Financial Times (London,England)

December 3, 1992, Thursday

Inspired exercise in bad taste

By STEPHEN AMIDON

DEATH BECOMES HER (PG)

Robert Zemeckis
THIS IS MY LIFE (12)

Nora Ephron

SLACKER (15)

Richard Linklater

THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD

Nancy Kelly
ELECTRIC MOON (15)

Pradip Krishen
In 1980, Robert Zemeckis made a remarkable little black comedy called Used Cars, one of the most underrated films of recent years. Remarkable because it exuded the sort of good natured bad taste so rarely seen on screen. Since then, of course, Zemeckis has toed the line and raked in the loot, becoming the highest grossing director of all time with films like his Back to the Future trilogy.
With Death Becomes Her, Zemeckis makes a welcome return to his early low standards. The film is an inspired exercise in bad taste that should appeal to everyone who has ever paid good money to see a freak show or rubbernecked at a traffic accident.

Death Becomes Her tells the story of an ageing movie star (Meryl Streep) who makes a Faustian deal with a magician (Isabella Rossellini) to regain her youth. The potion she drinks gives her eternal life, which comes in handy when she is murdered by her husband (Bruce Willis) and his lover (Goldie Hawn). She returns to haunt them, only to find that being a zombie has its drawbacks, especially when one of your intended victims is one as well.
It is not the story that is notable here, but rather the striking special effects Zemeckis uses to tell it. Streep’s head is twisted backwards, smashed between her shoulders and knocked off its perch altogether; Hawn’s midriff is ventilated by a shotgun blast. Both women then proceed to rot for the rest of the picture, winding up looking like microwaved mannequins. If the idea is to put people off the notion of eternal youth, it is singularly effective.
If the above sounds like too much to stomach, it should be noted that it is all done in a lighthearted, anarchic spirit. Zemeckis and his buddies at Industrial Light & Magic have made a cartoon using human bodies, capturing the fluidly violent form of the genre as well as its affable nihilism. In his last film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Zemeckis perfected the art of placing human and animated figures in the same scene. Now, with Death Becomes Her, he has people behave as if they themselves were the cartoons.
The actors get into the spirit of all this quite admirably. Hawn lets herself be ballooned up to a believable two hundred pounds, while Willis plays a boozing nerd as if he was to that manner born. Most credit should go to Streep, though, who suffers indignity right from the opening scene, when she performs a truly awful musical dance routine, until the last, when she is reduced to nothing more than a severed head.
But the film really belongs to Zemeckis, who seems to have realised that it is easier being a bad boy once you’ve banked a half billion bucks. Having become the biggest grossing director of all time, Zemeckis now seems determined to be simply the grossest.
*****
The only thing gross about This is My Life is its rampant sentimentality. In it, Julie Kavner plays a single mother who sells cosmetics at a New York department store while thirsting for fame as a stand-up comic. She finally gets her big break, only to find that success sours her relationship with her two daughters, who would rather have mom a failure at home than famous but absent.
Unfortunately, Nora Ephron, whose pen could drip acid when she wrote the screenplays When Harry Met Sally and Heartburn, seems to prefer syrup now that she is directing her own material. Every time her film teeters on the brink of a real conflict, such as Kavner’s use of her eldest daughter’s teen angst for material, Ephron retreats into a hollow, feel-good reconciliation, usually accompanied by a cloying Carly Simon soundtrack. To make matters worse, the film is woefully unfunny. If comedy is all about timing, then Ephron’s directorial watch needs winding.
The usually superb Kavner is disappointingly listless, while Dan Aykroyd and Carrie Fischer as theatrical agents seem to be reading out the script for the first time.
Slacker is the sort of film that achieves cult status by telling the disaffected young that their rebellion is somehow different, somehow more justified, than the uprisings of preceding generations. Set in and about the dreary college town of Austin, Texas, Richard Linklater’s drama-documentary charts a day in the life of a group of jobless, aimless 20-year-olds as they drift among the city’s coffee houses, bedsits and bars.
Despite its problematical premise that ‘withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy,’the film has considerable charm and real style. Linklater has a wonderful ear for the dialogue of the dispossessed – his wandering characters are often captivating as they opine about Madonna, Elvis, political assassinations and Chaos Theory. They keep you on the edge of your seat by virtue of the fact you never know what they will say next. (You do know what they will do, though – nothing). They all suffer from a sort of spiritual Greenhouse Effect, in which insulating values and ideologies have been baked away by an overheated, intellectually noxious culture. The only character seen hard at work is a young man who has locked himself in a roomful of televisions for four years, intent on watching everything.
Fans of Godard and Wayne’s World will find much to treasure here, though ageing hippies and other fogies may well feel like the character who, when asked to come to a party, declines by explaining he has ‘less important things to do’than engage in ‘premeditated fun.
‘ *****
Another independent effort from America is Nancy Kelly’s Thousand Pieces of Gold, which details the life of a young Chinese woman who is sold into slavery by her father. She is transported to 1880s Oregon, where her ‘master’tries to make her a whore. She rebels against her fate and soon finds herself involved in a difficult relationship with a Civil War veteran.
The film is handsomely shot and features a spirited performance by Rosalind Chao in the lead role. Despite the timely agenda of feminism and an ethnic rethinking of America’s western heritage, however, director Kelly’s film turns out to be a rather standard melodrama, complete with poker games in a smoky saloon and bad guys with scruffy beards. The hero may be a heroine, but she still rides off into the sunset, her best guy at her side.
*****
Electric Moon is another culture clash film that never works up enough steam to make for a real collision. It is set in an Indian resort where Westerners come to experience the real East, only to be duped by the owners, who secretly use stuffed tigers and fake bird calls to convince their guests that they are in some primitive paradise. Director Pradip Krishen’s film is an occasionally insightful glimpse into the way people cannot see forests for trees, though its worthiness is undercut by an often tedious pace.