You never really know who anyone is, and it would pay to be a little careful," a sassy assistant (Pidgeon) warns her too-trusting boss (Scott). She sure has that right. Almost no one is who he (or she) seems in The Spanish Prisoner, a diabolically clever thriller by writer-director David Mamet. Like the best of Hitchcock, Prisoner seductively sucks you into its paranoid world. It is one of those movies that is even more pleasurable upon second viewing, as one can then really admire the elegance of its setup and just how neatly the pieces all fit.
Scott, as the movie's naive hero, heeds his assistant's warning almost too late. The token dweeb at a big corporation, he has invented a formula, referred to here only as "the process," from which his company stands to make millions. He hopes to share in the manna, but he's a lamb in a wolf's den when it comes to business. While at a company meeting on a Caribbean island, he is befriended by a rich man (Martin, smoothly exacting) who asks Scott to drop off a gift for his sister when he returns to New York City. It's the first step in an elaborate con game in which Scott is the all-too-gullible victim. (The movie is named for an ancient scheme in which a con man tells a mark that he has a beautiful sister and a fortune being held hostage back in Spain, but that, with a little money from the mark, both sister and swag can be sprung.)
Prisoner is Hitchcockian in its precision and the sexy byplay between Scott and Pidgeon (Mrs. Mamet in real life), but wholly Mametian in its fascination with ornate cons (remember his House of Games?) and the now-bordering-on-cliche staccato dialogue. All told, it's a richly absorbing film. (PG)
Fedja van Huet, Jan Decleir
This is the Dutch movie—though there is not a tulip or windmill in sight—that nabbed the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture last month. Based on a classic Dutch novel published in 1938 by Ferdinand Bordewijk (not exactly a household name over here), Character is a dark, brooding drama that follows a young man's difficult rise from poverty to membership in a fancy law firm in 1920s Rotterdam. For most of the movie, he is also doing battle with the shadow of his tyrannical, manipulative, brooding father, a man his mother refused to marry and whom our protagonist glimpses only occasionally and always at a distance.
Character has the sweep and moral power of a Charles Dickens tale, but it lacks the colorful subsidiary characters and humor that make Dickens so memorable. What's left is lots and lots of Plot und Drang. (R)
Steve Van Wormer, Paul Walker
The direct cinematic descendants of Bill and Ted and their excellent adventures, the titular Deedle twins (Van Wormer and Walker) are brothers out to prove boys just wanna have fun. A brainless comedy, Meet the Deedles begins on the siblings' 18th birthday ("We're legal and living regal," one tells the other), which the two celebrate by cutting school to go surfing. Angry, their tycoon father packs them off from their native Hawaii to Wyoming, where the duo join the Park Rangers and try to rid Yellowstone National Park of pesky prairie dogs.
The humor here is dumb and dumber (though I did like it when one of the Deedles, eyeing a nearby lovely, muses, "I'd like to be a Deedle in her haystack"), but most of it is pretty harmless and on-the-mark for its intended pre-and adolescent audiences. As the Deedles, Van Wormer and Walker deliver their lines with the vacuous, peppy vigor of male cheerleaders, while AJ Langer, playing Walker's love interest, manages to seem perky even while eating worms. (PG)
Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin
allegedly shooting down their fellow students in Jonesboro, Ark., is still all too fresh in most minds, the last thing one wants to see is an ammo-saturated movie in which a 9-year-old autistic child is targeted for assassination.
Mercury Rising's alleged plot has the kid deciphering a top-secret government code. Rather than change the code, covert agency head Baldwin decides to whack the kid. Willis, an FBI agent, tries to protect the boy. As directed by Harold Becker (City Hall), none of this seems even remotely plausible or entertaining. Neither Willis nor Baldwin are given much in the way of character or dialogue to work with, nor do they strike sparks in their few scenes together. (R)
Brigitte Rouan, Boris Terral
Diane (Roüan) is a chic, 40-year-old Frenchwoman who lives in Paris, is happily married, has two well-adjusted teenage sons and a thriving career as a book editor. Then she meets Emilio (Terral), the shaggy-haired, hunky, twentysomething flatmate of one of her authors. Zing go the strings of her lust-filled heart. She embarks on a passionate affair with Emilio, sneaking off to bed with him every chance she gets, lying to her husband and colleagues and—in one of the film's more charming scenes—literally walking about Paris on a cloud. Then Emilio dumps her.
Post Coitum, as sharply written and directed by its likable leading lady, is a deeply felt, funny yet incisive film about love, sex, passion and regret. As the heroine says, "When you're 20 and love goes wrong, you cry because you think you'll never love again. After 40, you cry because it's far more likely that you never will." (Not rated)
Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw
The Butcher Boy is a brilliantly eccentric and chilling movie from director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), but it's not for the faint of heart. If you're squeamish, take this black comedy's title as fair warning. Young Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens), our vengeful protagonist, lives in Ireland in the early '60s with his drunken dad (Rea) and loony mother. Understandably angry, as well as overstimulated by a mix of Catholicism, anti-Communism and cheesy sci-fi movies, Francie focuses his wrath not on his parents but instead on a bourgeois neighbor lady (Shaw) who, when first we glimpse her, is striding through town as if she were Margaret Hamilton out stalking for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In a film filled with good performances, the most astonishingly accomplished comes from acting tyro Owens, now 15. Blessed with an impish choirboy's face, he turns Francie into a character who can break your heart at the same time that he's cutting it out. (R)
Catherine Deneuve
Deneuve, never an actress afraid of a challenge, here takes on two roles. She's a criminal attorney hired to defend a mentally unstable young man charged with murdering his aunt, a famous psychoanalyst. And, in an elaborate sort of flashback in which the lawyer tries to understand her defendant's history, she plays the aunt as well. This woman is softly curvaceous, coolly seductive and—the movie's biggest shock, considering Deneuve's world-famous blonde mane—a redhead. Actually, the getup gives Deneuve a velvety allure that makes her look something like a French Jessica Rabbit.
But the movie itself suffers from a split personality. Simultaneously a study of madness and a satire of psychiatry, it's inscrutable to the point of being unwatchable. (Not rated)
>David Breashears
HIGH SOCIETY
THE MISSION DAVID BREASHEARS set for himself in 1996 was daunting enough: haul a 42-pound camera to the summit of Mount Everest to make the hair-raising IMAX film smash Everest. But hardship turned to horror when a storm killed eight climbers from other expeditions, a nightmare chronicled in the bestseller Into Thin Air. Filmmaker-climber Breashears, who aided in rescuing the survivors, didn't film any aspect of the tragedy, even though he passed two of the corpses en route to the peak. "I would have felt sullied," he says. "I grew up with the ethics of a mountaineer first. Anyone who heard what we heard over the radios would have agreed." The 37 members of his crew weren't sure they could go on. "I was very concerned about the safety of my team," says Breashears. "And I was feeling very mortal myself." In the end, everyone stayed to finish the project.
The sky-high critical praise for the $6 million film marks a career summit for Breashears, a 42-year-old divorce who now lives in Newton, Mass., and has been climbing and filming the Himalayas since 1979. Since then, he has become the first American to reach Earth's highest summit twice (he has now had four peak experiences there). But Everest teammate Ed Viesturs says he and Breashears have since formed Everest Anonymous: "If I have an inkling that I want to go back to Everest," Viesturs says, "I call David and he talks me out of it, and vice versa."
- Contributors:
- Sue Miller,
- 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!
