Archive for March, 2003
137 – Sweet Home Alabama
Posted by frothy in Sweet Home Alabama on March 25, 2003
Rich son of big-city mayor proposes to fashion-designer girlfriend, despite his mother’s misgivings about her. The newly betrothed fiancee realizes she has some unfinished business, though, in the form of the redneck hillbilly backwoods husband she left seven years prior.
Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) is riding high. Her recent fashion show went off perfectly, and the man of her dreams (Patrick Dempsey) has asked her to marry him. One problem – she needs to get her husband Jake (Josh Lucas) to sign the divorce papers. So she hightails it down to Alabamy, anxious to get the papers signed so she can get on with her life.
Ah, but not so fast. Jake’s not letting her off the hook that easily. Nope, first he calls the cops on her, since she appropriates his spare key and enters his (their) house. When the sheriff discovers they’re still married, though, he holds up his hands and calls it a domestic dispute. Jake won’t sign the papers, he says, because she’s turned into a a high-class, highfalutin, effete snob. Ok, those are my words, not Jake’s, but you get the picture. Our little girl has some growing up to do!
Much of the plot has to do with culture clash – Melanie walking down Main Street gabbing on a cell phone, Melanie in a honkytonk bar shootin’ pool while women with babies linger nearby. This is all that Melanie left when she escaped from her tiny hometown seven years ago to make it on her own, and naturally at first she can do nothing more than turn up her nose at everything in the hamlet.
Ah, but of course she’s due for her comeuppance, and that’s where Jake and the rest of the town come in. Someone must be Taught a Lesson, else it wouldn’t be much of a movie. Jake refuses to sign the papers so Melanie can be Taught a Lesson.
A movie like this has to be taken for what it is – a dumb comedy. It doesn’t pretend to be anything fancy or all-important. It’s not self-involved or overly pensive. It’s a simple plot driven by simple characters, buttressed by a traditional soundtrack.
The movie’s buoyed by some appealing performances, but Witherspoon’s isn’t one of them. I’ve often considered Reese Witherspoon to be nothing more than a flavor of the month blonde, because she offers no real nuance to her acting – everything’s broadly done. Her characters in Legally Blonde, Election, and Sweet Home Alabama bear striking similarities. Sure, maybe she’s being typecast, but if that’s the case, perhaps she needs to try something that’ll stretch her talents a little.
No, the best performance is by Josh Lucas as Jake. Lucas’s piercing eyes and laid-back grin serve him well as Jake, whose upbringing and background belie (in the eyes of Melanie, at least) a wealth of intelligence, wisdom, and depth. Lucas is very appealing here, knowing but not omniscient; able to love but stubborn – much like the stereotypical southern man, come to think of it. Lucas doesn’t come off as a typical pretty boy, though, unlike Dempsey as Melanie’s intended. Even so, this is a major improvement over the Patrick Dempsey we’ve seen in the past (Loverboy, Meatballs 3, Run, Mobsters). He’s assured and polished, just not highly developed.
This is a popcorn film that’s aimed at people looking for a few good chuckles. With any culture-clash movie, you’re bound to get some laughs because the viewer is apt to be on one side of the cultural fence or the other and therefore will find something to which he or she can relate. Happily, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously,as well it shouldn’t, considering the characters are cardboard cutouts and the plot is predictable. This kind of simplistic movie usually works fine, but the abrasiveness of Melanie brings the whole film down a couple of notches.
Sweet Home Alabama: **
136 – The Road to Perdition
Posted by frothy in Road to Perdition on March 13, 2003
Road to Perdition is one of those movies that’s heavy on mood and atmosphere but makes you stop and think every few minutes, “What the heck are these people doing in this movie?”
Tom Hanks is hitman Michael Sullivan, in the employ of local tough guy John Rooney (Paul Newman). Sullivan’s very effective at his job, and he’s equally effective in keeping his true occupation from his young sons. On one fateful night, however, son Michael (Tyler Hoechlin) stows away on one of his father’s business trips and witnesses a slaying. Knowing the boy has seen far too much, Rooney’s own son decides to kill him – but gets the wrong boy (not to mention his mother).
So the Michaels young and old are on the run. Sullivan wants to get back at the man who killed his family, and that journey can only lead to one man – John Rooney.
There are several problems with this movie. The first is – surprisingly – in the casting. Hanks isn’t wrong for the part of Michael Sullivan, but there’s also no real need for him to play the part, either. He’s okay, but he’s just not as effective as Tom Hanks usually is. For someone who’s such a great and accomplished actor, Hanks had no need to take on this role, which conceivably could have been played by most actors in America.
Paul Newman isn’t any better. I know, sacrilege! Newman’s been in Hollywood for a long, long time, and he’s one of my all-time favorite performers. But the man’s getting old. I don’t mean he’s aging gracefully, although he had been doing that for many years. I mean he looks old – in this movie, he looked very haggard and weary, as if he had been working on the movie nonstop for seven months. There’s none of that old fire and passion we’ve come to expect from Newman. There’s one scene in particular near the end in which his character confronts Hanks’s character, and – no lie here – he sounded like he was on Death’s door.
Oh, I know. He IS an old man. Newman’s 78 years old, now. But I’ve never seen him look and sound as bad as he did in this movie. The last movie I saw him in was Message in a Bottle (1999), in which he played Kevin Costner’s cantankerous father. And he was very, very good in that movie. He was funny, self-deprecating, engaging, and magnificent – aging gracefully, if you will. But this movie’s like the anathema to Message.
Imagine, a movie with Hanks and Newman! New guard and old guard! It should have been a real meeting of the thespians, a chance to compare the styles of two of the greatest ever to walk onto the silver screen. But it’s a major dissapointment, this acting summit. Hanks is earnest but a little insincere, and Newman looks like he’s walking in his sleep.
What makes this movie even more disappointing is the fact that it was directed by Sam Mendes, who wrote and directed American Beauty (1999). This is his first film since Beauty, but there’s none of the nuances of that masterpiece evident in this one. Was he just happy to work with acting legends?
There are some interesting, almost random funny moments, as when Michael, Jr. learns to drive the getaway car (they’re on the lam, remember), but overall it’s a bleak, uninspiring film. At least the title is appropriate, as “Perdition” means “eternal damnation,” which is what watching this movie sometimes felt like.
Road to Perdition: **
135 – Igby Goes Down
Posted by frothy in Igby Goes Down on March 12, 2003
This is the movie that proves that Macaulay Culkin isn’t and wasn’t the best Culkin actor. Kieran Culkin, now 20 years old, is spot on as the iconoclastic Jason “Igby ” Slocumb, Jr., wild child in a very odd family. Think Malcolm in the Middle in which everyone, including Malcolm, is a bit wacky. No, wait, calling the Slocumbs wacky isn’t quite fair. Let me explain.
Mother Mimi (Susan Sarandon) is a snobby upper-crust matriarch who’s dying of breast cancer. Brother Ollie (Ryan Phillippe) follows in her footsteps – except for the dying part, of course. Father Jason (Bill Pullman) is suffering from schizophrenia and resides in a sanitarium, though we see him in the occasional flashback.
Because of Igby’s upbringing, he’s transformed himself into a sort of rebel against everything. He gets kicked out of public schools and private schools alike. In desperation, his mother sends him to military school, which works for a while.
So Igby’s grown up in a lifestyle of opulence – he has money, he has all the material obsessions anyone could want, and of course he wants something else: nothing. He wants to escape the clutches of his domineering mother and protective (to a fault) brother. He wants to be his own person, see his own sights, and live life as best he can. Trouble is, he’s penniless until his mother dies.
Igby’s travels take him far and wide, partially aided by the benevolence of his obscenely wealthy godfather, D. H. (Jeff Goldblum). This enables him to escape, for a time, from his schools and his family.
So what’s the point of all of this “escaping,” you ask? After all, he’s part of the elite of society, and although escaping from it sounds like fun for a time, is it worth a 90-minute exposition? I think it was, at least in this particular case. I’ve never been a strong fan of costume dramas – which is what this is, sans period costumery – but I think that the idiosyncrasies and overall oddness of Igby and his family make up for the familiarity of the script. Culkin, in his first “adult” role (I remember him best as the youngest child in “Father of the Bride”) is very well cast, showing us that acting is just as important as being cute and cuddly – in essence, he was able to do what his older brother Mac couldn’t, and that’s act after hitting puberty. Kieran Culkin’s no longer the cute little kid, and that’s good – it should work in his favor, not hamper him.
True, the script is a little pedestrian, but there are just enough oddball moments to keep the viewer interested. Sometimes screenwriters will try to make a character as weird as possible, and that just leaves the viewer cold, with no way to relate to the character. Igby’s character works because he’s believable and because he’s not infallible.
Igby Goes Down: ***1/2
134 – One-Hour Photo
Posted by frothy in One-Hour Photo on March 12, 2003
For most of us, dropping off film to the one-hour photolab isn’t a big deal. We drop it off, pick up our little claim ticket, and then go shopping for an hour or so. But for the photo technician, who sees hundreds and hundreds of daily life pictures, each snapshot is a glimpse into another person’s world, whether it’s a birthday party for an eight-year-old boy or softcore porn for a local entrepeneur.
Seymour Parrish (Robin Williams) has been developing photos at the SavMart for many, many years. He’s cheerful and friendly to his customers (and he does consider them to be “his” customers), and he knows his stuff when it comes to the technical aspects of the job. See, Sy’s no mere clerk, although that’s how you and I and most other people see him; he’s a qualified, experienced technician. So much so that he gets into a brief shouting match with the guy who delivers Agfa developing equipment over a minor discrepancy in the machine.
Sy lives alone; he’s middleaged and has no friends or close family. He doesn’t even have a dog. What he does have, though, is the opportunity to live his life through the pictures his customers have taken, from birthday parties to sex games to vacations to any and all events in people’s lives.
There’s one family in particular through which Sy lives vicariously the most often: Nina and Will Yorkin, with son Jake (age 8). Sy’s been developing the Yorkins’ photos since before Jake was born, and he’s been able to watch the boy grow.
This might seem to be a normal obsession, right? At least as normal as obsessions can be, anyway. But Sy, as you may have guessed, is a little different. He has an entire wall in his house devoted to the Yorkin family. Over the past decade or so, whenever he’s developed prints for Mrs. Yorkin, Sy has made a copy for himself. As a result, there are thousands and thousands of photos on the wall from the Yorkin family.
When the store manager (Gary Cole) discovers the discrepancy between the number of prints produced and the number that have been actually paid for, he confronts Sy, and the downward spiral begins. Sy’s obsession with his surrogate family intensifies as he descends even deeper into madness.
But he’s not just a creepy loner, although that’s a big part of his character makeup. Sy feels a certain kinship with the family – at least with Mrs. Yorkin and Jake – and also feels protective of them. So when he comes across some damaging photos, that descent into madness accelerates rapidly.
Is this a good role for Williams? In his recent turn in Insomnia, he was creepy and not at all the hyperkinetic funnyman we all know, and he was very effective at essaying deep emotions. The same holds true here. In fact, I think this is among the best work Williams has ever turned in. He’s mesmerizing as Sy, making him not into an unfeeling monster but rather into an obsessive man with a warped sense of values.
The other actors are well cast, too, especially Gary Cole as his boss and Connie Nielsen as Nina Yorkin. But it’s Williams’s show, and while in olden days he might have turned this into a tour-de-fource, pull-out-the-stops performance, in One Hour Photo Williams takes a very effective subtle approach. He underplays Sy just enough to let the audience know what he’s feeling and what his motivations are without beating them over the head with it.
The story moves along very well, and the film is exceptionally photographed (so to speak). The original music by Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek is fantastic and – best of all – appropriate to the movie, which is a rare treat.
One-Hour Photo: ***1/2
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