RANDOM SHOTS
by Les Phillips

Chicago (Rob Marshall).

Marshall et al. want to keep it moving, keep it exciting, keep it sexy and cynical. They succeed, but at some cost: the style is the star here, and the performances, which are basically very good, are constantly undercut by the director and his method. Renée Zellweger or Catherine Zeta-Jones or Queen Latifah attempt to sell songs with all the showbiz they can muster, but the camera won't focus on them and let them do the selling job. You get the actress's face, then her leg, then a crosscut to an entirely different scene (the singer keeps singing), and back again and all around. A couple of numbers at the very end of the film are shot and staged straightforwardly, and they're still quite lively. Even the New New Musical doesn't have to be on uppers every second. Early in the film, basic narrative continuity is so frequently cut, bumped and ground that audiences may have trouble getting their bearings (and the story isn't so complicated, it really isn't).

Queen Latifah is good enough, but she doesn't have much screen time, so I'm surprised by the praise her performance has received. (OK, I'll come clean -- truth is, I saw a Sandra Bernhard performance in which Bernhard absolutely demolished Queen Latifah in ninety hilarious seconds, and I'll never be able to take her seriously, not ever.) The other leads are quite good, but much challenged by the way they've been shot. I didn't think Zellweger ever quite caught the proper tone of dumb blonde cynicism, but her singing and dancing was a revelation (or was it merely surprising?). Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere seemed dead on, extremely effective, and very comfortable in their roles.

John Kander and Fred Ebb are basically workmanlike composers who produce first-rate songs very occasionally. One triumph of this film is that it makes all of those songs sound wickedly excellent. I liked Chicago, and certainly recommend it. But if a new era of film musicals is indeed upon us, I hope they don't all look like this.

The Good Girl
(Miguel Arteta).

Mike White, who wrote The Good Girl, is much better than most of the characters in his Texas setting, and he wants you to know it. Most people here are vacant. They spend much of their time stoned in front of the television, or in a different sort of fundamentalist Christian stupor, or they're making lazy circles around the discount store with their shopping carts, not quite smart enough to know what to buy. White even acts the role of a mendacious Jesus freak, and gives himself some of the best cheap-shot laugh lines. This cartoon condescension toward ordinary people really put me off The Good Girl initially. But a real story breaks through the stylized wiseass artifice of the film.

Jennifer Aniston plays Justine, a lonely discount store clerk, not quite energetic enough to be desperate, but sick of her stoner husband and her tedious, self-righteous co-workers. She begins a love affair with a 22-year-old who calls himself Holden (after Caufield), with disastrous results. The plotting is ingenious, almost elegant. Do Justine's errors and misjudgments doom her, or is she simply the prisoner of her circumstances? The plot reminds me of naturalists like Dreiser or Zola, where the fate's a given; we just watch to see how it'll play out. In any case, Justine and Holden seem almost comically doomed. And the touch of comedy, in the classic sense, gives The Good Girl real distinction.

I couldn't decide whether Aniston was simply underplaying or whether she didn't have enough depth as an actress to convey Justine completely. But the performance is far from embarrassing, and it's very moving in places. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Holden, brilliantly. In climactic scenes he projects a rage and need so powerful that they make you forget everything meretricious about the film. He's going to be a great, great actor. The supporting performances are facile, but extremely well done. The story of Justine and Holden is rich and moving and heartbreaking. Couldn't it have been set in a real town, with other real human beings?

Kissing Jessica Stein
(Charles Herman-Wurmfeld).

American cinema has produced hundreds of comedies about people who are at least prosperous and sometimes very rich. A lot of them take place in Manhattan. And, in most of them, you never see anybody who isn't, at minimum, quite prosperous. In the thirties and forties, the best of these films were light and clever, the rich heroes and heroines were breezy and casual, and only the bad guys and girls were self-important. I think that contemporary Manhattan rich-people comedies, especially "indie" comedies, simply reek of the characters' self-importance.

It never bothered me that all the characters in Holiday or The Philadelphia Story were filthy rich. But I look at films like Kissing Jessica Stein, and it bothers me that everyone's from Scarsdale, everybody went to Brown, etc. This may be because I know a lot of people just like these characters, and I don't like their politics, or lack of politics, their chosen insulation from the great, poor, messy world and city. But I think what really bothers me is that the characters take themselves so damned seriously.

To paraphrase Edmund Wilson, who cares who kisses Jessica Stein? I'd care if she and her friends were more fun. The screenwriters portray her as lovably (or at least acceptably) neurotic. I don't think she's neurotic; I just think she talks too much about romance and sex and orientation, and, after a while, what little she does isn't so interesting. I've liked comedies that were mostly about talking and talking about romance and sex, but they were funnier, and the characters were more sympathetic. Tovah Feldshuh plays Jessica's mom, a bit of a suburban Jewish mother caricature, but more sympathetic than anyone else in the film. I recognize that this opinion may sit somewhere between actual criticism and class warfare, but it's what I think. Graa!

Sweet Home Alabama
(Andy Tennant)

Reese Witherspoon is truly a first-rate light comic actress. She is really, really good. She has to be, to keep you from turning off Sweet Home Alabama, a collection of stupidities, clichés, and obviousnesses that feeds on its own tautological banality. The evil of banality, Hannah Arendt might have said, if she'd seen Sweet Home Alabama.

Sweet Home Alabama tells you that there's no place like home, especially if it's the small town South, while simultaneously it condescends to everyone who lives in the South, mocks them brutally, mocks them without originality or taste or sentiment. Or any knowledge, whatever, about any part of the South, as best I can tell. Candice Bergen is reasonably effective as a Hillary Clinton figure who is mayor of New York, and whose son looks precisely like JFK, Jr. He's played by Patrick Dempsey, who hasn't worked much lately, and, the way he's aging, won't get much more.

Reese Witherspoon is really, really good.

©2003 Les Phillips
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