Except for a few minutes of voice-over narration, Hunter never speaks in this haunting Australian movie, but she gives what is probably her best performance yet (it also seems safe to say, with fall flying by, that it is the finest of the year). As a mute 19th-century Scotswoman who becomes a sort of mail-order bride to a New Zealand settler (Neill), then drifts into an affair with his neighbor (Keitel), Hunter is frail-looking but fierce, investing every moment with gravity and fire. Just consider one significant gesture: the oddly ecstatic way she strokes the keys of her piano—the instrument on which her adulterous affair hinges—with the back of her hand, as if she were caressing Keitel's cheek. Hunter makes this woman—who at first can express her feelings only through music—an almost mythically powerful character, as memorably vivid as one of Thomas Hardy's headstrong, rustic heroines. Like them, she is hounded by destiny, lovers and personal demons, and her drama is acted out against a wild, primal landscape of forest and sea.
Writer and director Jane Campion is perhaps not as sure-footed setting up the central triangle as one might wish, and whenever the story moves indoors—to Keitel's and Neill's cabins—the movie feels musty and crabbed (although maybe that's the point). But these are the tiniest of quibbles when weighed against Hunter's performance, Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography (one early, dusky close-up of Hunter, just before she accompanies her new husband inland, could be a movie in itself) and Michael Nyman's romantic but slightly chilly score. The movie is a beautiful, and rare, accomplishment: a distillation of passion, tinged with regret, tenderness and warmth. It's what a pianist would call a nocturne. (R)
Michael Keaton, Nicole Kidman
Keaton is an executive dying of cancer. His wife, Kidman, is pregnant, and he is videotaping an autobiography for the child. For most of the movie, he and the other actors address the camera directly.
Keaton whines, blames his parents for ruining his life and castigates his doctors for not curing him. As the cancer spreads, he flounders around in search of a miracle, even stooping to seeing a faith healer (Haing S. Ngor).
Keaton controls his tendency to lapse into flippancy. Kidman, in a shockingly flimsy role, is passivity defined. If she were any less gorgeous, she would fade into the scenery. Except for the eventual baby, played by the very cute Colby Sawyer Garabedian, the secondary parts are even more weakly cast. For a movie about cancer that displays some courage and honesty, see Joel Schumacher's Dying Young. (PG-13)
Gabrielle Anwar, Tim Curry, Rebecca de Mornay, Chris O'Donnell, Oliver Piatt, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland
Here is living demonstration of the word "foolproof," as it applies to Alexandre Dumas's romantic, classic adventure yarn, at least.
The foolishness at issue is that of producers Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum, who want to pass off the non-charismatic, lame Sheen and Sutherland as action heroes and cast de Mornay in a role once played by Lana Turner. Nevertheless, by using invigorating action sequences, colorful Austrian locations and an unhesitating pace, Roth, Birnbaum and director Stephen Herek concoct a splendidly engaging, lively action film.
Dumas's plot, of course, makes up for a lot of flaws. A young Frenchman, O'Donnell, arrives in Paris, hoping to join the elite royal guard, the Musketeers, just as the unit is being disbanded by ambitious cleric Cardinal Richelieu, an overdrawn real-life personality played by Curry.
O'Donnell joins forces with three Musketeer veterans, Piatt, Sheen and Sutherland, to try to foil a coup planned by Curry, his minionette de Mornay and the sheriff of Nottingham surrogate, Michael Wincott.
The snarly Sheen and phlegmatic Sutherland are oddly counterheroic. The only thing more laughable than Sutherland's getting tough, for instance, is Sheen's getting tough. De Mornay, pouting full-time as usual, trots out her serious acting mode, which consists of widening her eyes during Big Moments, such as when she resists the advances of the lecherous Curry. Anwar, as wan an actress as there is, plays Queen Anne. Hugh O'Connor, who looks like a combination of Winona Ryder and Laurence Olivier in his Richard III makeup, plays the foppy King Louis.
The an lie tone of the proceedings makes it hard to get too worked up over the concluding sequences, but Dumas's "One for all; all for one" schmaltz is impossible to resist. (PG)
Kirstie Alley, John Travolta
The surprise hit Look Who's Talking featured a loquacious male infant; in the sequel there was a chatty female kid. Now, in this eager-lo-please if slickly packaged continuation of the saga, there are dishing dogs. Alley and Travolta are back as the parents of a 4-year-old daughter (Tabitha Lupien) who's fixated on the Phoenix Suns and a 6-year-old son (David Gallagher) who's determined to get a dog. Travolta is hired as the private pilot for a blond cosmetics tycoon (Lysette Anthony) who has designs on her newest employee. When she leaves her impeccably groomed poodle (the voice of Diane Keaton) with Alley and Travolta at the same time they bring home a dog-pound mutt (the voice of Danny DeVito), the class war begins. What transpires between the mismatched canines—he eats designer shoes; she has daily paw-dicures—is far funnier than what goes on with their masters. For example, there's the night the bumptious DeVito-dog takes the disdainful Keaton-canine on the town and teaches her to enjoy the swinish things of life: going without a leash, rooting through the garbage outside Chinese restaurants for moo goo gai pan and sloshing through the mud. Dopey. Uh huh. But perfectly genial doggerel.(PG-13)
Macaulay Culkin, Jessica Lynn Cohen, The New York City Ballet
The dancing in this holiday perennial is swell. But putting Tchaikovsky's most famous work on film has done nothing to enhance it. Quite the opposite. The 13-year-old Culkin, for all of his star billing, is hardly the movie's focus and rarely dances. The story centers on a young girl (12-year-old Cohen in an inauspicious debut) who's given a nutcracker doll as a Christmas present by a mysterious uncle. She falls asleep and dreams that the toy transforms itself first into a soldier that saves her from enormous mice, and then into a dashing prince (Culkin, who first performed The Nutcracker at the New York City Ballet in 1989). Unfortunately the first-act Christmas Eve celebration is shot primarily from close range. While bold gestures and exaggerated facial expressions are required for theater productions, here the broadness looks ridiculously stagey. The second act, a panoply of dance, which would have benefited from some close-ups, is shot from a distance, thus offering views no better than those at live performances. Factor in a smirking and rather graceless Culkin and an overacting Cohen, and the result is a flat-footed Nutcracker (G)
- Contributors:
- Tom Gliatto,
- Ralph Novak,
- Joanne Kaufman.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
