Why The Christmas Films Don't Sparkle
By Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss
'Tis the season to be jowly. After pursuing the youth market most of the year, Hollywood devotes December to prestige films aimed not at the huge post- Christmas audience but at the senior citizens in the Motion Picture Academy. The goal is a batch of Oscar nominations; the reality is a glut of ambitious pictures that give no one a very merry Christmas. Of seven holiday movies, all but one ignore Hollywood's hard-learned rules of storytelling:
A Life Is Not an Epic. When David Lean died, did he take the secret of epic movies with him? Lean knew that life is full of dramatic events, but it's what's inside that counts; the enthralling vistas matter less than the interior vision. That lesson is lost on Hollywood, whose idea of epic biography is a story of a big shot (Gandhi, Bugsy Siegel, Malcolm X) who got shot. Violent death is meant to lend tragic grandeur.
Hence Hoffa, an utterly externalized view of the corrupt, crusading boss of the Teamsters, James R. Hoffa. The R stood for Riddle, and David Mamet's lean script is content to leave him at that. Hoffa does stuff -- bullies management, connives with the Mob -- but who is he? The movie gives not a clue. Jack Nicholson looks eerily like his subject, and he has the abrupt gestures and staccato voice of a man who overcomes lack of eloquence by force of will. But director Danny DeVito, who also plays Hoffa's closest ally, gets way too fond of slo-mo shots and swooping cameras; instead of a hard-edge portrait, we get painting on velvet. It's epic-style vamping around the void of epic character.
If You Must Make an Epic, Be Sure You Have the Right Subject. Genius is one- tenth inspiration and nine-tenths obsession. Chaplin makes you think it is ten-tenths passivity, a matter of landing in the right place at the right time. So Richard Attenborough's film breaks new ground. Instead of casting Charlie Chaplin in an unnaturally heroic mold, it makes him a distracted twit who wanders through his life as if it belonged to someone else.
All the things that shaped the immortal mime -- his Victorian sentimentality (of which his passion for underage girls was the most obvious, least agreeable part), his pretense to intellectuality, the torments of his vast celebrity -- are only vaguely alluded to. These are tough topics, wrong for the form (and indulgent attitude) Attenborough has chosen. Robert Downey Jr., who plays Chaplin, might have been up to them, but this episodic film gives him only cautious scenes, not an incautious character, to play.
A Movie Sound Track Should Be Accompanied by a Movie. The Leap of Faith album is a little masterpiece of gospel music, mixing the real thing (as performed by the Angels of Mercy, Patti LaBelle, Albertina Walker) with soulful tributes from pop acolytes (John Pagano, Wynonna Judd, Lyle Lovett). But the movie, like The Bodyguard, doesn't live up to the craft or fervor of its music. This tale of a tent-show evangelist (Steve Martin) -- he promises "miracles and wonders" while lining his pockets with the gullible hopes of decent people -- can't even take energy from Martin's holy rants and amazing body wit.
Director Richard Pearce and writer Janus Cercone purport to present an insider's view of con artistry, but their seen-it-all cynicism is a fraud too. By the end we're eye-high in butterflies, walking cripples and God's own rain shower. The greenest born-again Christian does not believe in climactic miracles as desperately as does a moviemaker looking for a way out of a troubled scenario. No wonder, then, that this Elmer Gantry wannabe winds up as a Field of Streams. And no miracle, either.
If You're Going to Get Cute, Lose Weight. There's a reason why the Good Lord in his wisdom did not endow the elephant with a sense of whimsy. A person could get crushed by a large creature's attempts to trip the light fantastic. That's pretty much the way Toys leaves you: flattened, bruised and whimpering.
Based on a moldering script by director Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, Toys is informed by a sensibility still more antique: 1960s peacenik. It posits a conflict for control of a family toy company between a near holy fool (Robin Williams) and his uncle, a retired Army general (Michael Gambon) who wants to convert the plant to military-weapons production. Both are predictable types. Their employees are so sweetly innocent one longs for Hoffa's Teamsters to come in and give them mean lessons. But everyone's main function is to trigger special effects and lend scale to production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti's overweening sets, which sometimes quote wittily from the modernist tradition (Dada, etc.) but also overuse the pachyderm motif at the heavy heart of this disastrously miscalculated movie.
Be Sure You Copy the Good Stuff. A better title for Used People might be Used Goods; it's this year's Moonstruck knock-off. The chief difference is that, as written by Todd Graff and directed by Beeban Kidron, this lower- middle-class New York City family is glumly dysfunctional instead of chipperly so. The matriarch is newly widowed Pearl (Shirley MacLaine), and oy, has she got troubles. One of her daughters (Marcia Gay Harden) is developing multiple personalities based on celebrity models. The other (Kathy Bates) is fighting fat and single-mom bitterness. Grandma (Jessica Tandy) is, perhaps sensibly, threatening to move to Florida.
Pearl herself is being pursued by a mysteriously persistent suitor (Marcello Mastroianni) -- a sleek Italian rooster fluttering a hysterical Jewish hen house. She's wary, attracted, distracted all at once. What's worse, she's supposed to be endearingly eccentric. So is everyone else in a film that some idiot in the quote ads is sure to call heartwarming. Mind-numbing is more like it. What this bunch needs is a team of psychiatric social workers.
Remember: Some Stars Are Worth the Paycheck. He broods, suicidally, about his blindness. He snarls orders like the Army lieutenant colonel he once was. He pretends to a worldliness that is not entirely authentic, and he can't quite hide the arrested adolescent lurking beneath his spit, polish and bluster. Frank Slade is a piece of work, all right, and playing him Al Pacino is always an actor acting -- in love with his own prodigious technique. For which, thank heaven, it permits him to range boldly outside the conventional lines of Bo Goldman's script for Scent of a Woman.
Frank has a minder, an ingenuous, fretful prep schooler named Charlie Simms (played with sturdy discretion by Chris O'Donnell). The pair go off to New York for a Thanksgiving weekend full of wine, women and rented limos. Will Charlie help Frank gain a new lease on life? Will Frank help Charlie assert moral superiority over snooty schoolmates and snaky headmaster? Will Martin Brest's movie go wheezy (2 hr. 25 min. for a simple two-hander -- pass the No Doz!) as it takes these matters too seriously? Need you ask? Need you care? If you're here for anything but the star turn, you're at the wrong movie.
Relax Guys, It's Only a Movie. Bereft because the love of his life is in what her doctors insist is an irreversible coma, a test pilot (Mel Gibson) volunteers for an experiment in cryogenics. Frozen in 1939, Daniel is filed and forgotten until the day before yesterday. Thawed out, he naturally finds the world greatly changed, his old passion utterly unchanged.
Sure, Forever Young is Rip Van Winkle, The Time Machine and E.T., plus all their hundreds of heirs and assigns, rolled into one. But amid the huffing and puffing of these holiday movies, there is something very agreeable about Jeffrey Abrams' affable script, Steve Miner's gently romantic direction and Gibson's easy-riding charm. Jamie Lee Curtis and Elijah Wood are good too, as the mother and son who take Daniel in, wise him up and protect him from government snoops who want to pry into the scientific secrets he contains. Forever Young reminds you that unpretentious, unself-conscious sober-silliness -- once every moviegoer's birthright -- has been sold out in this age of excess.