Reviews
The Untouchables (1987)
One of the Few Very Good 80s Movies
There's an 80s cult out there -- people who think the decade was great because 1.) that's when they were in their teens or 20s; or 2.) they like 80s music. But the sad truth is, the decade was (with a scant handful of exceptions) one of the lowest periods in the history of film-making. One of the few exceptions is The Untouchables. DePalma has always been an uneven filmmaker who at one time seems to have thought of himself some kind of latter-day Hitchcock; and he made a few great pictures. But in 1987, all of that preteniousness combined with his remarkable technical skills to create a fun, watchable, if often brutal, quasi-historical drama. You can snicker at the sentimentality, the humane-good-guy vs. inhumane-bad-guy dichotomy, but this is the last Hollywood picture I know of where that old formula really works. By the 1990s, sadism and brutality were more to the point; by today's standards, the famous "bat scene" has a lot of fans. I'm no moralist (I'm a huge Polanski fan) but I like to see a movie where morality actually makes the story WORK. As for Costner -- otherwise one of the least inspiring, most annoying actors in the business -- this is the role he was made for: bland, full of pure American "virtue," and therefore totally vulnerable. I can't think of anyone else who could have played Eliot Ness.
Max Dugan Returns (1983)
Last of the 70s Sleepers
The Neil Simon era in film didn't last long (circa 1977-1983) but some of us are old enough to remember when all they had to say in the trailers was "In Neil Simon's XYZ" to lure moviegoers. Many of the pictures were sub-par, but Max Dugan was a good swan song, in part due to Marsha Mason (if there were an Oscar for Best Couple, she and Dreyfuss should have received it for Goodbye Girl) but also simply because it's a neat little movie that's never received its due. Matthew Broderick's first movie. Donald Sutherland got a new haircut. Jason Robards may have been cast as an afterthought to lend cachet, but who else could play the ironic, world-weary, Kierkegaard-and-Wittgenstein-reading jailbird title character? I only have one acquired gripe: that so much of the dialogue is so "sharp" and "witty" that it feels contrived (not that they aren't memorable). This is one of the rare instances when a screenplay may be almost "polished" out of existence. That said, if you don't have a warm spot, you can forget it. This isn't a cinematic masterpiece (and I say that as a Polanski-and-Coppola type); but the story is neat and the performances are genuine, and in a decade when films set in L.A. focused primarily on glitz and bling-bling (which Max Dugan indirectly parodies), it's still refreshing to be made to feel at home among the sunlit bungalows of the city's low-key/low-rent, lower middle class suburbs.
Ghosts Never Sleep (2005)
A Compelling Debut
I just saw this film at the Rome Internaional Film Festival in Rome, Ga -- mainly because of Faye Dunaway, and because the majority of these festival films never make it onto disc. From the start you know it's low budget: the lighting and cinematography aren't, shall we say, top flight. But what a story -- clearly autobiographical at some level, when you consider it's told from the perspective of a struggling screenwriter -- and the pacing,, which is erratic at first, begins to approach Pakula or Friedkin level. The vanity common among aging actresses doesn't prevent Dunaway from turning in a weirdly compelling performance as the Irishman's damage-controlling widow, despite her erratic brogue. Sean Young has seldom been so sympathetic --and never looked sexier, IMHO. Tony Goldwyn looks like Aidan Quinn and does a convincing paranoid. But I couldn't take my eyes off Shea Alexander as the pathetic, coke-driven, sex-obsessed producer Melissa Weiss: her performance leaves a lot to be desired, but one gets the sense of someone who's been there, or at least seen it with her own eyes. I'm looking forward to Steve Freedman's next film. I'm sure it will be worth watching -- and that a bigger budget will have nothing to do with it.
Network (1976)
It's All About the Characters
There are two kinds of "Network" fans in the world: the Max Schumacherites and the Howard Bealists. William Holden has never looked or sounded so impressive, and there's much to be admired in his performance as the callused, romantic Max. But I happen to be in the second camp. I love Finch as an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our times, on TV, in the florid language of a 5th Avenue bodhisattva. I can't overlook Max's tendency to roll out that tired anecdote about taking a taxi to the George Washington Bridge back in the 1950s, and what a fitting way it would be to open a memoir about the Golden Days of Television -- which is the very fate he ends up consigned to. I listen to him browbeat Diana Christensen about what a creature of TV she is, and yet can't help but cringe at how easily he slides into the role of the Unfaithful Husband (and how easily he's able to talk about that irony). All this suggests to me is that Chayefsky was unable to keep the one character he most identifies with from running away from him. Beale straddles the past and the future of television: an "old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples" yet who also recognizes that the medium has not begun to know its limits -- and sets out blindly to find them. (They turn out to lie somewhere between corporate America and the FCC.) As a self-referential visionary, he anticipates some of the more rabid talk-show hosts of our own time, a kind of left-wing Bill O'Reilly. Well, now that I think about it, that's not much of an accomplishment, though it's fun to watch. The tragedy of "Network," I guess, is that it's Diana Christensen who's ahead of them all: she's the real Sybil the Soothsayer, and when she sees the future of television, she sees Reality TV; yet as conceived by Chayefsky, she's brilliant, beautiful, and cold as a frozen dinner.