Chick Flicks
by Les Phillips

In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003).

Jane Campion is a risk-taking genius. In a way The Piano, her breakout film, took the fewest risks. Her version of The Portrait of a Lady was eccentric enough to make me wish for a straighter version (not to mention eternal life for John Gielgud) yet I could still take pleasure in the (often failed) leaps of faith that she made. I think her early New Zealand movies, Sweetie and Angel at my Table, are almost completely successful and brilliant in their originality.

I can't figure out how to categorize In the Cut. It's based on a novel by Susannah Moore which, at least here, seems a staid enough thriller in its form. But Campion's sense of intuition introduces so much more -- the camera observes and accentuates so many nuances in the relationship between the professor-protagonist (Meg Ryan) and her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh), not to mention between Ryan and her smoldering detective friend (Mark Ruffalo). Campion also understands Brooklyn, knows it isn't Manhattan, and exploits its dangers. The music and lighting are unusually intelligent throughout.

In the Cut is full of suspense -- I was completely compelled -- yet the plot was an anticlimax for me. Partly this is because I can't really follow plots in suspense movies, or don't care to. Mostly this is because the subtext of the film carried so many more surprises and questions than the storyline did. I think this was one of last year's ten best movies. And Leigh and Ryan, especially Ryan, gave performances that were as intelligent as the film.

Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003).

This film deserved a better distribution deal and better reviews. There have been many, many stories of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, with many differing points of view, including the Ted Hughes Is From Hell version. One virtue of this film is its willingness to grant that many of these points of view deserve credit. This Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) is ambitious but not monstrous; jealous of Hughes's fame, but civil; perhaps pathological but not necessarily out of ambition or jealousy. Plath's rage at Hughes's unfaithfulness, in this version, seems a trigger for madness, and for the intense energy that produced Ariel. But the screenplay (John Brownlow) is humble; it doesn't try to explain exactly what happened. Daniel Craig, an actor new to me, acquits himself well as Hughes, though we don't see the rough-hewn wildness that was allegedly central to the poet's makeup. Blythe Danner plays Aurelia Plath. She is excellent.

Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003).

I no like. This has been more true the more I thought about the film. There's not much here that hasn't been seen in Kids, except Kids had no adults in it. Come to think of it, there wasn't much in Kids that wasn't to be seen in The River's Edge. Every year or two, along comes a film that's going to explode our heads with The Truth about adolescents...and, as with this film, this is about all it attempts to do. For those of us whose heads exploded long ago, it's hard to get too excited about Thirteen. It's true that the acting is quite good. But, for me, it was also true that the verité, the spontaneity, the handheldedness of it all seemed forced and ultimately tiresome.

The film had a doctrine; I think I got that. It was hard to feel for the kids. I no like.

Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003).

A sweet, humane film with more characters than Gosford Park, but the story lines eventually collude nicely. The moral tales of love that ring false are mistakes, not cheats, and more than outnumbered by the true stories. Bill Nighy plays a corrupt old rock star, and his schtick began to wear on me. I was shocked to find that Hugh Grant, as the Prime Minister, was sympathetic rather than intensely annoying, and that his big political scene -- dressing down the American President, played by Billy Bob Thornton -- was surprisingly plausible. Other good performances: Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, the little kid who plays Liam Neeson's son. Curtis makes London look cool and contemporary, a place to fall in love.

Toys in the Attic (George Roy Hill, 1963).

Geraldine Page, Wendy Hiller -- and Dean Martin. In this film, an attempt at a serious psychological drama, Martin isn't a joke, but he's barely passable; the director used Martin's charm and masculine energy to somehow make his performance not contemptible. He plays a ne'er-do-well younger brother in a strange New Orleans family, and the southernness, con-man qualities, desperation, moral contamination, dissolution -- those are all missing. His wife is played by Yvette Mimieux, a classic early 60s sex kitten who apparently had a subsequent career as a serious academic. Neither her talents in anthropology nor her talents in mimesis are apparent in Toys in the Attic.

Toys in the Attic is based on the last serious Lillian Hellman play. Martin's two spinster sisters (who have always, always wanted to go to Europe) manage the homestead back in Norlins, hoping that their beloved bro will come home from his wanderings, or get married, or be successful, or perhaps not get married or successful; perhaps will just come home, live with them, and become infantilized. Page is the perky extrovert sister, Hiller (so completely Southern that I didn't recognize her until the credits) the morose one, and they are brilliant.

The play is melodrama, very dated, artfully made and shot, and the screenplay does its best in compressing too much plot and subplot into too little time. It almost works, and with, say, Paul Newman instead of Dean Martin, it might actually have worked. Quite possibly Newman didn't want to do another film, after Sweet Bird of Youth, as Geraldine Page's boytoy, even subliminally. Or was just tired of playing buff Southern underachievers.

Gene Tierney has a nice role as a suave, witty matriarch.

©2004 Les Phillips
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