LONG AFTER THE THRILL
by Les Phillips

Something's Gotta Give was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it was rewritten and reprogrammed by a committee of marketing executives. It has a holiday season niche: romantic comedy with older stars. It has another marketing hook: girl directs feminist comeback movie for older feminist movie star. Only a committee of old men who smoke cigars, or young men (or women) who want to be old men who smoke cigars, would interpret feminism as "throw over Keanu Reeves for Jack Nicholson." Especially when Keanu, to my knowledge for the very first time, plays a man -- a mature, independent, self-sufficient, emotionally together man. And Jack Nicholson, as he often does, plays a child.

I have to admit that Jack has some wonderful comic moments here, amidst all the Jackery and japery, and some nice dramatic moments as well. Half an hour into the film, Diane Keaton is so disgusted with Jack Nicholson that she wants him out of the house, out of her life, out of the movie. This is, of course, exactly what she should have done; we could all have gone home ninety minutes early and celebrated the end of Jack Nicholson's career, and Diane Keaton could have gone to bed with Keanu Reeves. But, no, Jack grew on her, and damned if he didn't grow on me too. And so then Jack and Diane have their little fling, They Have Sex, and it changes their lives, but they decide it won't really work, and they go their separate ways. That would have made a nice movie. Except it goes on for another thirty minutes, and drags you through the damnedest set of false endings and clumsy plot constructions to put Jack and Diane together again. That ending apparently tested better, even though getting there made no sense at all.

Still, there are lots of reasons to see Something's Gotta Give. It looks gorgeous. It takes place in New York and Paris, and the film was actually shot in New York and Paris. Everyone in the film is very rich. They all have many possessions for you to envy, and they have really good dinners at expensive yet cozy-looking restaurants. Frances McDormand plays Keaton's sister, and she steals every scene she is in. I wouldn't mind if McDormand developed a sideline as the wiseass sister/neighbor/best friend of the female lead in retro romantic comedies. A girl has to eat, and it'd give her more maneuvering room within the industry, so that she could make other, riskier films.

The major reason to see this film is unquestionably Diane Keaton. The cliché is well-founded: she's not afraid to look her age. She can also look ten years older or younger, depending on what's called for at a given moment. Her delight in sex is thoroughly convincing; her sad moments are deeply, even profoundly touching; she makes a crying breakdown heartfelt, then silly and heartfelt at the same time; and more than a bit of Annie Hall is still visible. The character is written without real dimensions, but Keaton herself has dimensions to spare; she fills out the part nicely. Another of the best performances of the year.

*

We start with your basic dwarf (Peter Dinklage); a reclusive, grumpy dwarf whose only apparent connection in life comes through a preoccupation with trains and railways. He works in a store in Hoboken that sells and repairs all kinds of model trains. He goes to meetings of train enthusiasts and watches films of trains rolling down the rails, going into tunnels, coming out of tunnels. When his employer dies, he inherits an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey, and goes to live there. He walks there, on train tracks. No phone or electricity in this depot, a bit of shabby furniture, a lot of train stuff. Now comes a depressed woman (Patricia Clarkson), a painter, estranged from her husband, also solitary, but in a nicer house. She and the dwarf "meet cute" (she nearly runs him over with her car). Very gradually, they befriend each other. Then comes a friendly, jockish owner of a concessions truck (Bobby Cannavale), who drives out to rural New Jersey from Manhattan every day to sell cafe con leche and hot dogs to absolutely nobody. He parks his truck in front of the abandoned depot. He keeps inviting the dwarf out for drinks, for parties, for a good time.

At this point, I decided The Station Agent was surreal. Hot young Hispanic dudes do not drive hot dog trucks from Manhattan out to the Delaware Water Gap to park them in random locations with no customers and sell cafe con leche, dwarf or no dwarf. Yet The Station Agent is not supposed to be surreal. It's supposed to be real, or at least "real," and, despite its many true and beautiful moments, I simply had trouble getting around its fundamental implausibility. If a filmmaker wants to point to the heart of human nature by heightening eccentricity, you gotta believe the eccentricities -- and for me, that wasn't possible.

The acting is lovely. I read somewhere that writer/director Thomas McCarthy wanted to make a film with these three particular actors. It's nice to start with a sort of dream, with images and ideas, and to believe that the actors will fill in the spaces between the moods and images, but that often doesn't work, and it doesn't work here. The Station Agent avoids cliché. It is not quite the film where goodness turns out to be the province of the ignored and dispossessed (even dwarves started small, etc.), not a film about Beautiful Losers, not a film where true love and friendship saves people, not a film where people get what they want in the end after struggle and suffering, not a fount of political rectitude.

Having achieved those negative virtues, a film like The Station Agent still has to be something unto itself, besides just weird. It doesn't quite succeed. This is partly because, in an effort not to make the characters too likable, they're not made likable enough. I think the dwarf is terminally grouchy and really does want to be alone, and good for him, best wishes; I think the estranged wife wants to be miserable; and I think the hot dog salesman is a basically happy guy who has wandered into the wrong film, or been foisted there. The film looks beautiful, if seriously underpopulated. The virtues of loneliness are well portrayed. Did I mention that the acting was lovely? It's not enough.


©2003 Les Phillips
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