I Can’t Tell You Why

In 2002, the best scene in any movie was in About a Boy. I am not saying that it is the best movie of the year; it isn’t, quite. I am not saying that it boasts the best screenplay, or performances, or music, for it does not, quite. All it has is the best scene of the year, and that is enough.

Of course, the best scene of the year is not one that I can quite tell you about. Two reasons. The first, of course, is selfish; one does not want to be the kind of reviewer to give away spoilers, to have the reputation for giving away the ending of scenes. But the second is altruistic on my part. I want you — especially if you are, say, going to see Two Weeks Notice or something else not quite so good — to see About a Boy, to enjoy the scene, to feel the way that you feel when you see it.

Altruism is a rare enough thing, and it certainly forms no part of Hugh Grant’s world here. He plays a character with what could almost be called an endearingly selfish view of the world. We learn, early on, that Grant is the heir to a smallish fortune and an ongoing, never-ending stream of revenue. (Again, I will not give away the details here.) We also learn early on that he believes, wholeheartedly, in the notion that the entertainment industry is so advanced that it is, indeed, possible for a man to be an island, to live in his ample, tastefully furnished flat, and listen to CDs and watch DVDs and eat takeout all the livelong day, without doing a single blessed thing or talking to anyone else. “Selfish” may not in fact be the appropriate word here; Grant is all but oblivious to the existence of other people. Furthermore, he’s smart and self-aware enough to know his shortcomings. (We know this from the frequent voice-overs, straight from the Nick Hornby book, one expects.)

The one thing Grant cannot get easily in his island is sex. I do not mean here he is looking for anyone with which to share his island; that doesn’t seem to be a concern. It is not intimacy he is after. It is reasonably attractive women who are easily impressed by his shallow charm. Unfortunately, he seems to have run through the local population of eligible women, and embarks on a desperate course of action — dating single mothers. While this has its drawbacks for Grant, on the whole it gets him what it wants, and that’s all he’s after anyway.

But all you’re after is information about the scene, the one truly excellent scene in the movie, and that I cannot give away. I can tell you that in the scene Grant shares the stage (literally) with a boy, played by Nicholas Hoult. I will not give away the secret of how the boy comes into contact with Grant, or how their relationship grows, or what it is that motivates him to come into contact with Grant. I can say that Toni Collette plays the boy’s mother, and that she does a superb job, but not really why I think so.

I suppose that I can tell you why I liked About a Boy and why I didn’t like High Fidelity, even though they are based on Nick Hornby books (unread by me) and feature bright, single men narrating the failures of their lives amidst the detrius of popular entertainment. I hated High Fidelity because it was, I felt, too close to my life, cut too deeply. It is a better movie than I gave it credit for, I think, although I can’t see that I would care to watch it again, despite the excellence of John Cusack’s performance. About a Boy could have had that same sort of evil resonance with me; that it does not is wholly because of Hugh Grant, who plays his character to the smarmy, oily hilt. Cusack’s character didn’t work for me because he was a recognizable human being doing monstrous things; Grant’s character is a monstrous person doing recognizable human things.

At least until the climactic scene of the movie.

Sigh.

All I am saying here, all that I am really asking of you, is a little scrap of belief. Trust me when I tell you that there is a great scene here. Belive me when I say that About a Boy is not just some lame Hugh Grant run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, that it will grab you, it will touch you, and that it is about love and sacrifice and faith and everything that we want movies to be about.

Thank you for your time and patience.

See About a Boy.

The King of That

The worst thing about Adaptation is its screenplay.

This is not to say that the screenplay in Adaptation is bad. Well, actually, it is. Sort of. I mean, it’s brilliant, and everything, but it’s still bad. Famously bad, even.

The story is the stuff of legend. You have a famous Hollywood screenwriter, well known for his creativity in a business where originality took a hike some time ago and is now in semi-retirement in Arizona, selling real estate. His next task is adapting a book for the screen — well, not exactly a book, you see, more like an extended magazine article, a halfway-ironic story about the environment and law enforcement and natural selection, and who knows what all. And it’s out of the New Yorker, you know, which is good and traditional and all, especially since they fired that English chick, what’s her name. But it’s not what your movie fan reads, it’s not like it was out of Movieline or Premiere or, God help us, Entertainment Weekly, it’s not something that people will be familiar with. And the thing is padded, you know, stuffed to the end papers with trivia, like some sort of demon-possessed John McPhee book with bits and pieces of information drawn from, well, the whole wide world, the entire history of everything, thrown in here and there. And — and this is key, damn it, it’s about flowers, about orchids, which are nice and all, but which just sit there, you know, just sit there and look pretty, which is fine for the visuals, the look of the picture, but don’t do a thing — not one single God-blessed thing — to move the narrative forward. And then, just to top it off, you have the main character, the hero of the piece, who is just impossible. A swamp rat with a rattletrap van! A charming rogue, sure, but he’s also a horticulturist, someone who knows the Latin names for plants, a self-important pseudo-intellectual cracker with long hair and no front teeth. Impossible! Can’t be done.

So the screenwriter, who is under the gun, turns in this… well… it’s hard to pigeonhole it… turns in this thing, this narcissistic self-absorbed navel-gazing piece of… well, it’s just bad. What he’s done, you see, is to make the screenplay about him, not about orchids or the literary style of the New Yorker or about the intricacies of the Endangered Species Act or anything else even closely related to the book, but about him! Imagine what kind of level of egotism it would take to do something like that! To write about yourself in the context of somebody else’s book! And not only that, to cast yourself in the worst possible light, to show yourself as an old, fat, balding pathetic excuse for a human being, twisted around the narrative like a pretzel, broken on the wheel of enforced creative output.

And that’s just the beginning of it. The screenplay is bad enough just in its structure and its conceits and the general overall creepiness of its main character, the aforementioned screenwriter, but does it have to provide an identical twin for the character? Who may or may not exist? (Just try getting a straight answer to that question!) No straightforward photography in this picture, this means mirrors and trick shots and who-knows-what-all! And the majority of the sex in the movie is… well, better not go into that. And all those scenes in the lost and trackless swamp, just a miserable place to shoot, maybe the worst possible environment for delicate electronic equipment. And this guy calls himself a screenwriter! Oh, dear God… just imagine how you cast this part, nobody’s going to want to do this, nobody is going to want to play a writer in the first place, much less a fat balding pathetic wretch who’s only in the movie because he can’t, apparently, write his way out of a wet paper bag.

You see what I mean about the screenplay.

But that’s the worst part of the movie. The worst part! Even though the screenplay is undeniably brilliant and creative and different and unpredictable, everything else in the movie overshadows it. Think of it! Adaptation is wonderful, fabulous, simply sublime. Despite the weaknesses, the twitches, the overwhelming — there’s no other phrase for it — monstrous narcissistic obnoxiousness of the screenplay — the movie succeeds, it soars, it… yes! even inspires.

There’s enough credit for this astonishing, amazing, unprecedented achievement to go around. Let us first provide all due praise to director Spike Jonze, who rides, powerful but unseen, on the back of this wild beast of a screenplay, this heaving, rolling, bucking bronco of a narrative, and makes the damned thing gallop, gives it momentum. Given the impossible task of making a movie out of an impossible screenplay adapted from an impossible book, Jonze pulls off a tour de force, a movie that is brilliant, eloquent, and meaningful.

What Jonze does here is simple and graceful; he accepts the absurdity inherent in the screenplay without beating the audience over the head with it. It would have been easier to call attention to the nature of the screenplay, to highlight its twisted logic in the same way that the screenwriter highlights passages in The Orchid Thief. Instead, Jonze lets the audience discover the screenplay’s absurdities and ironies and pretzel logic for themselves. It’s an approach that rewards the intelligent viewer (assuming there are a few of them out there; they may be more endangered than the movie’s “ghost orchid”). Matters such as the curiously charming Seminole nurseryman and the impressively crude agent and the famously overbearing script doctor are handled with an impressive grace and aplomb.

Then there is the acting. A self-absorbed screenplay like this lives and dies based on its main character; Adaptation is extraordinarily fortunate to have Nicolas Cage at the top of his form. Cage has the part of the self-destructive screenwriter, and it’s a treat to watch him twist and squirm his way through the movie. Cage has what one reviewer (OK, well, me) called a “particular combination of deadpan hangdog stubbornness and manic energy”. He’s got both on display, showing the agony of the frustrated writer stubbornly clinging to the task of finishing the killer screenplay as well as the occasional breakthrough of mad creative inspiration. It’s a perfect part for Cage, playing both to the neurotic and recklessly overconfident aspects of his nature. He turns in a brilliant acting job, somehow making the audience care about his character despite his constant whiny voiceovers and obsessive self-loathing and his general obliviousness to the world around him.

And this may not be the best acting performance in the movie. You have the supporting cast. Brian Cox, for one, who suddenly, out of nowhere, this year became the best character actor in the world. He’s got a small part, but a vital one, and the best self-referential line in the movie. Chris Cooper as the Orchid Thief his own bad self, reveling in the Low Rent lifestyle and greasy mullet and cracker accent. Then there is Meryl Streep, whose performance surpasses even Streepian-level expectations, and which will be undescribed here as a treat for the audience.

Then there is the ending, which likewise must go undescribed; although it is adequately foreshadowed, it is still a delicious surprise.

“Why not just put in a wild story?” Cage’s character is asked by his agent. “You’re the king of that.” Cage’s character is the king, the king of the postmodern semi-nihilist philosophical thrill ride, and he has created here a brilliant, wonderful screenplay that waves its deficiencies in the air like banners. But Adaptation is more than just a brilliant screenplay; it’s a wonderful movie that engages the hearts and minds of the audience. More than that, it writes the audience into the screenplay, too, invites them to share the jokes, to feel the pressure of incipient failure, to understand that flowers can transcend their plantlike sameness to become important, vital characters in a narrative. Adaptation will challenge you, test you, draw you out, make you think and feel and care, and that is what great movies do.

And you will never, ever, pick up a phone and listen to a dial tone the same way again.

Indifferent Honest

There are exactly two ways that Antwone Fisher could have been a good movie.

First, it could have been about someone who is exceptional in some way, or does exceptional things. This is true of just about every single biopic out there. In fact, two of the best movies of the year are biopics. You have The Rookie, about a schoolteacher who finds his way into major league baseball, and 24 Hour Party People, about a TV journalist who helped create the British punk rock scene. You have two characters in these movies that are based on exceptional, interesting, real people, that are enlivened by stellar actors. (Dennis Quaid and Steve Coogan, both of whom turn out Oscar-worthy performances.) You can also throw in Mel Gibson as a cavalry colonel in Vietnam in We Were Soldiers into the mix if you’re feeling generous; it’s an interesting life and a good performance despite a horrible Randall Wallace screenplay.

But that doesn’t work here. Antwone Fisher is the more-or-less true story of Antwone Fisher, who has done one exceptional thing with his life so far. He has sold a screenplay. This — especially for us aspiring authors out there — is extremely interesting. Except that isn’t what the movie is about. Antwone Fisher is not about Antwone Fisher writing his screenplay and then selling it. It is about his earlier career as a petty officer aboard USS BELLEAU WOOD. We see him get into fights, receive psychiatric treatment, fall in love with a pretty girl, and connect with his long-lost family. There are many things you can say about this story, but “interesting” would not necessarily be one of them.

(You could say, if you were being charitable, that this is a “coming of age” story. This is true but uninteresting. You basically have the story of a young man growing up and coming to terms with his past, in the same way that all of us do. It’s a familiar enough story, all the more because it’s been a part of a thousand movies in the last century, but there isn’t anything especially interesting or different or exceptional about Antwone Fisher’s story that would make anyone take notice of it.)

There is, though, a second way. It is the more excellent way, but it is a harder and a riskier way. That is the path of total honesty. The only other way for Antwone Fisher to succeed in telling the story of Antwone Fisher is for Antwone Fisher to be totally, ruthlessly honest about his life. Because if you can be honest with yourself, and portray the events of your life in an honest and fearless way, then that in itself is extraordinary. Antwone Fisher had the potential to live up to its press clippings, had the chance to be a good movie, to tell its story in an interesting way, and to reach audiences. All that Antwone Fisher had to do to make sure that Antwone Fisher was a top-flight movie was to be completely, fundamentally, totally honest — honest with himself to begin with, and with the audience.

Antwone Fisher is not that honest, and Antwone Fisher is not that good of a movie as a result.

This is a serious charge, mind you, and I don’t feel altogether confident in making it, but there you go. I believe that the events of Antwone Fisher’s life are told correctly, with reasonable factual accuracy. I don’t dispute that he experienced abandonment and abuse and loss, and that he had difficulty dealing with his emotions as a result.

What I believe, though, is that the events in the life of Antwone Fisher are not presented as they really happened. Instead, things have been buffed and polished so much that the whole movie smells like Lemon Pledge. This is a story that has been resolutely sanitized, with the passion and emotion and honesty scrubbed away, until all that is left is a gleaming antiseptic shell.

Since I am asking Antwone Fisher to be honest, I will be honest. I am an adopted child; I never knew my biological parents. I don’t know if they are living or dead. I have not experienced a tenth — not a thousandth — of the things in my life that we learn happen to Antwone Fisher in his life, and for that I am grateful. But I share the fantasy; the idea that some day, I will meet my biological mother, talk to her, tell her about who I am and everything that I have done. This is apparently what Antwone Fisher did, and it is one of the climactic scenes in Antwone Fisher the movie.

Without giving too much away, all I can say is that I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it for one minute. I believed that something like this happened, fine, but I didn’t believe that it happened the way it did. From my perspective, it could not have happened like that. I don’t know exactly would happen if I were in that situation, or what really happened in Antwone Fisher’s situation, but something tells me that what happened on the screen didn’t happen in real life, not that way it didn’t.

This scene has, instead, all the earmarks of a fantasy, something that is desired but that is too perfect to actually exist. In a fantasy, people act the way you want them to. That is the nature of a fantasy. In reality, almost nobody acts the way you want them to, says the things you want to hear, are the people you want them to be. In Antwone Fisher, most of the other characters act the way they would in a fantasy. It’s certainly true of Fisher’s girlfriend (Joy Bryant), who puts up with Fisher even when she knows he’s lying, which is not typical girlfriend behavior. It is true of Fisher himself, at least while he is on USS BELLEAU WOOD. (By this I mean we never see him do a lick of work; he’s always sitting in his bunk writing his screenplay or something.) And if the portrayal of those characters isn’t honest, if the portrayal of Fisher’s confrontation with his mother is not honest… well, then, what are we to believe? What can we believe?

This is especially problematic because a large portion of the movie takes place on the psychiatrist’s couch of Denzel Washington. These scenes are the best scenes, by far, in Antwone Fisher, but they only work if we know that both actors are being honest with the audience. But if Antwone Fisher’s story is, at best, only indifferent honest, it casts a shadow over these scenes. (This is especially true of the very last scene that Washington is in, which is palpably untrue.)

I can understand that Antwone Fisher is not always going to be completely honest. I wouldn’t be completely honest in telling my life story; I don’t know that you would be either. The problem, as I see it, is not so much that Antwone Fisher is indifferent honest, but that it is almost completely self-serving. Everything that is done that seems to be a departure from reality is done to make Antwone Fisher look good, to make him look honest and noble, to make it look as though his story is exceptional, in a way that it is not.

And so we come full circle. As I said, there were only two ways for Antwone Fisher to be a good movie. It fails badly at both of them.

A World More Full of Weeping

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

No one — at least, no one who has seen Tomb Raider recently — would ever make the statement that movie directors are “unacknowledged legislators” of anything. For one thing, movie directors are not the sort of people who go unacknowledged; Hollywood recently came close to shutting down over the question of how to best acknowledge directors as opposed to script writers. And despite their occasional forays into the public policy arena, directors have little influence on the direction of laws. (One expects that they would like to, of course; A.I. itself actually begins with the ritual invocation of the Hollywood political muses by paying obeisance to the fashionable liberal dogma on global warming.)

However, there is substantial backing for the idea that Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are two of the unacknowledged ethicists of the 21st century. You can go all the way back to Dr. Strangelove for a lesson in the ethics of Mutual Assured Destruction if you like. 2001: A Space Odyssey explored the dangers inherent in a computerized mind without ethics. Both E.T. and Close Encounters dealt with the ethics of dealing with alien civilizations, and Jurassic Park is a powerful warning about biotechnology and cloning. And given that A.I. began as a collaboration between Spielberg and Kubrick, it is reasonable — and perhaps inevitable — to assume that A.I. has something to say about ethical behavior towards artificial life forms.

A.I. is the story of David (Haley Joel Osment), who is a “mecha”, a robot child designed to express love and affection towards its lonely human parents. When first we see David, he is entering the apartment of Henry and Monica, uber-yuppies of the future living lives of quiet desperation in a New Jersey home that looks for all the world like an abandoned Pottery Barn outlet. Henry and Monica have a young son named Martin who has experienced a nameless accident and has been flash-frozen in a cryogenics laboratory; strict population controls mean that they cannot have another child. (If I were Spielberg, I would spend less time explaining about global warning and more time explaining how the Chinese Communist Party took over New Jersey.)

As David tries to integrate himself into the lives of Henry and Monica, we get a sense of how unspeakably grotesque the whole thing is. David is capable of mimicking the reactions of a small boy, pretending to lie down and sleep, miming Henry and Monica as they eat, but the whole thing is off-center, tilted, distorted like the seemingly endless reflections of glass blocks and strips of mirror in the Swedish Modern paradise where the family lives. In its own quiet, domestic way, A.I. is every bit as twisted and disturbing as George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, or the trial of Kirk Douglas’s soldiers in Paths of Glory, or the way that HAL sings in 2001, or what the marching soldiers chant at the end of Full Metal Jacket. A situation this grotesque cannot go on forever, and inevitably results in stresses and strains and fractures within the family unit, leading up to a scene of — and there is no other way to say this — dreadful cruelty and appalling heartlessness, made all the worse by just how inevitable the whole thing is.

(This is something I almost never do, but I cannot warn parents strongly enough that A.I. is emphatically not a film for children. If you take your eight-year-old to see this movie, you are guaranteed nightmares for a month. I could not be more serious about this. Parents sometimes take children to see even R-rated movies thinking that they won’t understand what they see and hear, and that may be true, but there is no way that any child will misunderstand the abuse that goes on, or fail to identify with what Osment’s character is feeling when it happens. It is a wrenching, moving scene that would, I believe, horrify even the most well-adjusted child. Please — please — go see Shrek again instead.)

This has the effect of tearing David away from his IKEA heaven and landing him straight into the maw of the real world, where the ethical issues that robots pose to humans are being resolved at knifepoint. (If A.I. does nothing else, it guarantees that you will never watch an episode of “Battlebots” in quite the same way again.) David is thrust into one bizarre setting after another in a 21st century Pilgrim’s Progress through a Vanity Fair and various other hellholes. His guide is Gigolo Joe (Jude Law, who was in Gattaca, another cautionary tale of futuristic ethics) who protects him and imparts what passes for robotic wisdom.

This is the area of the movie that is the most technically well-done, as Spielberg takes us through a mutant heavy metal carnival, a gloriously twisted neon city (that bears an unfortunate resemblance in spots to the Joel Schumacher version of Gotham City), and the majestically flooded city of New York. The acting is also first-rate, Law as an artificially stylish hustler, William Hurt as a gentle genius, Robin Williams (at least I think so) in an uncredited voice-over cameo.

None of this, however, is too important.

What makes A.I. an important, although badly flawed, movie is that it despite appearances, it has nothing to do and little to say about the relationships between robots and humans. It has everything to do (up to a point) with faith, and what we believe in, and why. It is important to remember — especially when evaluating Osment’s role — that what we see on screen is a little boy playing the part of a robot who is playing the part of a little boy. The movie’s interest in mechanism is a smokescreen. A.I. is best understood as an allegory, a commentary on faith and the relationship of human intelligence to its Creator. Its real issues have to do with God, and why we have been abandoned, and why the world is more full of weeping than we can understand.

Of course, as with any allegory, not everyone is going to have the same interpretation. And if you are part of the audience who believes, with Mrs. Malaprop, that allegories should be left on the banks of the Nile, you will be disappointed by just how confusing and depressing A.I. can be. If you are part of the audience who thinks that the movie ought to be about how we relate to robots (this apparently includes my main man R. Ebert), you will be disappointed that the movie is not more than it is. And if you are part of the audience who buys into the allegorical significance of the movie, you will be disappointed that the movie does not end where it should, and that Spielberg feels the need to extend the ending and resort to a phony deus ex machina. (And if you are part of the audience who brings in cell phones and feels the need to discuss various plot points in loud stage whispers, stay the hell home.)

A.I. is so constructed and so designed that it will please nobody completely. The Kubrickian part of the movie is literate, intelligent and thought-provoking while retaining the essential contradictions and grotesque character of his best work. The Spielbergian part of the movie is superbly cast and acted, and the visuals are put together by the greatest technical director of our time. There are moments when these halves fit together perfectly, where A.I. lives up to all of its considerable promise. But there are moments when the two halves clash together with a sickening wrench, where Kubrick’s intellectual passion crosses swords with Spielberg’s commercialized vision, where the whole thing collapses into an unsightly heap of sentiment. It is emphatically worth seeing, but like any piece of legislation (acknowledged or otherwise), it is so rife with confusion and compromise that it cannot fully meet anyone’s expectations.

Opportunity Costs

The principle of opportunity costs is simple. Part of the cost for everything you do is the missed opportunities for the things that you don’t do. If you go fishing this weekend, you lose the chance to go hiking. If you go to Florida on vacation, you lose the chance to go to California instead. Go out to a Mexican restaurant, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to order sesame chicken. Everything you do includes the loss of an opportunity for something else you might want to do.

I say this for a reason. If you want to see All Or Nothing, think about what it is you’re giving up. Two hours of watching this tiring, depressing, horrible movie is two hours you will never get back again, two hours that you could spend cooking a new dish or walking in the park or cuddling with your significant other or watching a baseball game. You could read a good book, volunteer to help the homeless, give blood, or do any number of good and necessary and useful things other than watch this desperately useless and appalling film.

All Or Nothing is about a group of lower-class families in a bleak tract of worker housing somewhere in London. The characters range from the mildly uninteresting to the mindlessly brutal to the completely dull. They work in crummy jobs, they gripe and complain and curse at each other constantly, they drink too much, they abuse one another endlessly. Not your basic recipe for a fun night out at the movies, this is.

There are three dysfunctional families in All Or Nothing, with various degrees of focus. Ron (Paul Jesson) is a recklessly incompetent cabdriver, his wife Carol (Marion Bailey) is drunker than General Grant, and their daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins) is a tart. Next door is Maureen (Ruth Sheen), who takes in laundry, and is the best thing about the movie just by being intermittenly perky. Her daughter is Donna (Helen Coker), another tart, having a bad spot in her relationship with local bad boy Jason (Daniel Mays). Downstairs live Phil (Timothy Spall, Vanilla Sky, Rock Star) and Penny (Lesley Manville); Phil also drives a cab, and Penny works at the local grocery store. Phil mumbles a lot, and Penny complains a lot, and that’s all you need to know about them. Their daughter Rachel (Alison Garland) is not a tramp, she’s a big inchoate blob who works at a nursing home. Their son Rory (James Corden) is a blob, too, a huge grunting layabout who shuttles from dinner table to couch, cursing back and forth.

To be fair, these are not the kinds of characters we normally see in movies. But director Mike Leigh doesn’t deserve any kudoes for putting these particular characters on the screen. The lives of these characters are so stunted, so narrow, so crude that putting them in a movie is one step short of cruel. Worse than that, they’re boring, and asking a perfectly nice movie audience to spend two hours with a lot of tacky, rude, and depressing characters in a boring, pointless movie is cruel, no two ways about it.

The real problem with the characters in All Or Nothing is that they have no opportunities left to them; no skills or education to fall back on, no experience to guide them in handling the situations that they find themselves in. There’s simply no way they can change their circumstances — ungrateful children, layabout spouses, abusive boyfriends, wretched working conditions — by themselves, they don’t have the tools for that. They’re all doomed; the only question is which circle of hell they will end up at, and whether or not they’ll drag the audience down with them.

I suppose I should be kinder to All Or Nothing. For one thing, the acting is superb. The actors are completely convincing in their roles; you always feel as though you’re around a pack of dull, pathetic jerks. And the movie has gotten its share of critical raves from those who find its melancholy appealing in some ways. But, still, I found All Or Nothing to be dull and oppressive and uninteresting and little more. Take whatever opportunity you have to see something else.

Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

What tips you off to Almost Famous is the beginning, actually, the credits themselves. What we see is a disembodied hand, wielding a pencil on a lined yellow legal pad. The hand writes the title of the movie, and then the actors names, and then gets to Frances McDormand. “Francis McDormand”, the hand writes, and then realizes its error, erases the offending “i”, and then completes the name.

The hand, we’re told, belongs to Cameron Crowe, the talented director/writer/producer of Jerry Maguire and Say Anything, and a man possessed of Olympian talent. (That is to say, he’s the best in his field, but we only see him once every four years.). The handwritten titles are not merely a clever trick or a low-budget cost-saving measure, instead, they send a powerful, subtle message. This is going to be Cameron Crowe’s movie, the work of his hands and his spirit and his own creative voice. This is going to be — in stark contrast to the mass-marketed multitudes of mediocre movies — a deeply personal work, stamped with a quiet independence. This is going to be, also, a movie that’s possessed with a subtle, dry humor, a movie that’s not afraid to poke gentle fun at the conventions. That’s a lot for one hand to promise, but it’s a promise that Crowe more than fulfills.

Almost Famous tells the story of Crowe’s experiences as an improbably — but not impossibly — young reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. Patrick Fugit plays William Miller, the fictional stand-in for Crowe, and it is here that we first touch on a bit of Crowe’s genius. Think about it. You’re choosing someone to play you, as a teenager. There would be — there would have to be — a temptation to choose someone pretty, someone self-assured, a polished actor who could deliver all of the lines in the movie that you never got to say in high school. It is to Crowe’s eternal credit that he chose Fugit, a scruffy-looking kid with a huge puffy haircut and a geeky voice that gets worse when he tries to sound older. Fugit is painfully earnest, and gets off some lines of dialogue that sound incomprehensible but are authentic in their very awkwardness. There hasn’t been an adolescent performance this honest, this smart since Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore — although the performances are worlds apart; Fugit is much more passive, much more reactive.

Crowe gives Fugit quite a lot to react to, starting with two of the best small performances of the year. The incomparable Frances McDormand plays Fugit’s mom, in what ought to be a thankless role but is not. In lesser hands, McDormand’s character might have been a stereotypical worrying mom, out of step with the hip, cool culture. There are elements of that in her performance, to be sure. When the older sister (played by the young actress Zooey Deschanel, whom you’ll recognize later by her improbably big blue eyes) tells McDormand that her little brother is considered a “nark”, McDormand has to ask for a translation, and then asks, “Narcotics officer? What’s wrong with that?” But when Fugit asks her for permission to go on tour with a rock band, she relents so completely that it’s hard to think that part of her isn’t excited by the opportunity.

Most of what we see from McDormand is over the phone after that (especially the most memorable scene of the movie, where she finally gets to speak her mind to a bona fide rock’n'roller). Phillip Seymour Hoffman also has to do most of his acting over the phone; he plays Fugit’s muse, a dissolute, cynical rock critic named Russell Bangs. Hoffman is spookily good as the uber-critic, dispensing pearls of wisdom to the young journalist. “Be honest, and be ruthless”, he tells Fugit, and he even applies that honesty to himself in a wry meditation on the essential uncoolness of writing.

Those are the uncool characters, but Crowe gives equal time to the cool characters. Almost Famous takes place in the years when being in a rock-n-roll band was the coolest thing that any teenage boy could hope to be. (We see that happen on the walls of Fugit’s room, even, the posters change from the astronauts to The Who.) Jason Lee and Billy Crudup are the leaders of a band called Stillwater, a fictional composite of the different bands that Crowe wrote about, and they’re relaxed and high-spirited and funny and… well…. cool. The band meets Fugit on a ramp leading into a San Diego concert venue, and bring him along on the tour for their new album, “Almost Famous”. (The title of the band’s next album is one of the biggest hoots in the movie that’s chock-full of humor.)

I hadn’t seen Lee in anything since Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and had to be reminded which character he played. He’s the lead singer, and he’s impressive in that role, but he’s not the leader of the band or of the movie. When the band’s T-shirts arrive, featuring Crudup prominently, he has his best scene, railing about just being one of the “out-of-focus guys”. (An apt comparison, most of the minor characters are more or less out-of-focus in the movie, slipping in and out of the picture.) Crudup, we’re told, is the “guitarist with mystique”, and it’s his mystique that carries the movie. Fugit chases him throughout the movie, tape recorder in hand, vainly trying to get an exclusive interview, but Crudup is almost always a step ahead. He’s enigmatic and magnetic, whether he’s screaming about being a golden god (while high on LSD and beer) or confiding his secrets to Fugit in the background. One suspects that Crowe created the role for Tom Cruise, but Crudup does such a good job that there’s almost no way that Tom Terrific could have improved the movie.

That’s high praise (maybe not, if you’re not a Cruise fan), and you’d expect Crudup to get the biggest career boost of all the ensemble cast. But if you remember anyone from this movie ten years from now, you’ll remember Kate Hudson, who plays super-groupie Penny Lane. Hudson is just flat-out adorable in this movie, and the camera loves her with a passion straight out of a cheap romance novel. You won’t remember very much that she says, mind you, Crowe doesn’t give her many good lines to speak of. But the way she looks when she’s on the bus… when she’s in the field, talking to Fugit… when she’s on the empty, flower-strewn stage in Cleveland… when she’s on the plane headed back west… when she’s in the restaurant in New York, with Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” in the background… well… it’s a performance that will stick with you for a long time.

“You’re taking notes with your eyes,” Crudup tells Fugit at one point, and it’s probably the truest thing that he says. That’s exactly what Fugit is doing because it’s exactly what Cameron Crowe must have done. Not only did Crowe see the excesses and the joys and the pain of the mid 70’s rock and roll tour existence, he remembered it, and thought about it, and wrote about it, and recreated it, and shares it with us now. What we see is a deeply personal vision that manages to be hilarious and warm and touching and inspiring and all sorts of other wonderful, wonderful things. Crowe received two Oscar nominations for Jerry Maguire, and it would be a crime against humanity if he doesn’t come away with at least one statuette this year; he’s written a great script and directed and produced a great movie.

Only Skin Deep

Kevin Spacey, not too long ago, helped reintroduce us to the seven deadly sins in Se7en. In no particular order, they are gluttony, avarice, envy, pride, wrath, lust, and the other one. (I’d look it up, but I’m too lazy.)

Aside from a hearty helping of Lust, American Beauty mostly steers clears of the deadly sins. What we see are a laundry list of tacky little suburban sins. Stalking the Cute Neighbor with a Video Camera. Trading in the Camry without Asking the Wife. Buying Marijuana from the Kid Next Door. Saying Mean-Spirited Things about the Gay Neighbors. And so forth. Even the Lust is tacky, lending itself more to Jerry Springer than the stuff of high drama.

In a way, this is appropriate, American Beauty is not truly concerned with the deadly power of sin at all. Its focus is on resentment, which is equally as destructive and deadly without being as much fun. American Beauty presents a seething, simmering cauldron of resentment, focusing on one Lester Burnham, played by the incomparable Kevin Spacey. Burnham is burnt out, sick of his cubicle and his job and his smarmy employer. His family dynamics are replete with the sort of circular resentment it takes years of therapy to overcome. It’s spilling over into the real estate practice of wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) and into daughter Jane’s (Thora Birch) relationship with her beautiful best friend Angela (Mena Suvari, a tempting enchantress right up until the time that she opens her mouth).

So much resentment is building at the Burnham house that it’s even sloshing over to next door. One family, we’re told, has already left the neighborhood because an enraged Carolyn uprooted their sycamore tree. (”The root system was on our side,” she explains.) The new neighbors have their own growing resentments, and these interact with the Burnham’s resentments. In fact, you’d have to be a sociopath not to be affected by this yawning ocean of resentments. American Beauty is thoughtful enough to provide us one in the person of Ricky Fitts, (Wes Bentley), the teenage neighbor next door with the video camera. Ricky is admirably self-possessed and confident, but creepy — a young Hannibal Lecter with a camcorder.

Eventually, with all this resentment floating around, something has to give. And when you think about it, this may be a good year to let off a little resentment. Check out the Doug Hutchison character in The Green Mile and see how he unleashes his resentment against an inmate who mocked him. Take a look at George Clooney’s soon-to-be-cashiered major in Three Kings, who is driven at least as much by resentment as greed. Or the extreme steps taken by John Cusack’s character when he resents his wife’s desire for freedom in Being John Malkovich. To go back to the earlier part of the year, there’s Election and Rushmore, where Matthew Broderick and Bill Murray experience a lot of the same resentment as Spacey does here. And don’t forget Fight Club, which oozes with resentment to about the same extent that it oozes with blood.

Better yet, don’t go to any of these movies. Just stay at home and rent The Ref. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out on one of the funniest comedies of the 1990’s. The Ref features the selfsame Kevin Spacey, playing Lester Burnham all over again. Judy Davis is his frustrated wife, and her character is a close enough duplicate of Bening’s to make one wonder if Davis and Bening have ever been in the same room at the same time. In The Ref, a long-brewing cloudburst between husband and wife is precipitated by the arrival of cat burglar Denis Leary, who takes the couple hostage in the course of a botched robbery. Davis and Spacey engage in this tremendously bitter verbal duel all the way through the movie, but the resentment level is leavened considerably by a hilarious script.

Much of the comedy in The Ref comes from the aggravation that Leary (no stranger to angry resentful outbursts himself) is forced to endure in listening to the bickerings between Spacey and Davis. But in American Beauty, we, the audience, are the outsiders looking in on these resentful relationships. Unlike Leary’s character, we can’t tie up Spacey and Bening and yell at them to shut up, and more’s the pity. While there’s some comedy to be had in American Beauty, (especially one funny scene where Spacey and Bening confront each other at a fast-food joint) mostly, it’s overwhelmed by the anger and the bitterness and the resentment.

As a piece of entertainment, American Beauty is just flat-out disappointing. For me, anyway, the pervasive level of repressed hostility and outright resentment seeped over into a resentment of the movie and all its works, enough so that I couldn’t enjoy it at any level. The characters are neither likable or sufficiently interesting or colorful to allow them to get away with unlikability. The acting isn’t good enough to recommend it, either. Although Spacey is his usual wonderful self, he never manages to differentiate Lester Burnham’s character from his overall persona. Wes Bentley is spooky-good as the creepy neighbor, but his part is just so odd that it’s hard to connect with him.

American Beauty has been winning a lot of the critic’s awards, so there’s very likely more to it than I got out of it. But it’s hard to see what that might be. Maybe there’s some value to the whole thing about unveiling the seedy side of suburbia, but, hey, I could’ve told you that suburban life is depressing, and it wouldn’t have cost you $7, either. There’s some pretentious talk about the idea of beauty, illustrated by this little movie of this plastic bag flying around like the feather from Forrest Gump. However, all of this claptrap comes out of the mouth of Ricky the sociopathic neighbor, who walks around filming dead birds and such. If there’s higher truth or higher meaning in American Beauty, it’s only skin-deep.

According to one of the real-estate signs in the neighborhood, American Beauty takes place in area code 847, which works out to be suburban Chicago. I know this, because I just looked it up, and I can tell you that I’m disappointed. Why? You see, at the beginning of the movie, Lester Burnham tells us that he’s going to die. Well, he does die. And when he dies, I was comforted by the thought that maybe the death took place in suburban Baltimore, and that maybe, just maybe, Tim Bayliss and Frank Pembleton would show up at the door and investigate, and that somehow, this whole movie would turn into a Homicide episode, which would have improved it no end.

For me, at least, in moviemaking, there are only two deadly sins. One is casting Richard Gere. The other one, almost as bad, is the sin of not being entertaining. American Beauty wisely steers clear of the first one, but commits the second one over and over again. In the end, it’s enough to make you resent the whole movie.

Living in Chains

There’s a scene, late in Amistad, where lawyer Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) is trying to explain the American legal system to his West African client, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou). Cinque, having never heard of the appeals process, is enraged when Baldwin tries to explain that the Supreme Court will now have to decide whether Cinque and his fellow African refugees will go free or be executed for revolting against their captors. Baldwin explains that Cinque is “almost” free, which prompts Cinque to scream, “Almost!” again and again in rage and frustration. (At least that’s what I think he’s saying, as almost all of Cinque’s lines are in the Mende dialect.)

Amistad is a well-made, exceptionally well-acted, and skillfully directed film about a great historical story, but it’s a victim of its own quality. Amistad is a good movie, an Oscar contender, even, but with its pedigree, with its starpower, with the resonance of its story, you would expect this to be a great movie. And it’s almost a great movie. While that word — almost — is not as frustrating for you and me at the movies as it is for Cinque and his pirate crew, it’s frustrating enough.

Amistad is at its most powerful in depicting the voyage of Cinque to America. After a brutal kidnapping from his village, and harrowing and murderous journey from West Africa on the a Portuguese slaver, Cinque manages to break free of his chains on the slave deck of the Spanish ship La Amistad, kill his oppressors, and attempt to steer the ship back to Africa. The action sequences are powerful and deeply disturbing, evoking all the horror and pity of slavery. Unfortunately, the real meat of the movie takes place ashore, in a series of courtrooms and legal maneuvers. It’s sort of like Perry Mason meets Roots.

Now, don’t get me wrong, here. I’m a lawyer. I love this kind of stuff. And for me, anyway, it’s a bonus to see Matthew McConaughey in the courtroom again after his performance as Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill. But there is just so much courtroom wrangling and arguing and cross-examination that it detracts from what the movie is really about. Even the resolute Cinque, who disrupts one trial by shouting, “Give us free!”, over and over again, is reduced by the end of the movie to quizzing lawyers Baldwin and former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) about jurisdictional questions. And by the climax of the movie, a quirky, overlong speech by Adams, we’re all as tired of the legal process as Cinque is. (It’s a measure of the screenplay’s awareness of the legal process that former Justice Harry Blackmun was tapped to play the part of the Chief Justice.)

The problem with Amistad is that it tries to do too much and leaves too much left undone. Amistad spends, for example, a lot of time on historical political intrigue. While pertinent to the legal back-and-forth, it isn’t very interesting, and wastes the talents of fine actors David Paymer, Anna Paquin, and Nigel Hawthorne — not to mention that America’s Finest Actor, Morgan Freeman, is given a surprisingly slim role as a Boston abolitionist working towards Cinque’s freedom. There’s also a surprising amount of time spent on John Quincy Adams and his supposed struggle with the memory of his father, President John Adams — which doesn’t quite ring true. (John Quincy Adams, while a mediocre President, was one of America’s most accomplished diplomats, possibly America’s greatest Secretary of State, and served ably in the House of Representatives after his term in the White House.)

Amistad is at its best when Djimon Hounsou is on screen. McConaughey’s character calls Cinque “the greatest man living in chains”, and Hounsou’s indomitable Cinque exudes greatness and dignity, even in chains. In a world all too quick to write him off as a savage, Cinque gives us an example of courage, humility, strength, and resolve. Hounsou plays his role brilliantly, especially considering that we don’t know what the heck he’s saying most of the time. (Amistad is stingy with subtitles for some reason.) But we always know what Cinque is feeling and thinking, thanks to Hounsou’s expressive performance. Amistad’s chief failure is that it takes the focus of the movie off of Cinque and on the legal and political issues.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in relating the story of his arrest in The Gulag Archipelago, asked why, exactly, the Russian people never rose up and fought the KGB agents that came to arrest them in the middle of the night. He sadly concluded that “we didn’t love freedom enough.” Amistad, by telling the story of one man’s fight against slavery, reminds all of us that freedom is precious, worth fighting for, worth dying for. It is a noble effort by a great director to deliver a powerful message. However, just as Cinque’s efforts at freedom were hampered and delayed by legal and political maneuverings, Amistad is hampered in telling its tale by the memory of those same maneuvers.

A good movie, yes, and almost a great movie.

Comedy as Endangered Species

The joke goes like this: What do you get when you cross a lawyer and a mobster? Someone who makes you an offer you can’t understand.

What do you get when you cross a psychiatrist with a mobster? Well, instead of a clever punch line, you get Analyze This, with Billy Crystal as the neurotic psychiatrist and Robert DeNiro as his patient, a gangland leader suffering from anxiety attacks and difficulties in managing his inner rage. It’s a cross between genres — Goodfellas meets What About Bob? — and a cross between a legitimately funny movie and a dull, lifeless plodding mess. (Which makes it a double-cross, sort of.)

Analyze This is one of those movies where you don’t need character development. Crystal is the same character here that he plays in his best movies — City Slickers, let’s say, and Throw Momma From the Train — an ordinary, wise-ass schmuck carried on by circumstances he can’t control. DeNiro, on the other hand, plays his part like a cartoon character of his previous performances. (To be charitable, this is probably the best he can do in a script that has him bawling at Merrill Lynch commercials.) The script even does us the favor of having Crystal recognize DeNiro from TV, so their relationship doesn’t need to go through the initial development stage, either.

The good part of the movie — the only good part of the movie — is the banter between Crystal and DeNiro. It’s sharp, funny dialogue between two master actors. It’s great to see how they challenge each other, how they try to outdo each other, and how they manage to make it funny. At one point, Crystal, in a hurry to get DeNiro out of his vacation, offers to see him exclusively. DeNiro considers this: “You want me to clear your schedule for you?”

“NO!’ Crystal blurts.

And the whole movie is like that. Crystal tries to use psychology to control DeNiro, DeNiro tries to use force to control Crystal… it’s a great comic tug-of-war, and it makes Analyze This worth seeing, or at least renting.

But overall…

Analyze This forces us to ask the question: What has happened to the American comedy? Can we make comedies in America anymore? Have we lost our comic heritage? If Analyze This is the best comedy of the year — and it may well be — is there hope for movie comedies, or must the comedy genre disappear over the horizon like the Western?.

Think about it. We’re making three kinds of comedies in America right now: the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedies, the teenage gross-out comedies, and Eddie Murphy comedies. That’s it. Robin Williams and Jim Carrey are busy doing introspective special effects movies, Steve Martin and Bill Murray are doing small parts in smaller movies nowadays, and Mel Brooks has dropped off the face of the earth. The funniest actor working in Hollywood right now may very well be Jackie Chan. Think about it.

Because real comedies like Analyze This and In and Out and The Big Lebowski are so rare these days, it’s sad to see what happens when they fail. Analyze This fails because it can’t go far beyond the pairing of its two top characters. There’s nothing to link the conversations between Crystal and DeNiro together. Half the movie is Crystal being pulled away from whatever it is he’s doing to have another conversation with DeNiro. It’s almost as if Crystal is a yo-yo and the only suspense in the movie is how far he will be able to get away before DeNiro tugs on his string again. Although the movie elicits a good supporting performance from Joe Viterelli as DeNiro’s messenger, it wastes performances from Lisa Kudrow and Chazz Palminteri as Crystal’s fiancee and DeNiro’s rival, respectively.

There’s nothing really wrong with Analyze This. It’s a decent enough comedy with two great comic actors strutting their stuff. It’s got a few laughs, here and there, which is great. The problem is that there aren’t enough laughs, anywhere, and that’s a problem that one movie can’t solve by itself.

Frankenstein, Tarzan and Tonto

A movie review is not a novel, or a poem, or any other work that one could call truly literary. The movie review does not lend itself well to the tools of the serious writer; you will very rarely find foreshadowing or stream of consciousness ramblings or magical realism or any of the other techniques that professional writers use in your average movie review.

Unless, of course, you’re just desperate for an idea, and in that case, anything goes.

So when I say that Rob Schneider’s character in The Animal serves as a metaphor for the whole movie, you know I’m just grasping at straws here. Schneider’s character is a Northern California loser who is injured in the sort of accident that Toonces the Driving Cat* used to have all the time, a one-car rollover crash off the side of a cliff. He is found in the woods by a mad scientist who replaces his damaged organs with organs from various animals. (Presumably Schneider’s brain was damaged as well, but no one seems to notice.) The animal parts interfere with Schneider’s human character, causing him to take over the characteristics of an animal at times, and wackiness ensues. Likewise, The Animal itself is stitched together from parts of other movies in the same way that Schneider is stitched together from parts of different animals. The movie shamelessly borrows themes and situations almost at random and combines them indiscriminately with the goal of creating the aforementioned wackiness.

Neither experiment is particularly successful.

The Animal is like nothing so much as the old Frankenstein, Tarzan and Tonto sketch.** Like Frankenstein, Schneider is a half-human construct that becomes the object of fear and ignorance (he’s even chased by a mob with torches at one point). Like Tarzan, he has all the speed, stealth and cunning (OK, maybe not cunning) of a forest animal, and has problems fitting in with polite human society. And like Tonto, he’s trapped in a buddy-cop script that requires him to undertake a lot of physical abuse. Except, of course, that the Frankenstein, Tarzan and Tonto sketch was much, much funnier than anything you get in The Animal.

Even so, these character archetypes aren’t the real inspiration for The Animal, to the extent that the movie can be said to have inspiration; the movie is much closer in spirit to Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, let’s say. The movie that it’s most like, actually, is the Tom Hanks comedy Turner and Hooch, with Schneider playing the roles of both the bored cop and the snarling dog.***

The Animal lives and dies on the success of Schneider’s abilities to entertain, and he manages to do very well in spots. The real genius of The Animal (I use that word very advisedly) is that when Schneider is overcome by his animal urges, he cannot speak, which means he doesn’t have to do any acting, just barking and running and chewing on things. Anyone who might think that the image of Rob Schneider licking himself or chasing a cat or snarling when a waitress takes away a plate of food is overwhelmingly hilarious (the hyperactive ten-year-old in the seat in front of me seemed to think so) is more than welcome to see The Animal, with my compliments. (The scene where Schneider is fitted with an “Elizabethan collar” is very funny indeed.)****

The real weakness of The Animal is not Schneider, who acquits himself favorably but not extraordinarily. The problem is the rest of the cast, The Animal may have the worst supporting cast of any movie this year. Nobody in the rest of the movie can act worth spit.***** Producer Adam Sandler has one funny cameo, and Ed Asner (yes, that Ed Asner) has a wickedly delicious moment when he injects a little too much realism into a police obstacle course. Everyone else is flat-out terrible, enough so that I’m not even tempted to look up individual actors on the Internet Movie Database and tell you exactly how bad they are. Every time the cameras of The Animal aren’t on Schneider, the movie sputters, stalls, and dies in just the same way that my battered Toyota does on hot afternoons.

(And there’s another metaphor for you, free of charge. Who says that the movie review isn’t a literary form?)

The Animal is not a bad movie (the way that, say, Pearl Harbor is), but it is a poor one, with a main character and concept much more suited for TV sketch comedy than the big screen. It does have its funny moments, though, and keeps the gross-out scenes to a minimum, and you can take the kids, I suppose. Just don’t expect much, and you won’t be that disappointed.

____________

* You usually don’t see footnotes in movie reviews, either, but here goes. Toonces the Driving Cat, for those of you not in the know, was an old Saturday Night Live sketch involving a cat who regularly drove a late-model sedan off the cliff. It had a very funny theme song:

Toonces
The Driving Cat
The cat that could drive a car
He drives around
All over the town
Toonces
The Driving Cat

** This was a “last half hour” SNL sketch that was funny (until it was driven right into the ground); it was a talk show with three hosts who talked in grunts and broken English and involved Frankenstein (the late, great Phil Hartman), Tarzan (Kevin Nealon) and Tonto (Mike Myers). “Bread good,” Hartman would say. “Fire bad.” Great stuff.

*** Of, if you like, Ron Howard’s Splash, with Schneider playing the parts of Tom Hanks and the mermaid. I mention Hanks only to point out that he was making exactly this type of movie twenty years back, and while it’s difficult to imagine Rob Schneider garnering two Oscars down the road, it’s not completely and totally impossible. (UPDATE:  It is now.)

**** I refer to those funnel-shaped collars your dog wears when it comes home from the vet so it can’t lick its wounds. I don’t know what the real name of it is, but it looks like something Sir Walter Raleigh might wear, if he was really drunk.

***** I am told that the part of Schneider’s love interest is someone named “Colleen from Survivor”, which may be of some interest to some of you, I guess. I had never heard of her, but then I’m a little slow sometimes. (Can someone please tell me if there is really a band called “Limp Bisquick”? I’d like to know.) She can’t act, either, but she at least has the excuse of not being an actress.