Urban Amusements

David Mamet’s “Heist” almost gets our vote for the best picture of the month. If you want something a little shaggier but still good value, you might prefer Penny Marshall’s “Riding in Cars with Boys,” or if you’re looking for a great big meaty novel of a movie, New Wave hero Jacques Rivette’s “Va Savoir.”
Mamet has learned to do the slick crime film in his sleep. “Heist” follows a familiar formula, which you may have seen recently as “The Score”: a genius in criminal planning (Gene Hackman), an impossible crime, the mob (or something close to it) as obligatory partners, tidal waves of double crosses. After a while the plot twists begin to seem automatic. The fact that one knows Hackman is in total control, and whatever seems to go accidentally awry has already been taken into account in his deep, deep planning, induces a cinematic daze. Still, “Heist” is exciting and easy to watch. Hackman is ably assisted by Delroy Lindo; Danny De Vito almost plays a character and not, as so often these days, a self-delighted, wise-cracking facsimile of himself; and Sam Rockwell looks ridiculous in his little moustache.
“Riding in Cars” has awkward and sappy stretches, as we’ve come to expect from director Penny Marshall, but the film, from a novel by Beverly Donofrio, is held together by Drew Barrymore’s infectious performance as a bright, horny, socially awkward small-town girl who “ruins” her life getting knocked up by a lower-class boy. She keeps trying and failing to break out of the cycle of social disapproval and poverty in which she is trapped until she finally turns her life into material for a successful book. Apart from Barrymore, the film doesn’t invest much energy in its characters: Steve Zahn as her druggie husband, Ray, borrows his appearance and style from a Flintstone, and their child (Adam Garcia) grows up to be a bit of a drip, much too preppy for the story we are being told.
What the film has going for it is its strong sense of class transgression: Barrymore is the product of a solid middle-class home, while Zahn’s background is poor and disorganized. Their home life features substandard housing, litter, and constant used-car maintenance. As we might expect from Marshall, Beverly’s strongest emotional attachment is to another woman, her childhood friend, who makes a “good” but equally destructive marriage.
“Riding” also takes us on a foray into Bad Mother territory; Donofrio/Barrymore is so intent on bettering herself that she can barely attend to her child. Like drug use, inadequate parenting is a subject to which we have been super-sensitized, and all of our discontents have been loaded upon their broad discursive backs. As a consequence, viewing becomes a tense affair, because it’s not clear that Marshall wants us to condemn Barrymore for this neglect.
All the characters in “Va Savoir” are grown up, though their behavior can be shockingly infantile, and their neatly intertwined relationships gave us two hours of grown-up pleasure. This comedy of sexual relationships, with not so much sex and a lot of relationship, crowns Rivette’s career and reminded us of both Max Ophuls’ magnificent “La Ronde” and Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.”
His dangerously attractive protagonists are touring actors in a Pirandello play, and Rivette lightly evokes the Italian master’s fizzy mix of fantasy, artifice, and reality. While performing for declining audiences in Paris, members of the Italian troupe involve themselves messily involved with some French folks: a philosophy teacher, a dancer, a rich housewife, and her creepy grown children. Highly recommended.
The easy winner of the “bad parent” sweepstakes is Life as a House, a fraudulent (but aren’t they always) tear-jerker by Irwin Winkler. Get this: a divorced architect (Kevin Kline) who is a neglectful father and all-around miserable, self-absorbed sonofabitch is diagnosed with inoperable cancer and given weeks to live, so he suddenly becomes intent on winning back the love of his estranged son (Hayden Christenson). As a result of paternal neglect and his mother’s (Kristin Scott Thomas) second marriage to an emotionally remote businessman (Jamey Sheridan) the son has become a sullen, reclusive junkie and borderline hustler, lost in the outer reaches of total-volume Walkmanship.
The folks both outside and inside the film see nothing wrong with these attitudes and relationships: on the contrary, a miserable fable about empty lives is invested with moral promise, and Dad becomes a charismatic holy man whose obsession with his house creates fellowship among lonely housewives, teenage pimps, and the local fuzz. Still, we have to admit that the performers charmed us. Kline has an amazing calm concentration; Scott-Thomas glows in the small register of her performance as the ex-wife, and Christenson makes a strong debut as the pierced delinquent who turns into a man. Hug your child today.
Another annoying thing about “House” is that no one is allowed to go away mad (except for one hypocritical neighbor), and that is a perfect segue to another entry in the bad-parent sweepstakes, “Amelie,” a film beloved by all Europe and in the process of conquering American hearts as well. The Amelie of the title (Audrey Tautou) is a Hepburnish sprite who flits about Paris and environs doing comic good deeds for others and arranging an attenuated love affair for herself. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, “Amelie” is a sprightly mix of charm and whimsy. Unfortunately, charm and whimsy only carried us for a half hour before the film began to turn a little slick around the edges.
Tony Scott’s “The Spy Game” is the foreign-policy equivalent of “Life as a House.” A spymaster (Robert Redford) who has plied his dirty craft in the dirtiest episodes of America’s recent history is moved to commit one honorable act as he retires: he will rescue his protege, Brad Pitt, from a Chinese prison “all on his own.” Such a plot is completely out of touch with our reality since, first, we have been forcibly reminded that America has an incompetent intelligence service, and, second, most of Redford’s projects involve assassination and that could never be. Nevertheless, this morally contemptible film is highly suspenseful as Redford moves into the policy planning rooms of the CIA to subtly discover and then thwart the game that is afoot. That’s when the message hits you: America is so omnipotent that it has no one worth fighting but itself.
We’ve stuck by the Coen Brothers for many a movie now, but their most recent, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” disappointed us. It’s not so much a random failure as the inevitable defect of their common virtues: the love affair with the American heartland which is indistinguishable from a plastic vision of Hollywood at its sappiest; the highly saturated visual field (or lack thereof); the stable of strong character actors; and the fatal attraction of film noir.
If “Miller’s Crossing” was their heartfelt tribute to Dashiell Hammett, “Man” is their James Cain film dealing with the darker side of the American 1940s. Although its overt allusions are to “Double Indemnity,” its true connection is with the country virtues of a novel like “The Postman Always Rings Twice” or a play like Sidney Kingsley’s “They Knew What They Wanted.” There’s either too little or too much: Billy Bob Thornton carries the ordinariness and low-keyed cool of the Cain hero to impossible extremes (he comes across like a lobotomized Bogart), and the black-and-white spectrum of the film is oppressively flat. By contrast, the supporting performances (by Michael Badalucco, Jon Polito, and James Gandolfini) are a little surreal and hysterical. The Coens’ films always pay great attention to detail and image play (mostly hair and wigs; “The Man” is a barber), and the chain-smoking has an archaeological fascination. As the sultry, unfaithful wife Frances McDormand is, as ever, just perfect.
Antonio Fuqua’s “Training Day” has an attractive core image—the corrupt but charismatic cop who has lived in the streets for so long that he imagines himself on both sides of the law. Enhanced by Denzel Washington’s strong performance, the result is a passable action film.
Not much theater this month: The Flemish troupe Needcompany brought its mysteriously acclaimed production of “King Lear” to Minneapolis under Walker Art Center sponsorship at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Lear, of course, is one of the great bad parents, and we thought there would be plenty of material for an updated, relevant look at Shakespeare’s excruciating tragedy. Well, it’s not the first time we’ve been wrong. Performed in Flemish, mostly, with some passages in English and French and bits of text running like supertitles across the stage, their version deliberately avoided anything like dramatic interest. It’s hard to make “King Lear” boring, but Needcompany turned it into mediocre performance art. The best moments were silent, when the company’s talented dancers showed their stuff.
Our own 15 Head: A Theatre Lab did much better by classic fairy tales in its production “Red/instructions to follow,” created by the company and directed by Jon Micheels Leiseth. With a cast of ten nimble quick-change artists, “Red” gave the old stories some delicious twists, with multiple Red Riding Hoods and Beanstalk Jacks, a practical Cinderella, a knowing Sleeping Beauty and, for a smash finale, everyone turning into either a Grandmother or a Wolf. The romantic, ingenious set and lighting design by Joe Stanley deserves special mention.
The glow of “Merrily We Roll Along” still hovers about us, and we’ve just read that the Guthrie has extended its run. Go see it if you can.