Duets (2000) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | September 22, 2000
Paul Giamatti's and Andre Braugher's acting chops still can't rescue the schlockfest that is "Duets"
Karahokey
[xrr rating=2.5/5]
Duets. Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Huey Lewis, Paul Giamatti, Lochlyn Munro, Angie Dickinson, and Andre Braugher. Cinematography by Paul Sarossy. Edited by Jerry Greenberg. Music by David Newman. Screenplay by John Bynum. Directed by Bruce Paltrow. (Hollywood Pictures/Seven Arts Pictures, 2000, Color, 112 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
The origins of this movie are rather simple: Gwyneth Paltrow’s producer father Bruce Paltrow went out and called up favors owed him from everyone he knew in Hollywood to get his little girl the Best Actress Oscar that always eluded his more talented wife (and Gwyneth’s mother), Blythe Danner. So, as payback to daddy for greasing the palms of every has-been and old-timer in the Academy, Gwyneth starred in this strange movie that I am sure has even someone of her average Hollywood talent cringing with embarrassment whenever she screens it.
Basically, the film starts out with Huey Lewis (erstwhile jazzy rocker from the 1980s) starring as Ricky, a karaoke singer who is down on his luck (sort of like the real Huey Lewis). There’s a great full-frontal nudity gratuitous scene though, to let you know he’s a ladies’ man (though not as smoove as Tim Meadows). That one fifteen-second scene comprises the entertainment value of the whole movie.
Next we go to Huey meeting Liv (Gwyneth Paltrow), and instantly the chemistry (oil and water, sorry) begins. Angie Dickinson is pulled out of mothballs for a cameo appearance to give Huey the made-for-TV stock speech, “you’d better take care of my little girl, and not blow it like you usually do.” Then, it’s back to yesteryear oblivion for Police Woman. This is important, because it establishes a sotto voce plot point that Huey and Liv have this “past” together, and a sottissimo voce point that it’s a romantic past.
The subplot of this movie revolves around Todd (Paul Giamatti, who played Howard Stern’s boss Pig Vomit in Private Parts). Giamatti’s actually a good actor, but he must really need the work, since he’s sort of homely, but can actually act (most of the plum roles these days go to good-looking actors who can’t act, like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise). Anyhow, he finds out all of the sudden that his yuppie suburban life has been a lie and a sham (the movie’s only novel plot point—okay, I’m kidding), so he hits the road in order to become a karaoke singer. Although a rehash of every hackneyed plot fromShoot the Moon to American Beauty, this one seems more plausible since the pitiful dialogue that comes out of Giamatti’s mouth qualifies him for no other work. Another good actor, Andre Braugher, plays a black con on the lamb (Reggie) who befriends Todd. This supplies the movie with a lot of great “buddies on the run” scenes right out of the tradition of Robert Urich/Lorenzo Lamas school of TV cop dramas.
There’s also a subplot revolving around a really cute couple that you forget instantly. But, gosh, they’re so cute, with that “aw shucks” quality that’s right out of the best Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams…oh, I’m sorry, I meant right out of the best Michael Landon and Sherwood Schwartz scripts.
Anyways, these subplots twist, revolve, meander and basically run out of steam until they conspire to locate—surprise!—all these karaoke singing drifters at this splendiferous karaoke championship. The suspense is notched up to full-tension here, and this is when all the threads of the plot come together. The cute couple almost misses their big break, but gets to sing just in the nick of time; you also find out that Huey and Gwyneth are—shock and surprise!—father and daughter. “Oh my God,” you think to yourself, “what a pervert I must be for thinking that they were lovers, just like the movie was implying all along.” Then you suddenly remember that Bruce Paltrow wrote and directed this, and you’re scratching your head even more. Hmm. Nonetheless, you would have never guessed that Huey was Gwyneth’s father, since he has this nice rich raspyness to his voice, and her flat performance of “Bette Davis Eyes” makes Kim Carnes’ breathy alto sound like Maria Callas.
However, Giamatti and Braugher’s final tune brings the movie crashing—literally—to a climax. Having hidden behind their karaoke alter egos the entire length of the movie, the police finally get wise to the pair. Knowing the cops are closing in, Reggie belts out a convincing “Freebird,” which is the last song you’d ever expect a black guy to sing, since it was by Lynyrd Skynyrd, authors of the Dixiecrat anthem “Sweet Home Alabama.” After the last notes resound hauntingly throughout the hotel lounge, Braugher pulls out a gun, and kills himself in a beautiful and touching tribute to Leoncavallo’s opera I Pagliacci, though I’m sure none of the parties involved in this movie’s production, nor the movie’s intended audience would ever know it.
I gave this movie two-and-a-half stars instead of one, based on the pearls-before-swine performances of Giamatti and Braugher, and also because Duets makes for a great party drinking game: Predict the lame plot; count the bad made-for-TV stock phrases; drink a shot every time someone sings off-key. Viewers please take caution: You will be approaching blood-alcohol poisoning levels after about a half-hour, so think when you drink!
This movie is rated “R” for adult language and situations, nudity and violence. A designated driver is optional.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Buddy Movies, Dramas, Movie Reviews, Musicals |
The Fountainhead (1949) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | July 27, 1999
Patricia Neal found that Gary Cooper's acting wasn't his only wooden attribute
Of Underdogs and Übermensch
[xrr rating=4/5]
The Fountainhead. Starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith, Robert Douglas, Henry Hull, Ray Collins, Moroni Olsen, and Jerome Cowan. Cinematography by Robert Burks, A.S.C. Edited by David Weisbart, A.C.E. Music by Max Steiner. Screenplay by Ayn Rand, based on her novel. Directed by King Vidor. (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1949, Black and white, 114 minutes. MPAA Rating: Not Rated.)
Because David O. Selznick (producer of Gone With the Wind and Rebecca) didn’t produce this as a faithful adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel, but Henry Blanke (The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca) did, I recommend seeing the movie before reading the novel. The problem of properly sequencing these events is one familiar to too many of fans of Ayn Rand’s novel about Howard Roark, an architect of uncompromising integrity: When you read the novel first, you cast it, design its sets, and play it out in your mind. And in my mind, Howard Roark is played by Burt Lancaster, Ingrid Bergman is ice queen (who melts at Roark’s touch) Dominique Francon, Farley Granger as Peter Keating, and Orson Welles plays a thinly-veiled Charles Foster Kane, a.k.a. Gail Wynand. (I would keep Robert Douglas as Ellsworth Toohey, he is so perfectly cast). Screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Ben Hecht, directed by Howard Hawks, Technicolor, music by Bernard Herrmann.
Anyways, since that’s all in my mind’s eye, let us deal with what’s actually there:
Without giving away the plot too much, the story deals with one of novelist Ayn Rand’s most crucial themes: The individual versus the collective.
Her loner individualist is architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), loosely based on the seminal real-life modernist Frank Lloyd Wright. Through Roark, Rand demonstrates the injustices that come hand-in-hand with being a misunderstood genius. That is, at least, by society’s drab masses. Manipulating them is rabble-rousing columnist Ellsworth Toohey (Douglas), a fastidious, fascistic little man who understands Roark’s genius all-too well–and thus wants him destroyed. Toohey also has evil designs on press baron Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey), who runs his media empire by controlling public opinion on a macro scale. Yet, Wynand learns only too late that the devil’s in the details.
As a work of cinema, The Fountainhead is one of the greatest examples of post-German expressionism after World War II. Visually, it’s overflowing with Licht und Schatten worthy of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. This is the movie’s greatest achievement, deftly accomplished by cinematographer Robert Burks, who confines martyred saint Cooper in a shadow-world so oppressing, that it rivals Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (the latter for which Burks was also director of photography, as he was on all Hitch’s films from the early 1950s through Marnie, in 1964, with the exception of Psycho) for the sense of loneliness and psychological isolation which crowd in the hero.
Burks owes a lot to Citizen Kane in the use of low-camera-angles employed in projecting the movie’s tragic hero, Gail Wynand. Actor Massey brings a British-Canadian flair to the role that is completely outrageous and totally incongruous with the its Hell’s Kitchen origins. So what! As with Cary Grant, Massey succeeds in the “willing-suspension-of-disbelief” department when it comes to ignoring his British accent.
Burks’s camera lingers longingly and tenderly on screen siren Patricia Neal, as Dominique. This is when real hot women with ample bosoms got Hollywood roles, and when the likes of Marilyn Monroe “replaced” Jane Russell and Kim Novak was groomed as the next Rita Hayworth. The scene in which Neal visits Coop’s apartment with the none-too-subtle white fur bust ornament topping her evening gown is priceless in the glamour department. Some of today’s critics call this movie “dated.” If by “dated,” they mean not having untalented, unalluring, and underfed matchsticks such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Calista Flockheart, then, yes, The Fountainhead is “dated.”
Englishman Robert Douglas plays Toohey, the demagogic columnist with searing intelligence and over-the-top, villainous aplomb. Wielding his ever-present cigarette holder with blatant swishiness designed to circumvent the Hayes’ office censors, Douglas gives the best flamboyant homosexual villain performance this side of Robert Walker, as the tortured Bruno in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.
Rounding out this bombastic Expressionist tour-de-force is Max Steiner’s equally plush and bombastic Romantic score, which uses heavy brass and low strings to provide an aural sledgehammer that sets the action onscreen to the passionate Sturm und Drang of Tristan und Isolde. They don’t make movie music like that anymore. Composer David Raksin (Laura) once quipped that 1940s movie music overwhelmed the listener not only with foreboding, but with “fifthboding.”
Again, compare Steiner’s “maximalism” (pun intended) with the oat-bran sparseness of today’s so-called composers, such as Philip Glass (“minimalist” is too big a word to describe his simplistic, monotonous, scratchings) and Michael Nyman.
The Fountainhead is a movie made about giants, by giants. Reality be damned, this pic is worthy of Citizen Kane, Metropolis, and The Big Sleep.
Now, once you’ve seen the movie, then read the book, which is even better! Do it the other way around, and you’ll find yourself “what-if’ing” The Fountainhead that could’ve been, rather than basking in this sterling example of 1940s cinema.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Classic Movies, Courtroom Dramas, Dramas, Movie Reviews |
American Beauty (1999) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | June 6, 1999
There are only two compelling reasons to watch "American Beauty," and Thora Birch has both of them
Look Closer: Hectoring, Moralizing, Stridency
[xrr rating=2.5/5]
American Beauty. Starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scott Bakula, Sam Roberts, and Barry Del Sherman. Screenplay by Alan Ball. Directed by Sam Mendes. (Dreamworks SKG, Color, 122 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
American Beauty opens and closes with Kevin Spacey’s narration from the grave, an idea lifted from Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard. (The producers and leads make sure to drop Billy Wilder’s name every other sentence or so during media interviews, just to subtly drive that point home).
Similarities end there. The caustic and brilliant cynicism of Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s last screen collaboration has been replaced by Alan Ball’s pose of same. When it came out a couple months ago, there was a lot of talk about how “courageous” this movie’s producers were. I saw no courage in it, but merely a clichéd portrait of suburbia.
Suburbia as a soul-draining no man’s land is nothing new in Hollywood. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), explored similar themes, and Gregory Peck even shared the same (by-now hackneyed) profession—advertising man—as Kevin Spacey’s anti-hero, Lester Burnham (this surname is another filch from the Wilder Oeuvre, from the dipsomaniacal The Lost Weekend). In Flannel, Peck puts his job on the line to maintain his integrity, and end up winning. Spacey’s “modernized” rat boosts his severance package by blackmailing his firm’s “efficiency expert,” and then uses the proceeds to forever chuck his responsibilities.
The movie’s premise, that Spacey has (unbeknownst to him) just a year to live shows him in the throes of a mid-life crisis in which we find him “living each day as if it were my last.” So, does he go and write the great American novel? Does he reinvigorate his neglected family life? No; he quits his dead-end job to work at a fast food joint (obviously, a much more fulfilling career), exercises, buys a red Firebird (wow! That’s a new one on me!) and lusts after his teenage daughter’s best friend (Mena Suvari). Whereas Wilder and Brackett conjured memorable flesh-and-blood characters from the printed page, Beauty scenarist Ball has a reverse-alchemy going on: Despite lots of gratuitous flesh, the characters come off as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts.
There was a saying in the dramatic world, “the play’s the thing.” Now, “the agenda’s the thing.” All the characters in this movie aren’t really characters at all, but representations, stand-ins for various social and political agendas.
American Beauty is marketed with the slogan “Look Closer.” “Look closer,” you’ll see that the gay couple (Scott Bakula and Sam Robards) across the street is just like you and me; the “macho,” homophobic, Marine (Chris Cooper) is really a repressed homosexual (who didn’t see that coming a mile away?). The “weird” drug-dealing peeping-Tom (Wes Bentley) is really a well of philosophical profundity, rivaling Gandhi in depth and Mother Teresa in altruistic impulse. The “popular” cheerleader (Suvari) is actually this shy, lonely virgin (yeah, right), and the chiseled-chin real estate guy (Peter Gallagher) is your typical Hollywood capitalist—shallow, ruthless, a philanderer and (big surprise) a gun nut. No matter how much I “looked closer,” I couldn’t see any real people, or even idealized people that used to populate Hollywood fare. Instead, I kept seeing this P.C. playbook, written by some narcissistic baby-boomer who demands people view his movie with an open mind, but who himself sees life with blinders on.
As character studies, Lester and his wife Carolyn (played by Annette Bening) ain’t Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond. In Sunset Boulevard, William Holden and Gloria Swanson weren’t exactly people you’d want in your living room, but you’d certainly go to the Bijou to study them night after night. Their disturbing relationship was larger-than-life human nature at its darkest and most melodramatic. With American Beauty, it’s the people that have gotten small.
Occasionally, I actually sympathize with Lester, especially when he’s being sarcastic to his wife. But all-in-all, the characterizations are just laughable at best: In one scene, Annette Bening becomes a “gun-nut” and goes to the shooting range to work out her frustrations. She manages to get tight shot groups despite her rising arms, twisted, manic, facial expression and heavy breathing while shooting. It’s a scene that could only have been written by an anti-gun activist with an axe to grind. Real sportsmen at firing ranges know they can’t shoot well unless they’re calm and collected.
But that would contradict the moviemakers’ agenda. Likewise with the homosexual couple: They’re merely props for Mendes’ and Ball’s politics. Out of all the main characters in the movie, they have the least screen time (only about 2-3 minutes total), and are only in the script to represent “normality.” With all the talk the P.C. crowd devotes to the “trivialization” and “othering” of “marginalized peoples,” you’d think someone would’ve complained about how trivial these gay characters were. Aside from idly chatting with neighbors, delivering flowers to new arrivals on the block and jogging, the viewer knows nothing about them. But, since Jim and Jim weren’t written to be interesting beyond their function as poster children, Ball and Mendes didn’t see the need to.
Ultimately, “look closer” is a great marketing gimmick, because upon looking closer, the viewer is left as bereft of any inspiration or entertainment as upon entering. It’s is a new spin on an old Grimm brothers fable, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: If you can’t understand it, then it must be deep. If you don’t agree with Mendes’ and Ball’s worldview, then you must be a social regressive. If you don’t think suburban life is as bad as they paint it, then you’re not looking “closely” enough, and, if upon looking closer, you find it shallow and vapid, then you lack depth.
In reality, it’s Ball and Mendes who lack depth: You can’t have your cynical cake and eat your sugarcoated agenda, too. Proof lies in another movie released later this year, Election, by writer and director Alexander Payne, which explored identical themes as this movie. However, they’re really worlds apart: Election bristles with real cynicism, and Payne presents people like you’ve actually known in your lifetime, letting you bask in their hilarious pettiness, bitterness, sadness, euphoria, and delusions of grandeur. Payne actually gets to the heart of what motivates them in a panoply of human nature. Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon play internally motivated people, and thus come off as believable characters, complete in themselves. The cast of American Beauty are merely crude marionettes dancing on the strings manipulated by an all-thumbs screenwriter and director.
Look closer. There ain’t nothing there.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Black Comedies, Comedies, Dramas, Movie Reviews |
Psycho (1998) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | December 4, 1998
Deja vu not all over again: Anne Heche can't recreate Janet Leigh's primal terror in Gus Van Sant's "Psycho"
Psychobabble
[xrr rating=2.5/5]
Psycho. Starring Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, and Philip Baker Hall. Cinematography by Christopher Doyle. Edited by Amy E. Duddleston. Music based on an original score by Bernard Herrmann. Orchestrated and conducted by Steve Bartek. Screenplay by Joseph Stefano. Based on the novel by Robert Bloch. Directed by Gus Van Sant. (Universal Pictures, 1998, Color, 105 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
I’m not such a Hitchcock purist that I shun everything out there in the suspense genre, lest they be directed by the Master himself. Last year’s The Spanish Prisoner, which borrowed a lot of plot mechanics and the use of the MacGuffin from Hitch, is one example of a movie that lives up to its billing as a suspense picture. However, this so-called remake from Gus Van Sant is an abomination.
I mean, how could Van Sant have so royally screwed the pooch on this production? He shot directly from Joseph Stefano’s original script almost verbatim, right down to the camera setups, sound effects, Bernard Herrmann’s original score, settings, and even Saul Bass’s original titles.
Well, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and Gus Van Sant has just proven that Hitchcock’s genius was not so much in how he designed the schematic for his movies, but rather the exacting attention to detail and passion for his craft he invested in them. Just because Van Sant is adept at painting by the numbers does not make him a master painter. Rather, his clumsy attempt at recreating Hitchcock’s Gothic masterwork only demonstrate how difficult is must have been for Hitchcock to make his movies look so effortlessly natural. By contrast, Van Sant’s take looks belabored and fake, a cubic zirconium from the jewelry section of K-Mart next to the fat man’s priceless gem.
In this ill-advised waste of celluloid, the acting is worse than the High School for the Deaf Thespian Troupe. There are no costumes by Rita Riggs or Edith Head—I think they were picked out by a blind man walking through the Salvation Army thrift shop. The movie has been printed on color film: That makes a whole lot of sense for showcasing the film’s star, the chalky and pasty Anne Heche who butchers Janet Leigh’s defining role (played with much incisive intelligence by Leigh) worse than Norman’s mother does unsuspecting bathers.
Viggo Mortensen, who turned in a great supporting cameo in Carlito’s Way, is miscast here, turning John Gavin’s competent and utilitarian performance into the worse redneck schtick I’ve ever seen. It’s even worse than when Robert deNiro (otherwise an excellent actor) tried to do a believable Southern accent in the botched remake of Cape Fear.
Bernard Herrmann’s score is one of the saving graces of the film, but is as incongruous with the action on the screen as it would be if scored to The Little Mermaid. Further, Steve Bartek and Danny Elfman try to “improve” upon Herrmann’s straightforwardly blunt and brutal score by adding echo-effects, doubling notes and adding eerie sounding strains on the upper strings. These gratuitous notes wreck the whole effect of Herrmann’s “black and white music.” Imagine Andy Warhol being commissioned to “improve” the Mona Lisa with day-glo acrylic paints, and you get the drift of this bad re-orchestration.
But the worst part of this flick is Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. Not because he’s a bad actor; he’s not. In fact, he sort of reminds me of Orson Welles. He’s just been miscast. He’s way too big and masculine for the part, and comes across almost as much as a mama’s boy as does Mike Ditka. However, as if on cue to remind us of his neuroses, Van Sant has him force a hackneyed and unconvincing “nervous” laugh every few seconds.
Julianne Moore (in Vera Miles’s role as Lila) and William H. Macy (as Arbogast, the detective) give solid, competent performances, but Macy’s wardrobe makes him look boyish. No, not in the James Dean or Danny Kaye kind of way, but rather in the a-four-year-old -just-tried-on-daddy’s-clothes manner. Unfortunately, Daddy must have been a cheap pimp from the 1980’s trying to look like Don Johnson from “Miami Vice” on a Family Dollar store budget. They flop about Macy’s frame like a G.P.-medium tent. Julianne Moore has been modernized by toting a Sony Walkman hither and yon. At the point where she and Sam are about to see Sheriff Chambers, to report a missing person (Heche), Lila punctuates her exit from the scene with “let me get my Walkman.” Her sister and $400,000.00 (inflation) are missing, but can’t forget the tunes!
That’s because this movie has been made relevant for the MTV generation: Dumbed down, so that even in life and death situations, the viewer has Attention Deficit Disorder. Many other lines have been dumbed down, such as Martin Balsam’s “if it doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic.” From Macy’s mouth, it becomes “Jell-o,” apparently because aspic would be over the heads of the McDonald’s crowd.
Despite trying to modernize the look of the movie, the dialogue is 98% from Joseph Stefano’s original script. That script was written in 1959-60, during the Golden Age of Television, when shows like “The Twilight Zone,” “Perry Mason,” and, yes, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” gave viewers intelligent fare, from writers such as Roald Dahl, Paddy Chayefsky, and Rod Serling. Van Sant’s attempt to use the same script falls flat on its face, because there aren’t many actors available any more who can deliver a straight line, without all the sighing, giggling, breathing, huffing, puffing and ironic twinges that have infested today’s acting (some call it “realism,” I call it “ersatz emotion”).
This movie is about as suspenseful as an episode of “Barney.” Except, it took more talent to create and execute “Barney” than it did to resuscitate this corpse.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Dramas, Horror Movies, Movie Reviews, Remakes, Suspense Movies |
Citizen Ruth (1996) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | December 20, 1996
"Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue": Laura Dern is a white-trash heroin(e) in Alexander Payne's farce, "Citizen Ruth"
Ruthlessly On-Target
[xrr rating=4/5]
Citizen Ruth. Starring Laura Dern, Swoosie Kurtz, Kurtwood Smith, Mary Kay Place, Kelly Preston, and M.C. Gainey. Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Directed by Alexander Payne. (Miramax Films/Independent Pictures, 1996, Color, 102 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
One of the most oft-repeated clichés of the pro-choice movement is the line “men shouldn’t have any say over abortion, or a woman’s body.” Well, director Alexander Payne and his co-scenarist Jim Taylor have a lot to say about abortion, women’s bodies, and the issues of individualism versus groupthink in this frank and offbeat comedy.
I love Laura Dern in this movie! She is genuinely funny and quirky as the slow-witted Ruth Stoops, a white-trash glue sniffer who finds herself at storm center as a judge (David Graf) convicts her of criminal negligence to her unborn fetus. However, out of court, he advises her to “take care of this problem,” sotto voce implying that she get an abortion. Ruth doesn’t really care, though. She just wants to find some Krylon or airplane glue to inhale.
Finding herself in jail, some Christian pro-lifers take her under their wing. Suddenly, she is no longer a rational actor whose free will determines the birth of her baby, but a pawn in a public relations war between pro-life and pro-choice zealots. It is as if Ruth doesn’t even exist as an individual, and is only important to these fanatics as a poster child for their respective causes.
What I most love about the characterizations of the activists is how Payne shows how removed they are from reality. The pro-life couple who take Ruth into their home (Mary Kay Place and Kurtwood Smith) are Christian evangelicals who won’t even have a television in their home, who hold independent church services at their house and sing horrifyingly bad hymns like “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (this hokum is probably the main reason people become atheists; whatever happened to the grandeur of church hymns by J.S. Bach or Cesar Franck?) Their clothing is right out of the Monkey Wards 1977 catalogue, and they speak in that anti-intellectual singsong style.
The pro-choicers are just as big a scream. Swoosie Kurtz plays a “double agent” who spends months undercover as a tacky Christian hick pro-life protestor, in order to kidnap Ruth, whose pregnancy the pro-lifers intend to bring to term. Once she has Ruth at her house, the wig comes off and she becomes her real self, a somewhat butch lesbian with a bookish feminist lesbian lover (Kelly Preston). I love the scene when they sing a moon hymn to Gaia, embracing Ruth with just a little too much bodily affection. Ruth realizes that her new captors are just as much nutburgers as her old ones.
Eventually, the question of whether Ruth will or won’t have her baby boils over into a national media circus, and we get a couple of campy cameos from Burt Reynolds as President of the Baby Savers and my own Hitchcock goddess, Tippi Hedren, as the head of Pro-Choice. Though her captors claim they’re keeping Ruth locked up in their country house for her own protection, she slowly becomes wise to them when one of them lets it slip that their using her “to send a message that a woman’s choice can’t be bought.”
“You want to send a message?!?” Dern fires back. “I ain’t no fucking telegram, bitch!”
Of course, Payne and Taylor’s message is the true “pro-choice” one, that the rights of individuals are what count in these controversies. They demonstrate how the knee-jerk groupthink of movement activists often works to deprive others of their liberties when their exercise gets in the way of a movement’s agenda. It pitilessly depicts zealots from both sides of the fence on the abortion issue as cut from the same bolt of drab cloth, as insignificant people whose lives would be empty without having a cause to blindly follow.
Citizen Ruth shows the ultimate disdain such groups have when the hoi polloi actually exercise their rational, individual choice, and common sense. Payne’s moral center of the movie is a Vietnam biker vet (M.C. Gainey) who—though a fervent pro-choicer— sees through the fanaticism of both sides and treats Ruth as an individual, and gives her the “tough love” she needs, rather than patronizing her.
Another nice touch I like about this movie is that Payne presents us with sincere activists, who make pretty good points for both sides. And that’s where most Americans are; they’re not absolutely pro-life, nor absolutely pro-choice. But, reaching those points-of-view would require thinking, of which most rabid True Believers are incapable.
Citizen Ruth is director Alexander Payne’s first feature film, but he directs it with a self-assured style, in which the laughs come easy. This acerbic and cynical comedy easily belongs in the company of Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder, and I’m already looking forward to his next offering.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Black Comedies, Comedies, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
