ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

    Copyright © 2000 by Michael Segers
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High Fideli-T

       Reviewing only one film a week, I have to pick and choose, sometimes missing films that haunt me later on cable or video.  This week, I'm going to  make up for a couple of omissions that have given me a second chance, and I hope that I can interest you in looking out for them.  Both films, Dr. T and the Women and High Fidelity, deal with one of the most basic themes of all film and literature—the relationships, in all their confusion and not so much glory, between women and men. Although the characters and settings are quite different, the films share not only a sprawling structure with a few too many characters and stories for their length but also an ingratiating charm that outweighs their problems.  

     Robert Altman is a trademark director.  For me, Dr.T, Nashville and Short Cuts aren't “films by” Robert Altman; they branded products, Robert Altman films.  All three films are sprawling enough to show Altman at his best and his worst, and that sprawl is both his best and his worst.  He tries to create a whole world in a film, a world with a rich texture of knotted plots and unevenly developed characters. There are just so many characters caught up in so many plots in an Altman ensemble, however, that without a surprising song (as several of the characters in Nashville had) or a surprising bottom-less scene (as Julianne Moore had in Short Cuts), they just get lost in the fray.   

      And what can you say about a film like Dr. T, in which actresses such as Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Laura Dern, Shelley Long, Tara Reid, Kate Hudson, and Liv Tyler get lost in the frantic and frenzied fray?  Well, you can say that it is a mess, and it is, but a Robert Altman mess can be more watch-able, certainly more enjoyable, than a whole lot of what I find on the megaplex screens week after week.

     The story or stories twist and turn around Gere's Dr. T, a gynecologist who gives his patients what their husband's don't—attention, consideration, understanding.  The irony is that the women in his own life, his wife (Fawcett, who is wasted here) and daughters (Hudson and Reid), are falling apart.  So, he turns for attention, consideration, and understanding to a golf pro (Hunt), and then things in his home and his office really get messy. 

     The real mess in this film, however, involves its dead ends and conflicting messages.  Is it a feminist complaint about the loutish husbands who don't take their wives seriously?  Or is it a tale of a spiffy good old boy's condescension to the women in his office as well as in his home?  Does it celebrate women more than it mocks them?  I've heard the opening sequence (with a growing cacophony of female voices) called the worst beginning a film ever had.

     Everything is more or less wrapped up at the wedding of a young woman who may be or may not be a—oh, well… let’s keep a few surprises.  Weddings make good endings, and certainly for a film with its share of broken marriages and adultery, a wedding would have been a final, uh, well, it would have been a finale.

     And yet, there is a strange little venture into magic realism at the end that bothered many viewers.  Somehow, it, too, is an appropriate finale.  After all the downs and one amazing up, Dr. T ends up where we first saw him, between a woman's legs, doing what he loves to do, and I mean drawing on his skill as a physician to bring a new person into the world.  In other Altman films, destiny is just around the corner, maybe laughing at the characters as they bounce in and out of each other's lives.  (Remember Nashville?)  Dr. T, it seems, is destined to be, in several senses of the word, a woman's man.

     Rob Gordon (Cusack), the protagonist of High Fidelity, owner of a record (yes, record!) store, would very much like to be a lady’s man, but no matter how many pieces of his most collectable vinyl he traded in for even a cold speculum, he couldn’t keep up with Dr. T—and not just because Rob looks like John Cusack in seedy overdrive, while Dr. T looks like Richard Gere in nonchalant but graying elegance. 

     The key difference between the two is not so much enterprise or wealth, but let’s look at that gray hair.  Dr. T has paid his dues and grown up.  Rob is the most emotionally immature boy-man to appear on film since American Beauty.  Although transported from the London of Nick Hornby’s novel to Chicago, Rob’s dingy record shop and Rob’s dingy self are much the same.  Championship Vinyl, the shop, is not a place for Rob and his employees, the un-attracting opposites,  Dick (Louiso) and Barry (Black), to conduct business but to engage in endless arguments and top-five lists about music trivia.  Rob is not so much a businessman, even a man, a consort for a woman, as he is a bumbling superannuated teenager who just doesn’t get it even when Bruce Springsteen shows up to explain it all to him.    

     After his current live-in (Danish newcomer Hjejle) leaves him for a neighbor (Robbins, complete with ponytail, in a small jewel of a performance), Rob spins some golden oldies in his own life to review his own Top Five Most Painful Split-ups.  So, like a Side-B Altman, Frears spins a few too many characters and stories, beginning with Rob’s first love and loss, in junior high. 

     I don’t like narration in movies, an easy way out for a director, to tell rather than to show.  Yet, in High Fidelity, Rob’s boyishly honest self-examination running through a series of monologues fits the character and the story quite well.  Like all monologues, they are self-indulgent, but then, Rob is in the running for poster-boy for self-indulgence.  

     No matter how many different directions the film wanders off in, Fears stays in control of his material.  Dozens of songs flit run through the film, almost like the fading bits of songs on a car radio late at nighT  In fact, the way Fears uses music reminds me of the way Altman has (country music in Nashville, the fierce ballads of Short Cuts, and the blues in last year’s Cookie’s Fortune), simultaneously to unify and to distinguish the plots. There is a grimy realism in the sets and costumes as well as in the characters themselves, that gives the film a view of the past untainted by nostalgia. 

     Cusack not only fills out but also animates Rob, while Black and Louiso seem to be battling for Best Supporting Actor nominations.  As in Dr. T, the women are seen only through the men’s eyes and tend to blur together in quick vignettes.  What they have the opportunity to do, they carry off quite pleasingly, but not even Hjejle, the film’s main squeeze, even if she is in the process of becoming Rob’s ex—or, maybe not—is given enough to do.

     Both of these films benefit from sharing a review, not only because they have a number of similarities, but also because if I had trekked to the megaplex to see them when they opened, I might have filled out my reviews with more of my distaste for them.  With both of these, no matter how much I simply enjoy them on some level or other, I do have reservations.  While High Fidelity might pick up a couple of acting nominations, I doubt that we are going to hear much more about them.     

     Still, although they aren’t enough to sustain a night out followed by a morning of writing, they might be just the thing when you are looking around the video store or surfing through the cable channels. I enjoy the comments of Brian Drury of Garps World on Dr. T and am glad that Blake Kunisch of Outermost Movies and News shares some of my doubts about High Fidelity. Keep your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts, and pause to consider that although a film may not get on the top five (as Rob and his pals would say) or even the top ten, it may still have its distinctive charms.

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