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Three films: only Oscar nominations in common
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
Three reviews for the price of one this week. Why? Because I love you. And also because, as ballyhooed and award-nomination bound as these three are, I would be hard-pressed to concoct a full-blown analysis of any of them (except possibly the last and most interesting of the bunch, but that one's been out for a few weeks and you've probably heard enough about it).
So, to work: About Schmidt—I expected better from this acrid comedy about a retired insurance executive. That's partly because I'd like to believe Jack Nicholson can still surprise us after all these years, but mostly because writer-director Alexander Payne's first two films—the audacious abortion satire Citizen Ruth and the startling high-school politics rondelay Election—were among the smartest and funniest American films of recent years.
Sadly, Schmidt is a letdown. Nicholson is passably engaging as Warren R. Schmidt, a man coming to terms too late with the disappointments and frustrations of his mundane life. But those disappointments are so predictable (gee, a loyal company man whose pillar-of-the-community decency masks a deep well of loneliness and repressed anger), and Schmidt's attempts to resolve them so trite, that the film never gains any traction.
This character type has been a cliché since at least Willy Loman, and neither Payne nor Nicholson adds anything significant to the repertoire. Kathy Bates does contribute some spark as the loud, oversexed mother of Schmidt's daughter's fiancé, but she's not around enough to make much of a difference. And Payne proves, unfortunately, that he's not above getting a cheap laugh out of Bates' sagging breasts. (Not to mention waterbeds—didn't waterbed jokes die around the same time as disco?)
The movie's greatest success is in its setting—Payne has a good sense for the bland details of his native Midwest (Schmidt lives in Omaha, where Payne grew up), and an obvious love-hate relationship with its landscape of shopping plazas, chain restaurants, and drab 1960s neighborhoods. But the convincing locales are populated almost entirely with caricatures, and unpleasant caricatures at that. There may still be something new to say about the hollowness of the middle-class dream, but this ain't it.
The Two Towers—Talk about review-proof. After the first installment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptation cleared a half-billion dollars, who cares what any piddling film critic has to say about part two?
As before, there's epic sweep, preposterous expository dialogue and grand visual storytelling. Plus a terrific CGI rendition of Gollum—the first time Jackson has actually improved on my pre-adolescent mental conception of the characters. None of that changes the fact that, boiled down as it is here, Tolkien's myth-o-rama amounts to little more than fight-chase-fight-chase-fight. But if you don't like fights and chases, what are you even doing at this movie? (Just please, don't walk out of the theater like the guy in front of me did, telling your kids that this is some sort of "parable for what's going on in the world right now." Right, and so's "Little Red Riding Hood." But they'll learn more from reading the newspaper.)
Gangs of New York—Oh my freakin' god. Has Martin Scorsese completely lost his mind? On the evidence of this film, you'd have to say yes. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Gangs is a ludicrous movie, a revenge-epic western transplanted to what is supposed to pass for lower Manhattan in the 1860s. From what I've read, some people are taking it seriously, which is totally baffling and also takes all the fun out of it.
This is basically Mad Max on the Lower East Side, and for long stretches it is raucous, exhilarating entertainment. It is a valentine to violence, Scorsese's half-cocked but fully loaded conception of a city and nation forged in blood and fire and so on and so forth. What exactly it's all supposed to mean is hardly clear, but then moral clarity has never been Scorsese's strong point. This movie obviously got his fever up like nothing in a long time, and he rides it like it's a frothing stallion.
Daniel Day-Lewis glowers and chortles and taps knife-points against his glass eye. Leonardo DiCaprio sneers and pouts and proves that you can look astonishingly pretty even when your face is covered with your enemy's spurting blood. As does Cameron Diaz—there are bloodbaths for everyone in this movie.
By the time it reaches its insane (and largely incoherent, not to mention historically suspect—but again, who cares?) finale, the streets of the city are literally rivers of red. The film sags in its muddled middle section, much of which seems to have been left in the editing room. I'm looking forward to the director's cut. I hope it's five or six hours long—really. During its frequent surges of lunatic brilliance, it's one of the most exciting things I've seen in ages. It's even more fun than The Two Towers—and it makes almost as much sense.
January 9, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 2
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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