movie gets a good deal better, almost to the point that it’s borderline enjoyable.

So one of the problems is that the filmmakers forgot to tell the reviewers that Formula 51 is a comedy. Unfortunately, they also seem to have forgotten to tell the actors.

Nobody appears to have told Samuel L. Jackson, for example, that this was a comedy, with the possible exception of the costuming department. (Which is odd, because he is the star and the executive producer to boot, and this is the sort of thing you would think to find out before you make a movie.) Jackson is a talented, subtle actor, and here he’s reduced to something like a giant sight gag. For reasons best left alone, Jackson spends the bulk of the movie dressed in a kilt, complete with a black patent-leather sporran. This, in and of itself, is supposed to be hilarious, but it falls far short.

The kilt is such a touchstone for the movie that it’s worth exploring how such a thing could be funny. If the kilt were forced on Jackson for some reason, it might be funny, like the scene in Pulp Fiction where a bloodspattered Jackson and John Travolta must wear what’s in the back of Quentin Tarantino’s closet. But it seems as though it’s a fashion statement for Jackson, all the more so because he’s toting a set of golf clubs. The humor that we get is from a various lot of Brits telling Jackson various comments on the order of “Nice dress”. This is not funny, unless the sight of Samuel L. Jackson whacking a lot of British yobbos with a titanium driver is funny in and of itself, which it doesn’t seem to be.

Jackson is a genius chemist working as a street pharmacologist for an American drug dealer called “The Lizard” (played by Meat Loaf, again for reasons best left alone). Jackson is in Liverpool to try to sell a newly formulated drug, 51 more times powerful than cocaine and heroin put together, and perfectly legal to boot. And selling it in Liverpool, of all places, makes no sense whatsoever until you understand that it is designed primarily to get the film crew out of Southern California and into a more cost-friendly environment.

It has the added bonus of putting Jackson in the beloved Hollywood fish-out-of-water situation, although not much is done with this. Jackson gets to register his disgust with a platter of greasy fish and chips, and lectures others on the superiority of baseball to cricket, but that’s about it as far as comedy goes.

Then there is Robert Carlyle, playing one of the aforementioned British yobbos, a soccer hooligan in a suit coat. The funny part of his character is supposed to be his devotion to Liverpool’s soccer team, about which the movie assumes more than American audiences actually know. (Which is, of course, nothing, although we learn that the Liverpool team anthem is “You’ll Never Walk Alone, again, for reasons best left alone.) But this never really registers with the audience; there are enough rabid sports fans in America that Carlyle’s passion for the Liverpool FC hardly seems extreme or even unusual.

Then there is Carlyle’s romance with the winsome Emily Mortimer, who is playing a sniper in the Lizard’s employ. (It is not altogether clear why, given the current spate of sniper shootings in the Washington, DC area, this film was released and Phone Booth was not.) Her character is the least funny of the lot, and she is relegated to the part of The Girl, again, for reasons that are best left alone.

Only Rhys Ifans seems to realize that this is a comedy, and plays the part of his wild-eyed Liverpudlian drug dealer with brio and panache. “Drugs,” he tells us, “are our mates,” and it’s nice to see someone on screen taking pride in their profession for a change. Ifans is not given nearly enough screen time, and Formula 51 might have been considerably better if he were the movie’s focus instead of the dour Jackson.

Formula 51 is not necessarily a bad movie, just a dumb and derivative one. It is directed with considerable energy by Hong Kong veteran Ronny Yu (who sports titles on his IMDb bio like Shogun and His Little Kitchen and Chase Ghost Seven Powers). When the movie remembers to be funny, it often is. But it would have worked so much better if it had been crafted as a spoof, if the actors and the producers and the directors were let in on the joke, if the movie’s motivation had been to entertain the audience instead of taking their money and running off with it.

Faith of Our Fathers

As it happens, Frailty is the second movie in as many weeks that takes place on my home turf. (The second is The Rookie, set in part in The Ballpark in Arlington.) Most of the movie is set in 1979, when I was ten years old, and the movie’s protagonist is ten years old, too. The movie is set in a North Texas town not too different from where I grew up (although, according to the IMDb, the movie was filmed in California). Consequently, everything about the look and feel of the movie seems is completely familiar to me. I remember what it was like growing up at that time, in that place; the beat-up El Camino with Texas plates, the TV dinners in aluminum foil carapaces, the East Texas pine trees, the plastic glasses with the pebbly surface, the typefaces of the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram. The young protagonist has in his bedroom the exact same “Dallas Cowboys - World Champions” pennant that I had in my bedroom in 1979. Bill Paxton’s character has an angel-shaped trophy in his bedroom that looks almost exactly like the one that I won in middle school for essay-writing. For me, these minor details are much more chilling, in their way, than any of the horrifying kidnappings and cold-blooded murders that take place in Frailty.

What is different, of course, is the moral landscape. The plastic trophy in Paxton’s room begins to speak to him, taking the form of an angelic vision. Paxton emerges from this vision with the clarity, certainty, and insanity that is the mark of the true fanatic. The vision, we are told, provides a list of demons in human shape that walk among us — indistinguishable from everyday humanity — and that must perforce be destroyed with a brace of magical weapons, including a vicious-looking ax.

The twist here is that Paxton is so crazy (and, contrariwise, so convinced that he is not crazy) that he drags his two children along into this belief system. Fenton (age 10) and Adam (age 7) are awoken from a sound sleep in the lonely hours of the night and informed that they must join their father in the good work of destroying demons. Adam is enthusiastic, enough so that he comes up with his own list (in crayon) of demons that includes a schoolyard bully. Fenton is dismissive and skeptical, and then increasingly horrified and fearful as the body count begins to ramp up.

Frailty would like to be many things that it is not. It would like, one suspects, to be a blood-and-gore horror movie, but it doesn’t (pardon the pun) seem to have the guts to do so. The camera pulls away from the ax every time it falls, and only hints at the dismemberment that follows. It would like to be a film noir, especially in the scenes where FBI agent Powers Boothe confronts Matthew McConaughey as one of the grown-up children (imagine, if you will, what the support group meetings of the Adult Children of Serial Killers are like), but it flubs the required grotesque twist ending. Similarly, the 1979 scenes aspire to a Southern Gothic transcendence, but don’t quite reach that level; the family setting seems entirely too normal, despite the killings, for one thing. (A real Southern Gothic religious ax murderer would be singing “Bringing in the Sheaves,” not “Onward Christian Soldiers,” while chopping up bodies, don’t you know.) It boasts a few dark comedy moments — especially the scene where Paxton tells his son he’s proud of his dungeon-digging efforts — but not nearly enough.

Frailty works best as a dark moral fable about parenting. Paxton (who also directs) is an archetypical blue-collar Southern father who wants to pass on a legacy of persistence and hard work and love. But his madness changes and warps that legacy, turns it into something evil and sinister. That Paxton is a loving and caring father makes things much worse. Frailty is fundamentally about the faith of our fathers, and how that faith is handed down from father to son, and what can happen if that frail faith is broken.