This precious and preciously tided movie follows the American-gothic-gone-rancid adventures of the dysfunctional Grape clan. Its members include Gilbert (Depp, his hair dyed a preternatural red), a grocery clerk who's the family provider; his 500-pound mother (Darlene Gates), who hasn't left the house since her husband killed himself seven years ago; Gilbert's retarded young brother (DiCaprio), whose passion is trying to scale the local water lower; and two sisters (Laura Harrington and Mary Kate Schellhardt) who spend their days pretending everything's okay.
Enter the free-spirited Lewis, whose camper breaks down outside of town. Though given to banalities such as "I love the sky—it's so limitless," she stirs up feelings in Depp, including a profound longing to ditch his family and hightail it out of his one-horse Iowa hamlet.
This is all a little too studiously grotesque, and it goes on for too long. (PG-13)
Kevin Bacon
Bacon is an unhappy, hotheaded assistant coach at a Catholic college. A bit sloshed on red wine at a fund-raising dinner, he spots a tall African teenager (6'8" Charles Gitonga Maina) playing basketball in a video sent by a missionary. That, he decides, will be his greatest recruit.
All of this is mildly entertaining, as Bacon journeys from his snow-covered campus to the African jungle in search of his potential star. But then Mr. Formula lumbers in, out of breath from lugging his bag of tricks. One can only sigh, or fidget, over the feisty missionary nun, the chiefs prodigal elder son and Bacon's moral rejuvenation during a climactic basketball game. By that point the movie has long been on automatic pilot. (PG)
Tommy Lee Jones, Hiep Thi Le
The title of this pretentious and chaotic Oliver Stone film comes from its protagonist, Le, a Vietnamese woman who endures 30 years of war, marries an American Marine and announces herself to be "between East and West, North and South, Vietnam and America, heaven and earth"—between everything, in fact, except the devil and the deep blue sea.
Based on the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip, who now lives in San Diego with her second American husband, the movie is full of dialogue and narration that suggest Stone thinks he is making a definitive statement on Vietnam when in fact he is telling the story of one woman's tortured life, and not doing that much justice.
Hayslip grew up near Da Nang, enduring a rape by Vietcong guerrillas, torture and imprisonment by South Vietnamese authorities and all the peripheral terrors of occupation, first by French troops, then by Americans.
The strongest sequences come early, when Stone still has his characters sorted out. After that he clutters things up with murky flashbacks and lots of Buddhist priests whom Stone refers to as "wizards."
When Jones marries Le and takes her and her three children home to San Diego, he is unconvincingly shocked by how inhospitable his family acts toward her. Stone heavy-handedly casts such scenes to indict all of the American involvement in Vietnam, as if a vaguely racist clerk in a California supermarket incriminates a whole country. Hayslip's story is powerfully moving. It is just a part of history, however, not history in microcosm. (R)
Daniel Day-Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite
The second teaming of Englishman Day-Lewis and Irish director Jim Sheridan (after My Left Foot), this movie tries tendentiously to make a case for those who argue that Britain misrules Northern Ireland, violates Irish civil rights and knowingly compromises its own legal system.
The story, though, is adapted from the self-serving memoir of Irishman Gerry Conlon, a petty thief from Belfast who served 15 years in a British prison after he Was convicted of involvement in the terror bombing of a suburban London pub in 1974. Conlon insisted that he was innocent and that his confession had been extorted through physical and psychological brutality. Sheridan buys Conlon's story uncritically. Every Englishman here is a corrupt anti-Irish bigot, except Emma Thompson, who plays a sympathetic lawyer who pleads Conlon's appeal and gels the case retried.
The film's most striking subplot has Postlethwaite, as Day-Lewis's distant working-class father, arrested when he tries to free his son. In the unlikeliest of coincidences—though a real one—father and son end up in the same British prison cell. As the two become enmeshed in the turmoil of prison life, Sheridan stages the anguished father-son confrontations with intimacy, and Day-Lewis and Postlethwaite play the relationship with moving passion.
If Sheridan didn't feel the need to pile on the pedantic subtexts, this would be an absorbing personal drama, rather than a vituperative, question-begging broadside. (R)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Tom Gliatto,
- Ralph Novak.
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!
