Tom Hanks has become one of Hollywood's biggest stars by playing guys who are smart (okay, not Forrest Gump), funny and fundamentally nice. These are the exact same qualities he brings to the screen in his directing and screenwriting debut, a pleasingly bouncy movie about a fictional rock band in 1964. An intentionally modest maiden effort, the movie is, happily, fundamentally nice. Its melancholic subtext catches up with you only after you leave the theater.
In the film, four guys from Erie, Pa., form a band initially called the One-ders and record the catchy tune "That Thing You Do!" Soon they sign with a major label, and their single rockets up the charts. With success, though, comes growing conflict among band-mates over career goals and the realization that there is life beyond wheezing through yet another chorus of their hit. At the movie's end, an American Graffitti-ish coda on each character's fate implies that adulthood is more complicated than a pop song.
There are no big surprises, but Hanks keeps the movie bopping along with genial energy, shows a sure touch with his young actors and stages his concert scenes crisply. Of the band members, the standout is Scott (from TV's Grace Under Fire), a loose-limbed wiseguy who could have doubled for Hanks 10 years ago. Tyler, as another bandmate's girlfriend, has little to do besides squeeze into cigarette pants and tearfully deliver one big speech at the end. Hanks, in an onscreen role reflecting his offscreen one, has a sizable part as the shrewd record company exec responsible for shepherding the group to success. A solid job, Mr. Hanks, on both sides of the camera. (PG)
Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub
In a word, yum. Tucci (sleazebucket Richard Cross on last season's Murder One) and Shalhoub are immigrant brothers from Italy trying to make a go of their restaurant on the Jersey shore in the late '50s. Or, rather, Tucci, the maitre d' and the more assimilated of the two, is trying to make a go of it. Shalhoub, the chef, has an artist's indifference to public taste. When a diner asks for a side order of spaghetti with risotto, he screams, "Philistine!" Without such hungry Philistines, however, the mortgage can't be paid. Then a flashy, friendly rival down the block (Ian Holm) promises a golden opportunity: He'll deliver singer Louis Prima and his band to Tucci's place for a post-rehearsal supper.
The climactic banquet is the most succulent parade of courses since Babette's Feast. But the real pleasure of Big Night, which Tucci scripted (with a cousin, Joseph Tropiano) and directed (with his friend, actor Campbell Scott), is watching good performers tuck into well-written roles. Demonically energetic, Holm practically bounces through the movie. As his unfaithful wife, Isabella Rossellini is sly and glamorous. And Allison Janney, as the florist Shalhoub loves from afar, waits to be courted with beatific patience, mingled with a slight air of bafflement, (R)
Danny Aiello, Teri Hatcher, Glenne Headly, Charlize Theron, James Spader
Chaotic where it wants to be impressionistic, silly where it wants to be funny and precious where it wants to be hip, this unorthodox caper film is nonetheless brightly entertaining. Thanks go to an engaging, whimsically sweet performance by Headly, a dazzling debut by South African model Theron and an array of decorative small performances, including one by Keith Carradine as a remarkably casual homicide detective and Greg Crutt-well as a pompous art dealer who says, "I may be an ass, but it took me a long time to become one."
Director John Herzfeld, a TV veteran who also wrote the script, keeps things moving, though he lets Hatcher get away with a very nervous, unfunny performance as an Olympic skier whose ex-husband is murdered while he's in bed with her. Spader commits the murder with Aiello, and Jeff Daniels and Eric Stoltz are jaded vice cops who stumble on the killing. (R)
Anthony Hopkins, Natascha McElhone, Julianne Moore, Joan Plowright
Much livelier and more energetic than the average Merchant-Ivory movie, this engrossing tale is essentially an apologia for Francoise Gilot, who was Pablo Picasso's mistress from 1943 to 1953, bore two of his children and was the only one of the many women in his life to leave him, rather than the other way around.
Hopkins plays Picasso with impressive gravity, portraying him as a relentlessly arrogant, manipulative man, always lustful but capable of emotional rapport only with his children. Yet screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ignores Picasso's artistic contributions in her zeal to justify Gilot's unhappiness with the life she maneuvered herself into when, as a student and aspiring artist in Paris, she let Picasso pick her up in a cafe. Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts helps director James Ivory fill the screen with sumptuous tableaux. As long as you're not looking for a rounded portrait of Picasso, this is a splendid movie. (R)
>Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio
LOVE CONQUERS ALL
A BIT OF SKEPTICISM SEEMS UNAVOIDABLE when contemplating William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which opens Nov. 1. Start with the title. Did Twentieth Century Fox feel we would confuse this with Jeff Foxworthy's Romeo and Juliet? Then there's this business about the Bard's couplets tripping from the lips of modern Miamians caught up in warfare between gun-toting gangs. And what about the casting? Can 17-year-old Claire Danes (of TV's My So-Called Life) and The Basketball Diaries' Leonardo DiCaprio, 21, really create onscreen heat as the tormented teen lovers? Quite possibly. Coproducer Martin Brown is only echoing the pre-release buzz when he says the cinematic chemistry between Danes and DiCaprio is "like fireworks." But what about reports that when the cameras weren't rolling, the leads behaved like bickering Montagues and Capulets? In fact, Danes and DiCaprio "went through some very difficult times emotionally on the set," says director Baz Luhrmann. "There were definitely times when all three of us sniped at each other." The problems included the emotionally wrenching material—and the bad cases of Montezuma's revenge that both actors contracted upon arriving in Mexico City last winter for the shoot. In the end, though, Danes, who was dating rock musician Andrew Dorff, 19, younger brother of actor Stephen, and DiCaprio, who has said he's seeing someone not in showbiz, were "there for each other," says Luhrmann, who adds that the stars eventually settled into "a brother-sister relationship." Mmm, star-crossed siblings. Sounds like a very special, midsummer night's Sally.
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Tom Gliatto,
- Ralph Novak,
- Jeffrey Wells.
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!
