ROVIN’ AND RAVIN’ WITH MIKE

Copyright © 2000 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved

Three Wrong Numbers—and a Root Beer

After getting waterlogged on The Beach for my last review, I thought, as I walked into Hanging Up, this week, well, at least this will be better than what I saw last week. I was mistaken. So, it seems, are the advertising writers who have proclaimed Hanging Up a comedy. It isn't. What it is is a soap opera story of a dying father and three squabbling (and squabbling, and squabbling) daughters. It isn't amusing: it is irritating, with ringing telephones, shrill voices, and pointless situations.

The basic story, or rather, situation, is that there are three sisters, Georgia (Diane Keaton), Eve (Meg Ryan), and Madd (Lisa Kudrow). Don’t start thinking about King Lear yet. A few years ago, Georgia started an incredibly successful magazine named for herself, and Madd became a soap opera star. Eve, the only one with a husband, a child, or time to spend with their father, is still trying to get started in business herself.

As the father, Walter Matthau has a few funny lines at the beginning. Once we learn that he is suffering from Alzheimer's or some unspecified psychiatric problems, and we suffer through a flashback of his alcoholic disruption of his grandson's birthday party, not even Matthau can bring much humor to the situation.

Pardon my lack of gallantry in including the birth-years of the cast, but how Keaton, Ryan, and Kudrow could have all been children at the same time (as the flashbacks show) is never resolved. Neither do we ever figure out how anyone could have thought that Meg Ryan could carry the weight of this film. Bless her heart. Cute and cuddly and she is, you can't help but love Meg Ryan, and in cute and cuddly films like IQ (which she also shared with Matthau), she is as cute and cuddly as they come. But here, cute and cuddly translate into weak and tired. Bette Midler can slog her way through the mushy parts of a comedy as well as she can slug her way through the comic parts of a melodrama, as she shows again in Isn't She Great, but our little Meg just doesn't have what it takes. The truth is, there are so many problems with this film that I… I just don't want to get started, and so I won't. Hang up, indeed! This is a wrong number.

Thank goodness for a two-for-one coupon from the video store, which gave me two more chances to write a favorable review. I finally got to see An Ideal Husband, which never opened near me, and I took a chance on a film I had never heard of, Grey Owl, which sounded like a western but which turned out to be a flawed but somewhat pleasant surprise. The title character, a Canadian Indian guide and writer, is played by Pierce Brosnan (talk about surprises), an Indian with blue eyes and some surprises of his own. Grey Owl is based on the true story of a Archie Belaney, a young man from Britain, fascinated by the woods and wilds of Canada, who passed himself off as an Indian and became an eloquent voice for the Indians (now called First People) and natural resources of Canada.

A young Indian woman, Pony or Anahareo (newcomer Annie Galipeau), attaches herself to him to learn about the ways of her people. Of course, they fall in love and adopt two cute, cuddly beaver kittens (as baby beavers, it seems, are called). No, for all the cuteness and cuddliness, they are not played by Meg Ryan.

This would be a film to like, with Richard Attenborough's stunning views of the Canadian wilderness, but the film misses the point. There is entirely too much emphasis on the love story, especially since Galipeau lacks the emotional depth to play a totem pole. The real Grey Owl was a liar, a drunk, a womanizer, perhaps even a bigamist. Here he is polished up, and the movie is propped up on his truly worthwhile message.

This film suffers from what I call the Patch Adams Syndrome. Noble thoughts belong in your hearts, not in your movies. In the eighteenth century, dramatists included long, windy passages of noble thoughts, to which audiences responded, it is said, with applause, much as contemporary audiences will applaud after a song in a musical. But, such wordy flights tend, in fact, to drag a movie down. At least, they don't hold a movie up.

One special problem I have with this film is that at one point, Grey Owl (Brosnan) is swimming, and he walks out of the water, revealing a full rear nude scene. For those keeping count of such things, it was the second such scene of the year for Brosnan (whose assets were also displayed in The Thomas Crown Affair)—who admits that he used no body doubles. Except for the most dedicated Brosnan fan, I can't see that the view really adds anything to the film. I am not for censorship, just for good taste and cameras aimed a little higher.

Perhaps this film will renew interest in Grey Owl/Belaney. It created an interest for me, because I must admit that I had never heard of him. You can learn more about the real Belaney, who was the fake Grey Owl, at these two sites:

http://members.aol.com/cetaami/owl2.html#re

(Get ready for this next URL.)

http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/eppp-archive/100/201/300/canadasnorthern/northernlife-l/NationalLibraryOfCanada/temagami/greyowl/index.html

So, a soap opera pretending to be a comedy and an Englishman pretending to be an Indian? What next? How about a rehash of a nineteenth century drawing room comedy which in its own way blurred the lines between melodrama and comedy, Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband?

The notorious Wilde has not fared well on film, at least not since the 1952 adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. A recent film biography had more bare bottoms than bon mots—bad news for a Wilde film. While layers of stuffy late nineteenth century clothing remain discreetly in place in this film, there are subtle efforts to re-read the play as a comment on modern political scandals as well as on the scandal and double life of Oscar Wilde himself.

The film comes across with a sort of heavy earnestness, outright pomposity, that leaves me wondering why it was made. It lacks the energy and the depth of characterization that Wilde’s dialogue requires. (As a high school drama teacher, I never allowed my students to use Wilde’s material for their scenes.) It ends up drooping like one of Wilde’s favorite lilies. An Ideal Husband is not one of Wilde's best or best-known works, and this film does nothing to improve the play’s reputation, as it squanders some intriguing performances by its top-notch young cast, especially the ever fascinating Julianne Moore.

The ever fascinating and downright amazing Julianne Moore, that is. I never thought I would say this about any actress, but Julianne Moore makes me think of Marlene Dietrich with her combination of sensuality and intellect, strength and weakness, passion and restraint. Moore's performances have an ineffable quality, almost spiritual, almost transcendent. At least, they transcend in some ways even Dietrich's performances. On a more mundane level, like Dietrich, she does more than just wear clothes: she animates her costumes, gliding through An Ideal Husband, as if she had been wearing such getups all her life, still looking radiant.

Thank goodness for more Moore. Her performance was certainly the best part of these three films, and just about the only thing that made them worthwhile. If you want to get into the Wildes of the Internet, you can check out “The World-Wide Wilde Web”:

http://www.showgate.com/tots/gross/wildeweb.html

You can find the complete text of Wilde's play An Ideal Husband at:

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/E850003.108

And, till next time, you can find me hanging out at the most elegant beer, that is, root beer, joint on the Internet:

http://www.root-beer.org

I'll be drowning my sorrows but not my noble thoughts, trying to get rid of the bad tastes of these movies but keeping my feet dry, as I recommend you do also. Here's lookin' at you (especially you, Ms. Moore), but not, I hope, at these films any time soon.

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