Copyright © 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
Someone asked me the other day if I had so much pride that I really thought anyone cared about which movies I like or don’t like. Truth is, no, but it is not a reviewer’s place to tell his readers which movies he likes or doesn’t like. I had an experience this week with two very different films that reminded me how little my prejudices have to do with what I write about a film. The two films are: (1) a beautifully photographed ramble around Morocco tracing the path of a young woman seeking herself, seeking spiritual fulfillment, well, seeking something to seek; (2) a grittily photographed ramble across a few southern states tracing the path of a middle aged Elvis impersonator. So, which one do you think I thought I would like? Which one will I encourage you to see?
Friday, I headed for the megaplex for the newly arrived and weirdly titled Hideous Kinky, directed by Gillies MacKinnon and starring Titanic heroine Kate Winslet as Julia. This spiritless rather than free-spirited early 70’s hippy (though the word is never used) drags her two daughters, five-year-old Lucy (Carrie Mullan) and seven-year-old Bea (Bella Riza) around Marrakech as she plans to find reality by studying with the Sufis. Or, by the way, as she tries to ignore the reality that the checks from the London-bound father of the girls aren’t coming. Somehow, she gets involved with Bilal (Said Taghmaoui), who, despite walking on his hands, skinny-dipping, and telling fortunes, just is not the life-force he should personify. As a tourist he tries to hustle remarks, he is a "loser."
It falls to the girls, particularly to Bea, to be more mature than their twenty-five-year-old mother. When Bea ends up in an orphanage, Julia remarks that she has finally attained what she always wanted—normalcy, which for her means nothing more than a clean school uniform and a chance to go to school.
It is hard, if not impossible, to say where the movie is going, where it has been. Even a film like this based on characterization needs some sort of narrative skeleton. But there is no narrative here, just a few more lumps, a few more bumps for a remarkably self-centered woman who talks about seeking the annihilation of the ego—quite a big job for her.
OK, the scenery is lovely, but you could find a television documentary that would cover the same country with less confusion. I mentioned that after watching a recent film, I sat in the dark auditorium waiting for something else to happen. By the time this film chugged to an unlikely happy ending, I found myself fleeing the theater, trying to get the old Crosby, Stills, and Nash song about Marrakech out of my mind (though it was not in the film) and wondering how many support groups the kids would join as they came of age in the self-absorbed eighties.
Do you ever have one of those days after which you need to pour a glass of something cold, grab a warm cat, and stretch out in a recliner with something reassuring and undemanding on the tube? Inevitably, those are the evenings when you get America’s Grossest Home Videos and not much else. On a recent such evening, I began watching with half a heart and even less of an eye a film called Finding Graceland, directed by David Winkler (1998). A young man (Johnathon Schaech) on his way from nowhere, actually from the death of his wife (Gretchen Mol) in a horrible accident, picks up a hitchhiker. A hitchhiker named Elvis, who is in a hurry to get back to Graceland, where he hasn’t been since he died.
Why didn’t I change the channel? I don’t know. Perhaps because it promised to be so dreadful that I wanted to see if it could really be that bad, perhaps because the actor playing Elvis seemed so—well, so recognizable, but I couldn’t recognize him. By the time Bridget Fonda appeared as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, the yarn had enough momentum to keep me hooked.
I’ll let you in on a secret so old that it shouldn’t be a secret anymore, but apparently a certain kind of writer and filmmaker or critic has failed to learn it. The interest in a film or novel may indeed come from its characters, but the story, the narrative, the yarn is what provides the energy, the momentum, the hook that keeps an audience in place.
This is not a movie about Elvis Presley. It is not even a movie about the weird cult of Elvis-ness that has developed since his death. It doesn’t make fun. It simply reports, accepts. It uses that odd phenomenon to provide ambiance for this sad little tale of people who don’t go to the Morocco of their experience by choice but who try to pick up whatever pieces of wisdom and comfort they can dredge up out of their own painful realities.
Who is Elvis? The film leaves us with some mysteries intact. Elvis—really Elvis? A nut case? An angel? Anything but a fraud. (Anyone remember Miracle on 34th Street?) This man believes he is Elvis, however that may be possible. It was not until the credits rolled, and I saw the name Harvey Keitel did a few things fall into place. Of course.
This film records one of the most amazing performances I have ever seen. Keitel doesn’t look like anyone named Elvis I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t seem to be able to sing or to dance. He hardly tries to act like Elvis. What he does, remarkably, uncannily, is act like a man who believes he is Elvis.
There are some actors who are always themselves. Sean Connery always plays Sean Connery playing—someone else. A winning someone else, whether a super spy in the old James Bond films or a super cat burglar in the recent Entrapment. Harvey Keitel on the other hand is an actor who can lose himself in the part of someone, someone else, usually a losing someone. From his film debut in Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1968), he has specialized in playing the role of someone who has been there, done that, lost more often than won, and, it’s our good fortune, come back to tell us about it. Just look at some of his films in the past decade: "Pulp Fiction," "The Piano," "Reservoir Dogs" (which he co-produced), "Thelma and Louise," and one of my favorite films, "Smoke," in which a surprisingly lyrical performance by Harvey Keitel is paired with a surprisingly lyrical performance by Tom Waits, whose bare ruined voice is similar to Keitel’s fierce, broken characterizations.
As I said, I didn’t realize while I was watching this film that I was watching Harvey Keitel. But, I did realize that I was watching a miraculous performance. I don’t know how he did it, but every moment he was on screen, he projected not only his character’s conviction that he was indeed Elvis but also the reality that he was not. Even his one outright impersonation was like something out of Oriental theater, a projection of what Elvis might have been if he had not been Elvis. But, by the time this Elvis has left the film, this viewer (for whom Elvis is not a part of his mythology) was glad to have seen this film, much moreso than the film he had planned to admire last Friday. And, for an odd aside, a friend of mine who is an Elvis buff was as moved by the film as I was.
Sadly, these two sad little films will in their entire history probably never be seen by as many people as saw the new Star Wars film the first day it opened. That’s okay. I, too, shall see that film, after the lines die down, after I feel I won’t be stuck in the dark with a bunch of crazies dressed in the weirdest costumes since midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Movies make up a big, crazy, contradictory parallel universe, and a reviewer is no more than a tour guide trying to stay one step ahead of the tourists to whom he’s trying to show the sights. If he can put his prejudices on hold and swallow his pride, he is as likely to find wonders, and to wonder, as anyone else.
For the sights and sounds of Julia’s beloved Morocco, take this virtual tour:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/dest/afr/mor.htm
To learn about the Sufism that appealed to her, journey to:
http://www.sufis.org/index.html
http://www.ccnet.com/ rudra/rumi/sufilink.htm
And if you need to get to Graceland yourself, put on your blue suede shoes and boogie on down to:
http://www.elvis-presley.com/HTML/home.html
For a presentation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, from which I stole the title of this article:
http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pridprej.html#BEGIN
Well, Sufis meet the King? Who is hiding out reading Jane Austen? Only at Peanut.org! Whatever quest you are roving on, for Graceland or for grace, keep on raving and keep your feet dry as the Moroccan sands and your heart full of noble thoughts.