The Family Man
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