Director Nicolas Roeg is notorious for making eccentric, sometimes impenetrable films—Insignificance, Don't Look Now, Track 29, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Eureka—but nothing he has done seems as inaccessible as this preposterous romantic fantasy, which could have been titled The Exorcist and Ghost AND Our Lady of Fatima Meet the Night of the Living Born Again Pathologist Who Always Rings Twice.
The inexpressive title was part of the package, though, since this is an adaptation of Brian Moore's unimpressive 1983 novel about a San Francisco doctor whose body disappears after the doctor is struck and killed by a powerboat while swimming.
Theresa Russell, having worked with Ken Russell and having appeared in many of her husband Roeg's films, has contributed to more fruitcake projects than your average jar of candied apples, and she uses all her experience here to overcome the all but unactable role of Harmon's unfaithful, lapsed-Catholic, frazzled wife.
When Harmon's body disappears, Russell is puzzled, apparently not realizing that this is the era of the only good husband is a dead husband movie. Meanwhile, she is having hallucinations featuring the Virgin Mary, all the while finding time for hug breaks with her lover, James Russo, and guiltfests with various clergymen. Russo gives Harmon some competition in the hunk department, especially since Harmon's postdeath pallor makeup is so white and thick it seems to be a bacon fat derivative.
The other supporting players are undistinguished, except for Will (No Way Out) Patton as a priest sympathetic to Russell and Julie (Paint It Black) Carmen, who is full of convincing indignation as Russo's wife.
Moore's obsession with Catholicism keeps the guilt/free-will debate subplot bubbling, and Roeg, no slouch in the mysticism category himself, frequently pans the sky, as if hoping for one of those rare cameos by God. He overdoses on the Christian symbolism.
Producer Allan Scott's wispy script suggests a sluggish soap opera particularly desperate for plot turns. The movie seldom makes sense even on its own shaky terms. (R)
Spalding Gray
Gray's first act in the filmed version of his 1990 off-Broadway stage monologue is to explain the curious title. Monster in a Box refers to his behemoth (1,900 printed pages) auto-biography-in-progress, Impossible Vacation—the tale of a man who finds it "very difficult to take pleasure when in very pleasurable places."
Audiences may be similarly hampered. For though Gray, a self-described "raving talking head," can be witty, whether talking about the late R.D. Laing, writers' colonies, Hollywood agents, even AIDS, Monster in a Box, which was filmed—for no good reason—in front of an audience, doesn't have much immediacy and is far less cohesive than Gray's previous film, Swimming to Cambodia.
The pleasure is further diluted by overloud music and sound effects and inane home movie-style direction. (PG-13)
Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac
This hilarious French black comedy is set sometime after what seems like a nuclear holocaust in a nondescript apartment building that has seen better days and better tenants. The present inhabitants include a man who lives in a few inches of water in the basement along with assorted amphibians, a woman who futilely devises Rube Goldberg suicide machines, and two brothers who manufacture boxes that moo. These survivors have in common that they are chronically hungry carnivores—they wage fierce battle against a crew of sewer-dwelling herbivores—and that they are patrons of the remains of their building's deli.
In these days of famine and empty shelves, where does the beady-eyed butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) get his provender? Every time he sets out a fresh supply of cold cuts, there's one less tenant. And next week's rôti looks to be the building's newest occupant, ex—circus clown Pinon, who falls for the butcher's myopic daughter (Dougnac).
Adroitly shot by directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro—one side-splitting sequence plays to a threnody of creaking bed springs, wailing bicycle pump, clicking knitting needles and slip-slapping paintbrush—Delicatessen only occasionally gets mired in metaphor and symbolism. And for all the film's cannibalistic brutishness, it has—thanks to the delicate performances of Pinon and Dougnac—an undeniable sweetness. (R)
Hugo Weaving, Genevieve Picot
This small, glum, inexplicably praised Australian film is something like Wait Until Dark, the 1967 Audrey Hepburn thriller about a menaced blind woman, except that it lacks the earlier movie's violence, substituting a faintly kinky psycho-sexual study along the lines of sex, lies and videotape. The blind character (Hugo Weaving, who looks uncannily like sneering British novelist Martin Amis) spends his lonely days in a fictional city taking photographs—of the sky, of trees, of his dog—but, being blind since childhood, his aim is haphazard, and he needs to have someone identify the prints. Ah, but our hero has never really trusted anyone since childhood (how does he know that Mommy wasn't lying when she said he had taken a photo of a nice old man raking leaves?), and he certainly can't rely on his housekeeper (Australian stage actress Picot), a naughty minx who puts furniture in his way when she isn't trying to seduce him.
The job of photo interpreter falls instead to a dishwasher (Russell Crowe), an open-faced kind of guy whom Weaving meets one night after eating out. Picot perceives Crowe as her rival, sets out to undermine him, and does.
Director-screenwriter Jocelyn Moorhouse, an Australian TV veteran in her feature debut, doesn't get nearly enough tension, sexual or otherwise, out of this peculiar ménàge à trois. Other than an occasional bit of edgy humor (there's an indelibly weird image, for instance, of Weaving making his way down a back alley, carrying a comatose cat), Proofs strong point is Picot, who has the tartness and ferocity of a Down Under Glenda Jackson. When she puts the moves on Weaving, it's a bit like watching Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers stripped down to her bustier and singing Justify My Love. (R)
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Tom Gliatto.
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!
