HOLIDAY CELLULOID WRAP-UP

By Stuart Klawans

From Nation, vol 252 n 1, 01.14.1991

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Multiplex to be born? Scissors for hands, a six-chambered pistol for its heart, loins formed from Saharan sand and the ghosts of a thousand older, better pictures in its head--surely the Christmas movie is at hand.

And it's no revelation. Of the December releases I had seen by press time, even the most satisfying had Part III in the title. More on that later, along with Stephen Frears's The Grifters, which happens to be very good but is really a January release. (It popped up in December, for one week, apparently so it would qualify for Oscar nominations.) As for the rest:

Edward Scissorhands, directed by Tim Burton from a script by Caroline Thompson, might be considered a model for most of the other big pictures of the season. To its admirers, the film is a touching, funny, brilliantly realized fable. To the rest of us, it's all premise and no payoff. I can't fault the production team, which has created an immaculately bland, pastel, time-warped suburb. (The action takes place in 1960/1990.) Nor do I have anything but praise for the actors: Johnny Depp as the innocent android of the title, Dianne Wiest as the Avon saleslady who discovers him, Kathy Baker as a suburban femme fatale (who generates what plot there is), Winona Ryder as the teenage heartthrob. Such are the resources that Tim Burton squanders. In his eagerness to construct a trademarked, self-advertising fairy tale, he borrows snippets from Frankenstein, Candide, Rebel Without a Cause, old TV sitcoms and the new genre of the punk-rocker-in-suburbia. Had he dug into any of this material, Edward Scissorhands might have been memorable for something other than technical proficiency. But each element of the collage is paper-thin; instead of intruding onto each other, challenging and energizing themselves, the thematic cutouts are neatly overlaid. Edward Scissorhands ultimately resembles one of its hero's artistic creations: an accordion-fold of paper dolls, brightly colored, simple, featureless.

The cutout might be the symbol as well for Sydney Pollack's Havana, James Ivory's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky, Woody Allen's Alice. To praise one above the other would merely be to express a preference for xerographic bond over onionskin.

Havana and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are the most easily disposed of. The first is a transparent copy of Casablanca, set in Cuba 1958 instead of Morocco 1942. The second takes a pair of funny, nasty, Flaubertian novels by Evan S. Connell and turns them into The Adventures of Lucy and Desi Bridge.

The Sheltering Sky seems more substantial at first, since it at least has a theme: the attempt of wealthy American travelers to couple with the sexual-cultural Other. Unfortunately, Bernardo Bertolucci and his screenwriter, Mark Peloe, have treated Paul Bowles's novel with the sort of reverence that cries out for whoopee cushions. A churchlike hush settles on the film at the very start, when the author himself shows up to observe his characters and comment on them in a monotone voiceover. Strange, to get such assurances of high art in this film, whose ultimate distinction is to give new meaning to the term "dry hump." Debra Winger, one of the all-time experts at making movie love, adds a new item to her resume, regaling John Malkovich on a high bluff overlooking the desert. She gasps and heaves and rolls her eyes; he bounces up and down a couple of times while talking about the Infinite. Viewers who are not left supine with laughter will admire Vittorio Storaro's photography.

By now, you might be wondering if there isn't something out there worth the price of a ticket. There is; but first, we have to discuss Woody Allen's Alice. It's the story of a wealthy, pixilated woman (Mia Farrow) who, ignored by her philandering husband, finds solace through all sorts of otherworldly events. Think of it as an hommage to Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits--as in, there was an hommage last night at the liquor store at 95th and Amsterdam. Police say the suspects will plead guilty to a lesser charge of aggravated esteem. If you must sit through the picture--which is somewhat brightened by Bernadette Peters, providing an all-too-brief moment of rude fun--you might remark the heroine's fantasy of entering a confessional booth, set outside on a lawn. That's the giveaway. Woody Allen, pretending to evoke the imaginative life of a Catholic--it's an act of chutzpah worthy of the savings and loan hommage.

Now for the good news: The Godfather Part III turns out to be as good as a post-sequel can be--which should not be taken as faint praise, when the year's big novel was "Rabbit at Rest." The latest and apparently final installment in the Francis Ford Coppola-Mario Puzo saga is less gripping than the first Godfather and less interesting as a narrative structure than the second. Even so, it gives and keeps giving and doesn't give out until you're sated with the hero's doom. No doubt Updike's Harry Angstrom is a remarkable creation; but for my money, Michael Corleone is a bigger character in every way, perhaps the only one in contemporary American fiction who may truly be called tragic.

To stage Michael's last act, Coppola and Puzo have gone to new extremes, as the makers of a post-sequel must. But that doesn't mean they've multiplied the corpses. This Godfather is noticeably less bloody than either of its predecessors. It tops them, rather, by daring to bring Michael to unanticipated heights of power and prestige. He plays a role in one of the biggest international scandals of recent years; he also attempts to foil the ultimate mob hit. That's the public side of the drama, while on the private side Michael faces a reversal that's correspondingly huge.

Coppola directs these events with less bravura than in the past--if anything in the production says sequel, it's the loss of energy in the camerawork--but the performances more than take up the slack. Andy Garcia, a born star, is breathtaking as the up-and-coming Corleone nephew, Vincent; Eli Wallach plays the aged Don Altobello as if conducting himself in the role, with his forefinger as a baton; Sofia Coppola, with her almost prehensile lips, seems to chew her way through the part of Michael's daughter, Mary. As for Al Pacino, he may be beyond praise. Half a dozen images of him are competing for my attention even now--reaching down to dance with a little girl, staring at Vincent with exasperation and grudging approval, hunching over and stuffing a candy bar into his mouth to ward off a bout of insulin shock, holding a knife to his own throat to clinch an argument with his estranged wife. But the indelible image is the one at the end, when Michael, fulfilling the needs of tragedy, has lost everything. What happens then owes something to Edvard Munch and something to Brecht. But it's pure Godfather all the same; and considering Coppola's personal history, it's stunningly confessional as well. Go. See it.

The Grifters, which will soon return, is the latest of this past year's adaptations of novels by Jim Thompson, and to my mind the best by far. Set in the contemporary Southwest, it's full of racetracks, motels, leased-by-the-week offices and people who feel at home in them. It's a movie about the virtue of having low aspirations.

Roy (John Cusack) is a con artist who specializes in small-time cheating and won't try for anything more. You can see he knows his own limits--he keeps his money stashed behind a black velvet painting of a clown. Unfortunately, his girlfriend of the moment used to be a bigger operator. Myra (Annette Bening) looks to be about ten years older than Roy; judging from an early scene that shows her method of paying the landlord, she's considerably tougher, too. Eventually, Myra tells Roy that she wants him as a partner, which to him means only that she wants to grab his money and run.

By this point, though, the third player has entered--Roy's mother, or in Myra's suspicions, his "mother." Lily (Anjelica Huston) works for a bookie, running a perfectly mechanical scam and living out of her car. Although she thinks Roy isn't strong enough for even the lowest level of grifting, she herself has gotten a little too ambitious. Her boss finds out; and what with protecting Roy, fighting off Myra and trying to save her own neck, she precipitates a climax that for sheer visceral excitement can stand up against most of the classic films noirs.

Much of the praise that's gone to The Grifters has settled on Anjelica Huston, who really is very good. As usual, she's mannered--I wish she'd lose that trick of snapping her head to the side--but then, the character is a creature of artifice, too. If the art of comedy got more respect, perhaps Huston would win an Oscar nomination for her role as the villain in last summer's The Witches. As it is, she'll probably be tapped for this role instead, and I can't complain. It's worth the price of admission, just to hear her make a thirty-second line reading out of the words "permanent damage." Credit should go as well to Cusack for his Roy-an amazing study in false bravado and empty amiability--and to Bening, whose Myra comes on like a kewpie doll with a dirty mind. Frears's direction is fastpaced and to the point; the screenplay, by Donald Westlake, is the work of a very cagey old pro.

I had heard ominous rumblings about Awakenings--"the Rain Man of 1990," said one friend, who didn't mean it as a compliment--and so the film struck me as a pleasant surprise. The story, based on a memoir by Oliver Sacks, concerns the experiences of a shy, nervous, clumsy, not-so-young doctor called Sayer (Robin Williams) who in 1969 stumbles into his first job dealing with "live patients." He goes to work in a ward for the chronically ill, where he discovers an entire class of patients written off as "living statues" who have similarities that nobody else has noticed. Can these people be helped? Dr. Sayer tries an experiment with Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro), who has apparently been lost to the world for twenty years; and Lowe awakens.

That's the heart of the material; to get to it, you have to pass through a lot of tear-jerking and sermonizing by the director, Penny Marshall, and the writer, Steven Zaillian. They spare you no tearful reaction shot, no soundtrack crescendo, no thuddingly predictable tag line to a scene. Then, in case you've been able to abide all that, they conclude by turning Awakenings into the story of how Dr. Sayer finally asked somebody for a date. It's all as phony and manipulative as can be--and yet Awakenings, unlike any other film of the season, sent me out of the theater feeling that human beings were more complicated than I'd suspected, rather than less.

In other words, the movie didn't quite overwhelm Oliver Sacks's narrative. That's partly because the filmmakers, relying on their show-biz instincts, were unembarrassed about playing some of the material for laughs. Instead of the high-art reverence of The Sheltering Sky or the rather studied humor of Alice, the film starts out with gags. Some of Dr. Sayer's lines might have sounded natural in the mouth of Gracie Allen; when we see him at home, we discover that he lives a life of shtick. His refrigerator contains one quart of milk and several dozen plant specimens; his idea of decorating is to put up a chart of the periodic table of the elements. This sort of thing may be cheap, but it saves Awakenings from solemnity. As for the actors: Williams gives perhaps the best straight performance I've seen from him, De Niro is up to his own standards and the supporting cast is deep in talent. If you can put up with its conventions--a big "if," admittedly--I think you'll find Awakenings doesn't waste your time.

The easiest way to explain why I enjoyed The Rookie is to talk about Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet. Was it really that preposterous to cast Mel Gibson in the lead? Under the circumstances, yes--because Zeffirelli has surrounded him with an otherwise unexceptionable cast. But think how exciting it would have been had Zeffirelli gone all the way, with Gibson as Hamlet, Bernadette Peters as Gertrude and (the casting coup of the century) Clint Eastwood as Claudius.

Eastwood, seducing his brother's wife; Eastwood, murdering his way to the throne; Eastwood, stalking out of the play-within-the-play, with his jaw set and that vein in his temple throbbing--you'd see why Hamlet doesn't dare lift a finger. And imagine the scenes with Laertes--the sly winks, the bonhomie, the way Eastwood would have the younger man striving for his approval.

Change Claudius into an L.A.P.D. detective and Laertes into Charlie Sheen, and you've got The Rookie, Eastwood's latest vigilante, buddy-cop, car-wreck comedy. It's about as aesthetically sophisticated as a shot of whiskey, but also, I'm happy to say, as reliable. Played strictly for laughs, the movie provides a high number of casualties--people, cars, even a commercial jet--and a scene in which Eastwood once again enacts his most persistent screen fantasy, being tied up and sexually abused by a dark-haired woman. I suppose some people will be offended at the film's cheerful portrayal of police violence. Those are the same people who will be shocked, shocked, to learn that Havana tells you nothing about socioeconomics.