Mails of the Species
I'd like to have been on
the set of Sleepless in Seattle (1993) when Nora Ephron directed the
scene in which a misty-eyed Meg Ryan spies on Tom Hanks as he frolics on a
beach with his little son. It felt as if Ephron were standing off-camera with a
megaphone shouting: "OK, Tom, frolic! More frolic! Now--romp! OK, gambol!" In
life, Ephron is evidently incisive, but she doesn't have a good director's
insight into the minutiae of human interaction. She's the opposite of a detail
person. Almost all the scenes she writes and stages are blandly generalized--a
homogeneity that seems part commercial cunning (her movies go down easy, like
Muzak) and part the result of being rich and snobbishly insulated on the Upper
West Side of New York City, that magic kingdom where people parade their
liberalism but the word "Brooklyn" is always good for a laugh and a
shudder.
You've Got Mail
(which she co-wrote with her sister, Delia) is based on Ernst Lubitsch and
Samson Raphaelson's The Shop Around The Corner (1940), one of the most
enchanting comedies ever made. It's a classic setup: Two people work side by
side and can't stand each other but--unbeknownst to either--are pen pals ("Dear
Friend") who pour out their hearts in prose. When I went online in the early
'90s, the first thing I thought (and posted in a chat group) was: "Oh, now
someone will remake The
Shop Around the Corner with
e-mail"--which I mention to spotlight not my prescience but the obviousness of
the idea. It came to me while watching a pretty young woman in a San Francisco
cybercafe who seemed to have a wonderful, funny, flirtatious personality online
(I was in a position to read some of what she was typing) but who logged off
and buttoned up her coat without looking left or right and hurried into the
street as if afraid that someone might actually speak to her.
The story works better when set in a society with a clear
gulf between public behavior and private feelings--a society rather unlike our
own, in which the two are increasingly interchangeable. Ephron has diluted the
drama even more by making her cyberchums (Hanks and Ryan) friendly,
down-to-earth, and adorable, not at all the sorts who'd save their true selves
for their electronic epistles. There is conflict, but it's surface. Hanks' Joe
Fox is the heir to the vast Fox Books (read: Barnes & Noble), which
relishes the process of opening "superstores" and driving the local mom and pop
joints out of business. Ryan's Katherine Kelly owns a small children's
bookstore called, amusingly, The Shop Around the Corner. She and Joe are
snarling antagonists, but online (America Online, actually, which has been
flacking this picture for months) they are Shopgirl and NY152, and are
constantly shoring each other up. Joe even gives Katherine tips on how to lock
horns with her (unnamed) adversary.
One of the best things
about Lubitsch's original is that its Austro-Hungarian, kitsch-laden universe
(Nikolaus Laszlo's original play was set in a Budapest perfumery) barely
conceals real economic desperation, and there are serious consequences when the
two lovers clash and one of them gets fired. In the world of You've Got
Mail , the heroine might lose her shop, but she gets to keep her Upper West
Side apartment and to continue to frequent Zabar's and Starbucks, and her
employees are happily hired by the competition. The movie, without seeming to
realize it, turns into a romantic parable about the joys of being absorbed by a
conglomerate. Why, its lovers never even get a busy signal when they dial
AOL!
Y ou've Got Mail gets better as it gets more
relaxed, and the famous cafe scene--in which the man discovers in horror who
his correspondent really is--remains sure-fire. Ephron does well at evoking the
ways in which e-mail and snail mail diverge, the former being so much more
impulsive and exhibitionist. And I loved how Ryan flinched when the screen
displayed an instant message from NY152: He's actually there, in real time! Too
close! But where The Shop Around the Corner had a matrix of
relationships, Ephron reduces You've Got Mail to its two leads. Joe and
Katherine have featherweight significant others (Parker Posey, Greg Kinnear)
who can be discarded at the narrative's convenience without muss or fuss. The
other characters are just friends to be talked at. (You don't even get a sense
that the rest of the world uses e-mail.)
The director clearly
adores Ryan, but she's the actress's worst enemy, goading her into ever more
sickening reaches of chin-wagging cuteness--such as her fatuous look of
enchantment on the subway or the furtive little hip-hops to her laptop after
her Luddite boyfriend has left for the office. Hanks does better. It's nice to
see him playing a self-serving wisenheimer in a light comedy. He looks
careworn--AIDS, Vietnam, malfunctioning space capsules, and Omaha Beach will do
that to you--but his timing is still amazing. His wisecracks sound as if he's
nervously thinking them up on the spot, and he's better than anyone at saying
something he doesn't mean and then wincing in horror, as if longing to hit the
"Delete" key.
Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson), the protagonist of John
Boorman's marvelous almost-comedy The General , is a gangster in the
flamboyant movie tradition of movie mobsters who smile at the bullets that end
their lives. They aren't heroes but they have a bullying magnetism that Boorman
calls "pagan." The real-life Cahill, who thrived in Dublin in the '80s and was
gunned down in 1994, was the most legendary criminal in modern Irish history.
He was a "whaddya got?" rebel--someone who could have justified his thieving on
all sorts of grounds, from contempt for the repressive, hypocritical police
force to contempt for the repressive, hypocritical church. He might even have
fancied himself a Robin Hood, although Boorman (who also wrote the screenplay)
is careful to show that if Cahill stole from the rich he gave to no one but
himself and his family, and that his thieving put a lot of poor people out of
work. Call him a roguish tribal chieftain or an ornery sociopath, he is what he
is. And, for much of the movie, I had no moral reaction to his sometimes brutal
exploits; I just watched. How radical! There are different kinds of artistic
neutrality: the nihilist kind that signals "Nothing matters, so who cares?
Let's just get off on the spectacle!" and Boorman's kind, which signals "This
subject is too big to reduce to a thesis. Let's lay it out and study it."
Gleeson gives you
something to study. Purposefully inexpressive (the real Cahill would only be
photographed with his hand blocking his face), he has a thick neck and eyes
that, while small, suggest watchful calculation. The General begins with
his murder and the cheers that go up when word reaches the police station, then
flashes back: As a boy, he steals pastries, which he gallantly shares with his
future wife, Frances (Maria Doyle Kennedy). But even his gallantry is suffused
with mulishness. Refusing to budge from a condemned housing project, the adult
Cahill doesn't bother to reason, he just sits--past the point where the
building is razed and the trailer he has moved to the spot has been firebombed.
When a city delegation marches on his tent and offers to set his family up in a
new house, the inveterate burglar asks for a place in a wealthier neighborhood
so that he'll be "closer to work." His capers range from casual break-ins to
armed holdups to intricate jewel heists--the latter capped with an impudent
visit to the police station to establish an alibi.
W hat works against Cahill is his own runaway success. To
monitor his movements, the authorities appoint an inspector (an amusingly sober
Jon Voight, reunited with Boorman for the first time since the 1972
Deliverance ), who soon has the resources to post cops on Cahill's back
fence and on the street in front of his house, and to follow him and his gang
wherever they go. Using only the simplest cinematic means, Boorman achieves
what Martin Scorsese needed whip-pans and zoom lenses and a cacophonous sound
mix to do at the climax of GoodFellas (1990): He gives you the jittery
and suffocating sense of the universe closing in. Hunted by both the cops and
the Irish Republican Army, the snorting, overweight, diabetic Cahill does the
opposite of lie low.
Boorman pays a price for
his neutrality: The General isn't an emotional grabber. But on its own
terms it's nearly perfect. All I missed was something more than winks and hints
about the nature of the triangle among Cahill, his wife, and her sister (the
lush Angeline Ball), with whom he fathered several children. (Apparently, it
was a happy arrangement for all.) Some have argued that Boorman, the director
of Excalibur (1981) and Hope and Glory (1987), doesn't employ his
extravagant visual gifts in The General , which is in black and white and
isn't ostentatious in its mythic resonances. But Boorman, pickled since youth
in Arthurian legends, has become nearly unemployable thanks to the mythic
resonances in such epic turkeys as Zardoz (1974), Exorcist II: The
Heretic (1977), Where the Heart Is (1990), and the worthy dud
Beyond Rangoon (1995). It's agreeable to find him grounded in the here
and now--the magic is there but below the surface.
The magic is all on the surface of Prince of
Egypt , an animated musical version of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt
that at times feels as if it might have been called Indiana Moses and the
Temple of Doom . Ever on the lookout for a new way to tell an old story--or,
rather, a new old way to tell an old story--DreamWorks SKG has recast the life
of Moses as the saga of two brothers who end up on opposite sides of an issue.
The baby Moses, his existence endangered by the pharaoh's edict calling for all
Hebrew sons to be slain, is set adrift in a basket on the Nile before being
discovered--and adopted--by one of the pharaoh's wives. Cut to a chariot race
through the city that out- Ben Hur s Ben Hur , after which the
victor, Moses, goads his brother Ramses on to ever more high-spirited antics:
"Oh, come on Ramses, where's your sense of fun?" But then Moses bumps into his
real sister, Miriam, and brother, Aaron, and learns the truth about his
origins. Ramses, who becomes the new pharaoh, isn't pleased when his brother
becomes a champion of Hebrew civil rights instead of the wild and crazy guy
with whom he grew up.
A ctually, there are two brothers in the biblical
tale--Moses and Aaron, the latter directed by God to speak for his brother, who
scholars believe had a speech impediment. Prince of Egypt might have
been more psychologically compelling if it had set up a rivalry between the
good and bad brothers--between Aaron and Ramses--for Moses' soul. But Aaron
hardly figures here and, of course, psychology isn't the point. What wows 'em
are Broadway-style showstoppers, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz,
whose work has become less tuneful and more pretentious since the heady days of
Godspell and Pippin . Schwartz's rhymes are all of the moon-June
variety, and the big inspirational number, in which hope is conceded sometimes
to "fly away, like silver birds," asks: "Who knows what miracles you can
achieve/ When you believe?" The miracle here is the animation and production
design, which has less to do with belief than with talent and millions of
dollars.
This is sensational cinema: crowds swarming among
pyramids in eye-popping 3-D, camerawork that's distinctly Spielbergian in its
fluidity. Everything we love about biblical-movie kitsch is here, only
concentrated and heightened. Best of all is a sequence in which Moses falls
asleep against the wall of a temple and, in his dream, the two-dimensional
hieroglyphs of familiar Egyptian painting begin to move, enacting the story of
the Exodus in stiff, horizontal processions. The dream exalts the primitive art
that is the movie's visual inspiration in a way that seems truly religious.
