Generation Gap
The screenwriter and
novelist Hanif Kureishi ( My Beautiful Laundrette , 1985) has a yen for
ambivalence, for situations in which no character has a monopoly on either
rightness or wrongness. The characters are all right. Or, rather, they're all
wrong. No, they aren't: Right and wrong don't comfortably apply. They try to
act as if they're right but suggest by their behavior that they might well be
wrong--akin to a person who turns one way at an intersection and then keeps
glancing anxiously at the rearview mirror. To be human is to be pulled in
different directions; the least trustworthy people are the ones who seem most
certain.
This theorem applies especially to My Son the
Fanatic , directed by Udayan Prasad from a superbly wry screenplay by
Kureishi (based on his short story). Its central character--the "my" of the
title--is Parvez (Om Puri), a Pakistani cab driver in a bleak industrial city
in the north of England. The genial Parvez wants nothing more than to make it
as an Englishman, to the point of enduring a steady patter of racist
humiliations and drifting into a second career as a panderer. Nevertheless, he
tells himself that his life has a kind of integrity.
His grown son, Farid
(Akbar Kurtha), doesn't see it that way. The angry young man dumps his
Anglo-Saxon fiancee and falls in with a group of Islamic fundamentalists, some
of whom he houses under his father's modest roof. At home, poor Parvez is
reviled for the decadent culture that he embodies; at work, he's treated as a
pet, a "little man," by the German businessman (Stellan Skarsgard) whom he
supplies with prostitutes. Parvez has no status in either Western or Islamic
culture. In his den, he pours himself a glass of single-malt Scotch and listens
to Fats Waller and tries to avoid the incinerating glares of his increasingly
traditional wife (Gopi Desai) and the fervent prayers of his son. And he finds
himself falling in love with Bettina (Rachel Griffiths), an English prostitute
whose compromised purity seems to mirror his own.
M y Son the Fanatic is built on incongruities--on
the juxtaposition of fierce Islamic piety and amiable Western dissolution. The
tensions give it a comic tingle, but that comedy is rooted in melancholy and
alienation. The mix of tones is marvelously embodied in Om Puri, a charismatic,
slightly ravaged star of Indian cinema. Puri's Parvez begins with a magnetic
confidence in his own foolishness: He's proud of how he grasps for status. In
the movie's prologue, he can hardly contain his delight that his son is set to
marry the daughter of the local chief inspector, a man whose revulsion for this
dark-skinned taxi driver with his cheap camera is manifest in every frozen
half-smile. Kureishi could have spun a whole film (and a more commercial one)
out of this Birdcage opening, but he has already mined that vein in his
hilarious novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). When Parvez tells his
German patron that he holds himself above his fellow drivers--"Sir, I just joke
with them. A gentleman is my goal."--the tension between how he regards himself
and how the world regards him is heartbreaking. He's in for the comeuppance of
his life.
But if the father's way
is wrong, the son's way is dangerously out of touch: It condemns before it
understands. After all, both Parvez and the call girl Bettina are playing by
capitalism's rules, trying to get a foothold in a society that closely guards
access to its more "proper" ladders to the top. That means that Farid's moral
absolutisms--and the fundamentalists' picketing and firebombing of the
whorehouse--aren't so much wrong as entirely beside the point. Nowhere is this
more evident than in Griffith's lovely and self-possessed performance, which
transcends every hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché. What she does and
what she is have no connection; she does what she does to get by. The
affection between her and Parvez comes from the happy realization that in spite
of their differences, they're on the same (bush league) team--and each has
figured out what the other is truly worth.
M y Son the Fanatic isn't entirely pure in its
motives. Parvez's wife remains a remote and unsympathetic figure, a woman whose
lack of appreciation fully justifies his drift into the arms of another lover.
The theme has been much on Kureishi's mind. His most recent novel,
Intimacy , is a nakedly autobiographical exploration of a man's thoughts
on the eve of his abandonment of his wife and two small sons for a younger
woman. The breadth of Kureishi's self-justification in Intimacy is
fairly breathtaking; he really does need more characters, more checks on the
central character's point of view. Kureishi is much more convincing as a
dramatist than as a monologist.
Still, My Son the
Fanatic isn't an easy sell: Miramax picked it up for U.S. distribution and
sat on it for a couple of years, reportedly debating whether to alter its
irresolute ending. It's shocking that the company would even consider such a
change, since the film's irresolution is its greatest strength. Kureishi's
hopelessness is the kind that leaves you exhilarated, convinced that even if
the characters on screen haven't found a "right" way, the quest for a right way
is what keeps them--keeps all of us--alive. The punk aesthetic lingers in
Kureishi: The more hopeless the movie gets, the more upbeat it feels.
Critics of all persuasions have been beating their breasts
and warbling for Disney's new Tarzan cartoon. They're half-right: The
movie is a collision between inspiration and tastelessness, between the
defiantly quirky and the wholesomely homogenized. I hated it in principle--I
hate most modern Disney cartoons--but adored a good deal of it in practice. The
storyboarding frequently borders on genius, and few cartoon characters have had
the gorgeously dizzy aplomb of Minnie Driver's Jane.
The noxious first. There's something really icky
about the way the gorillas talk. I know, animals have spoken English in
cartoons since cartoons began to speak, but Tarzan is the first time
they've done it in a story in which language is a central theme. The daft charm
of Edgar Rice Burroughs' protagonist--a little boy raised by gorillas whose
animal and human languages are constantly vying for supremacy--doesn't have the
same piquancy when the gorillas talk like characters from Leave It to
Beaver . If we're all the same under the skin (or fur), then what's the
point of the story? Glenn Close's tender mama gorilla has clearly been to
finishing school; Lance Henriksen's massive patriarch must have learned to talk
from watching after-school specials: "I said he could stay," he grits, after
baby Tarzan gets adopted by his missus, "That doesn't make him my son." Gorilla
comic relief comes from Rosie O'Donnell as Tarzan's pal. I'd have welcomed her
self-congratulatory sarcasm in Instinct , but here it made my back hair
stand up. You can pretty much ignore Rosie, Glenn, and Lance, but it's
impossible to shut your ears to Phil--Collins, that is, whose songs feature
Afro-Celtic polyrhythms over soft-rock sludge.
All is forgiven when Tarzan (the voice of Tony
Goldwyn) meets Minnie Driver--I mean, Jane. When he scoops her up to elude some
angry baboons, the sequence is more electrifying, more dizzyingly vertiginous
than anything in Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997). It gets better
when they stop to chat. He's a likable schnook with a long, skinny chin and a
slightly embarrassed lope. She's all blithe insouciance--a wonderful parody of
proper English maidenhood straining to burst its corsets and grab a piece of
jungle hunk. What a voice Driver has! Breathlessly throaty--it only just
manages to contain its own melodic exuberance.
