Based on Oscar Hijuelos's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, this adaptation could easily have been as misguided as The Bonfire of the Vanities. The fact that it isn't should be rated a victory, if perhaps a small one.
The Castillo brothers, Cesar and Nestor, are Cuban musicians who come to New York City in the early '50s. The swaggering, lubricious Cesar (Assante), who, as someone notes, "thinks he is the last Coca-Cola in the desert," seeks fame and fortune as drummer and vocalist and finds satisfaction in the arms of a cigarette girl (the too rarely seen Cathy Moriarty). Dreamy, sensitive Nestor (Banderas), a composer and trumpeter, is trying to forget the woman back home who broke his heart. He finds temporary solace with would-be teacher Delores (the quietly effective Maruschka Detmers).
By day the Castillos work in a meat-packing plant; by night they assemble a large band that soon seems headed for the big time. But when the hotheaded Cesar insults the mobster owner of an important club, the Castillos are reduced to playing weddings and bar mitzvahs. And then a chance encounter with Desi Arnaz (played, woodenly, by Desi Jr.) leads to a spot on I Love Lucy and to the brothers' climactic confrontations with each other.
It's just a bit too oedipal watching the son replace the father in the Lucy episode. Other than that, Mambo Kings is expertly cast and performed. Assante, his eyes flickering like a lizard's, perfectly captures Cesar's brazen charm. Banderas takes the full measure of Nestor's dreamy longing.
The film also fairly spills from its frames with color and movement and fine music. Ultimately, however, it resembles Hijuelos's novel much as a sleeve resembles an arm. It fails to deal with Cesar's pathetic downward spiral—a key part of the novel—and tacks on a hokey Hollywood ending. The result is The Fabulous Baker Boys with a Latin beat. (R)
Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah
My name's Nick Halloway. I'm not sick, I'm not crazy—but I am invisible."
In this way everyone's favorite fall guy, Chase, announces that the deuces are transparently wild in this slick, if slightly wayward, comic melodrama. Chase plays a San Francisco stock analyst who meets a beautiful documentary filmmaker (Hannah) and tumbles so thoroughly that he gets piebald drunk when she slips away to a previous engagement. Next morning, dreadfully hung over at a big-league presentation at Magnascopics Research Laboratories, he sneaks off to the men's room for a catnap. Sure enough, he causes an accident en route which sets off a cyclotron which in turn clears the building and renders its only remaining inhabitant, the snoozing Chase, invisible.
That makes him, reckons the rogue CIA agent (Sam Neill) who is controlling Magnascopics' experiments, "the single most exotic intelligence asset on the planet."
So the chase for Chase is on. Now we see him, now we don't, with a few inconsistencies: Sometimes his clothing is visible while his body is not; sometimes both are invisible but objects he holds (like a gun) can be seen. For the most part, though, everything is blithely orchestrated by thrill-master John Carpenter (Halloween, Starman). Though not completely sure of his own footing here—Memoirs lacks the moral seriousness that gave the great comedy-melodramas (Stalag 17, The Apartment) their razor edge—Carpenter manages to conspire nimbly enough with Chase's fabled blundering to produce some funny moments: Chase trying to eat Chinese food when he can't see his hands, or working a ventriloquist routine with a drunk in the backseat of a cab.
Chase is in his old Saturday Night Live milieu, and he makes the best of it to keep the audience tuned in through a long, one-note joke. Hannah, all long legs and luscious lips and flowing blond locks, seems destined to play forever a mermaid who has graduated from Bennington, but she plays it quite fetchingly. Best performance, though, goes to Neill, who has inherited the velvet mantle of the suave villain cut so elegantly many moon-dark nights ago by James Mason. (PG-13)
Liam Neeson, Laura San Giacomo
In this twisty thriller, a man's fate hangs quite literally by a thumb. Tony Aaron (Neeson) is a disgraced policeman turned seedy detective, a charming rogue whose hands are either in someone else's pocket or on someone else's wife. It's Christmas 1959 in Brighton, England, and Tony is dispensing comfort and joy as he knows best: staging fake adulteries, with the help of his wife, for those desperately seeking divorces. (As English law then had it, adultery was one of the few ways to get out of a marriage.)
Tony's got the routine down pat: Have his wife and client check into a hotel, wait a decent interval, then break in, snapping the incriminating photos. But this night, the charade goes awry. Tony bursts in only to find his wife murdered along with the client, a famous painter. The culprit has also hacked off the artist's thumb, the means by which he had always "signed" his canvases. A prime suspect, Tony sets out to clear his name, a quest made more difficult when he becomes entangled with the artist's mistress (San Giacomo), herself a suspect.
Under Suspicion, which puts a deft spin on such classic films noirs as Double Indemnity, is as well-crafted as a Swiss watch until the preposterous climax. Still, the movie is beautiful to look at and, despite some silly dialogue and San Giacomo's parody of a screen siren, fun to watch. Kenneth Cranham is highly effective as a police inspector torn between duty and loyalty. And Neeson, with his Irish burr and long, slow smile, is the sort of guy who gives sleaze a good name. (R)
John Mellencamp, Mariel Hemingway
Now look here, John, you being the star of your own directorial debut and all. You can make a sleepy elegy to your down-home roots, or you can make a hot, dirty, lust-in-the-dust soap opera; but you can't make a hot, dirty, lust-in-the-dust, sleepy elegy to your down-home roots.
The gritty rocker here plays a C&W star who takes his California wife (Hemingway) and daughter back to some place called Doak City, for a nice visit with his folks. They include Grandpa (Dub Taylor), who figures his famous grandson ought to buy him a Cadillac so he can toot his horn at the pretty girls, as well as the singer's pa (Claude Akins), who is horsing around in the hay with John's past girlfriend and present sister-in-law (Kay Lenz).
Mellencamp feels so at home—especially after rubbing up against sister-in-law himself—that he decides to shuck his career and pack wife and child off to California. How come, John? To run with this pack of no-account hounds? Lord knows, we all hope there are higher roads in life than being rich and famous in California, but being down and dirty in Doak City sure ain't one of them. (R)
- Contributors:
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Mark Goodman.
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!
