Anything Goes
by Les Phillips

The conceit of De-Lovely, which bothered most reviewers, is that the ghost of the great Broadway composer Cole Porter is sitting with the director of his biopic, commenting and objecting and reminiscing as he and we see his life story unfold. This approach gives the creators of De-Lovely (writer Jay Cox and director Irwin Winkler) a lot of license -- characters burst into song, to each other, on occasion, and we also get a lot of music, most of it performed extremely well, in nightclub, rehearsal, and theatre scenes. Time spent singing and dancing is time not spent examining Porter's relationship with his wife, his relationship to artistic creation, or his sexuality.

It's clear that some reviewers have been waiting for sixty years for explicit, bitter revenge on the earlier Porter biopic, Night and Day (1946), a film in which, to understate the case, no homosexual characters appeared. Those people will have to wait a little longer. De-Lovely is about music and love. On its own terms, the film is usually quite entertaining. The Porters' several houses look beautiful, and so do all of the theaters, and everyone dresses very well. The marriage between Cole and Linda is problematic, but credible. I expected to hate Kevin Kline as Porter because I almost always hate Kevin Kline (and I started to hate him a lot more after somebody called him "America's pre-eminent Shakespearean actor.") It's interesting that the actor who gave such a convincing performance in In and Out cannot convince you, in this film, that he's homosexual. Kline underplays, for once, and the performance is almost completely successful. He also is extremely convincing as he ages.

Critics have complained that Ashley Judd is too young to play Linda Porter, since Linda was actually eleven or twelve years older than Cole. I think Judd solves the problem by making clear that she's lived quite a bit, by being authoritative, by being absolutely certain of where's she's going. And by being so clearly head over heels in love with Cole Porter. The supporting acting is very good, but these two carry the picture. A historical quibble: I understand that the Porters were good friends with Gerald and Sara Murphy (perfectly played here by Kevin McNally and Sandra Nelson). But did the Murphys really come over on ocean liners from France for every single one of Porter's New York opening nights? Were the Murphys really out with the Porters ALL THE TIME? Didn't they have several hundred other famous people to entertain? And why don't we get to see Gerald Murphy raking the beach?

In Pieces of April (written and directed by Peter Hedges) a suburban family drives in their station wagon from Pennsylvnia to New York City for Thanksgiving dinner. Estranged daughter April, in the person of Katie Holmes, is preparing the dinner. Cut to station wagon -- family talks, reminisces, and bickers. Cut to Katie, getting more anxious as every preparation goes wrong. Back to the station wagon, back to the tenement. This is not Hannah and Her Sisters, or even Home for the Holidays, and is quite a bit too low-rent to be The Myth of Fingerprints, and, given that April lives in a yucky tenement apartment with a broken oven, and can't really cook anyway, it's not exactly Babette's Feast, either.

Mom, played by Patricia Clarkson, is dying young of cancer, but this is not One True Thing or Stepmom or Dying Young either. Pieces of April gives you two genres for the price of one, without really being either of them. And it isn't much good. Katie Holmes is trying to be a movie actress. But she gives her character none of the difficulty, quasicriminality, or checkered past that has apparently alienated her family so completely (the script gives her some of it). The dysfunctional family in the station wagon is well played (Alice Drummond, Oliver Platt, two OK teenage actors, and more about Clarkson later), but Hedges needed to get them out of the car more. On the other hand, the city scenes are drably beautiful and convincing. The neighborhood is dangerous, the poor people are really poor, the dying mother is not nice and more than a little crazy, dad is clearly long-suffering.

Hedges' screenplay is quite a bit smarter than usual, and the city scenes are shot beautifully, and there are other intelligent sad things happening. But all of this excellent sadness makes the comic moments hard to take, and the completely implausible ending even harder to take. Sean Hayes has a smallish role. He plays one of Katie's neighbors, but really he's playing some sort of strange construct. I don't know how Hayes is going to maintain a film career as a character actor after umpteen years of playing the most fully realized and most recognizable stereotype in the history of television (Jack on "Will and Grace"), but this particular performance seems like an experiment gone bad.

Two things made me glad I saw the film. There is a brief, confrontational scene between Clarkson and Platt. Clarkson has left the car, insists she's going to hitchhike home, is spitting histrionics; Platt tries to talk to her. The scene is beautifully written and acted, painful, and, well, real. The other saving grace is Clarkson's performance. I'm still ambivalent about her as an actress. I think I like her better in small doses (Far From Heaven) rather than large (The Station Agent), but I'm beginning to understand her better. Her acting here is over the top and occasionally irritating, but it's original, not boring, and in several moments very attractive and moving.

James Cox's Wonderland stars Val Kilmer as John Holmes, the man with the unusually long penis, in a film that is BASED ON TRUE FACTS. A study of Holmes's famous career as a porn actor would have held unique interest, and could have been more real, more interesting, less cuddly than Boogie Nights. But Wonderland is about Holmes's less famous late career, as a criminal. Often I can't follow plots; in this case I just stopped caring, as different groups of grungy 80s dudes kept breaking into other people's houses and apartments, or each other's houses and apartments, and shot and threatened each other and swore a lot. Holmes, who could not have been as mundane as he appears to be in this film, gets lost in the shuffle. Lisa Kudrow plays Holmes's wife. She's very good. She's been an excellent dramatic character actress in films so far; now she's got time to make lots of them.

 

©2004 Les Phillips
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