Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
After what some might call the schmaltz of For Love of the Game last week, now is the time for weirdness, American Beauty and the British release, Plunkett & Macleane. Yep, it’s your lucky day, with another double feature of roves and raves.
Plunkett & Macleane, based on two real robbers of jolly old eighteenth century England, is an MTV version of history, complete with raucous music, pierced eyebrows, and such jagged lighting and camera movement that it is about as hard on the eyes as The Blair Witch Project. With hangings as performance art, torture, foul words, sexually transmitted diseases, and a ruby in the chamber pot, it’s not exactly what we’ve come to expect in a wigs and knee-breeches to-do. Yes, the word breeches is used, as is the word halitosis, which I cannot find documented in eighteenth century usage.
Macleane (Jonny Lee Miller) is a gentleman, a gambler, and a drunk, but in the rigid British caste system, a gentleman, nonetheless, while Plunkett (Robert Carlyle) is a sometime apothecary (an excuse for some explosive good fun), sometime thief. Macleane provides the charm, Plunkett the brains, for a somewhat askew Robin-Hood scheme, robbing the rich to give to the poor, themselves.
Unfortunately, we soon get the idea, but there is only one idea, and we see it played out again and again. It takes more than one more outrageously bewigged fop (Alan Cumming) or carefully rigged explosion to maintain interest. So, there is a love interest, Lady Rebecca (Liv Tyler), who happens to be the victim of their first robbery. And, of course, there is a very model of a law and order authoritarian, tinged with more than a dash of sadism (Ken Stott, probably the most convincing member of the cast).
The film is a richly textured visual experience. The prison scenes out-Dickens Dickens. You see a ridiculous wig, absurd makeup, and five o’clock shadow too, all on the same person. Director Jake Scott keeps the ensemble tearing through the hundred minutes of the film like Robin Williams in his bad old drugged-up days. Maybe it is significant that the two leads were together in last year’s cruel, grimy Trainspotting. It was a first for me, but when I saw Plunkett & Macleane, I was the only person in the theater. So, if you are interested, I suggest you get to it while you can.
Now, to cross the pond. What can you say about American Beauty, a rose-strewn chronicle of the final days of the life and marriage of a poster boy for male menopause, whose wife is a Martha-Stewart clone high on motivational tapes, adultery, and target shooting? I say that it is a well-acted mess, about as pretentious as Eyes Wide Shut, but with the men dropping trousers as well as the women.
We’ve seen the whole plastic-suburbs-with-picket-fences done more efficiently this year in Arlington Road, and with more enthusiasm last year in The Truman Show and Pleasantville, and many more times in years past. My own favorite of the lot is Bob Balaban’s Parents (1989) when we learn the secret ingredient in all those carefully choreographed backyard barbecues (which gets us to the whole fascinating genre of cannibal comedy, but I must exercise some discipline here).
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey, in a bravura performance) plods through a dreary existence. He is a failure at his job, in his marriage to Carolyn (Annette Bening, who gamely finds some depth in the shallowness of her character), and in his relationship with his daughter Jane (Thora Birch, doing the best she can with a stereotypical role). Last week, we had a love story; this week, a hate story. Lester hates his job. His wife and daughter hate him, and he and his daughter hate the Broadway show tunes his wife inflicts on them during her color-coordinated dinners.
But, all of this changes when Lester spots Jane’s classmate Angela (Mena Suvari) who has enough curves and moves for the whole cheerleading squad and who talks about her sexual adventures the way people used to talk about ice cream. Jane is shocked by her father’s exuberant response, Angela delighted. Lester is on another planet, and I’m left wondering where is Vladimir Nabokov, now that we really need him.
Meanwhile, Carolyn is having some awakening and fun of her own, and Jane is changing her feelings about the creepy peeping-Tom drug-dealer, your typical boy next door (Wes Bentley), who just might be the most normal resident in this icily normal neighborhood. Where, by the way, is Mr. Rogers, now that we really need him?
Wrapped in fantasies of his jail-bait Dulcinea wrapped in nothing but rose petals, Lester gets himself fired (but with a generous settlement), buys the car of his teenaged dreams (it seems it has been a long time since he has had any dreams). He lifts weights and works at a fast food restaurant like a—teenager? Do we start to see a pattern here? He smokes pot, purchased from the teenaged entrepreneur next door, with whom he shares musical tastes.
Director Sam Mendes (this is his first film venture) lenses this all in rather straightforward style, while drawing out some remarkable performances from a cast that melds into a true ensemble. But that’s not enough. This is one of those bleak comedies of ideas (like Fargo and Raising Arizona) which plays more for thoughts than for laughs. But for me, the only idea is how sad it is that this man can liberate himself only by regressing to adolescence (with all its obnoxiousness—remember, I was a high school teacher for twenty years). I had the feeling that if this superannuated Peter Pan could will himself a case of acne, he would sport his zits with pride.
So that’s it, our excellent adventure in weirdness and in ugliness, crudity, and downright viciousness. Both films earn R ratings for profanity, sex, and I think most of all violence, and American Beauty pushes various envelopes for drug use and the basic situation of the sexual infatuation of a man in his forties for a teenaged girl.
And so, this seems like a good time to tell you about a movie site that I roved onto by accident this week—
http://www.christiancritic.com
I am as distrustful of anyone who labels himself "Christian Critic" as I would be of anyone who labeled himself "Communist Critic" (and communism generated some dreadful critical writing). I’m looking for "Movie Critic." But "Christian Critic" is a fundamentalist Christian who, nonetheless, is a movie lover. While he does not compromise his beliefs (for instance, pointing out his discomfort with the supernatural in The Sixth Sense), he is not like those cranky social conservatives who try to fight some sort of major cultural battle over an unwed mother in a sit-com. Certainly, any parents could trust his judgments on objectionable content in films, and any fundamentalist could be heartened by the biblical context and references he provides for any film. As I’ve compared his judgments with my own, I find that he and I draw very similar conclusions about many films, judgments of the basic artistic quality of the films rather than of their content.
Christianity used to provide intellectual and artistic leadership, but in our time, for a variety of reasons—perhaps with Christians feeling themselves called upon not to conform themselves to this world—Christianity and the arts have taken on adversarial roles. Graham Greene was probably the last great novelist to identify himself as a Christian, and there is no great Christian music or visual art in our time. So, I salute "Christian Critic" for his effort to bridge a yawning gap, and I recommend his well-written reviews to you.
These dark, dreary films are seriously lacking in noble thoughts, but I urge you to keep your heart full of noble thoughts and your feet dry as you rove and rave through the dark nights of your soul and the dark movies of soul-lessness that, nonetheless, speak of things that we need to think about.