Financial Times (London,England)

September 26, 1991, Thursday

Hellish visions explore the haunted mind

STEPHEN AMIDON

JACOB’S LADDER (18) Cannons West End

MEETING VENUS (12) Plaza

A RAGE IN HARLEM (18) Cannons West End

RHAPSODY IN AUGUST (U) Curzon Mayfair

THE OBJECT OF BEAUTY (15) Curzon West End

Although his talent has never been in doubt, Adrian Lyne has always stood accused of slickness and superficiality in his approach to filmmaking. Jacob’s Ladder provides an emphatic answer to these charges. It is his finest, most serious piece of work to date, a film whose admitted flaws somehow fail to detract from its strange power. Jacob’s Ladder tells the story of a Vietnam vet (Tim Robbins) who is plagued by memories of one confused battle in which members of his platoon seemed to go collectively insane. Several years after returning home, these bad memories start to become hellish visions. He sees his girlfriend (Elizabeth Pena) coupling with a demon, watches a horn sprout from the head of a nurse, hallucinates about his son who died in a traffic accident some years earlier. These visions are so intense that he suspects he may be suffering a delayed reaction to something that happened to him in the war. He begins an investigation which leads him into a web of government intrigue, the occult and, ultimately, his own troubled psyche. It is a compelling, confusing and often brilliant film, keeping you off-balance while still holding your attention. Robbins is excellent, his pensive, doughy face capable of remarkable expressiveness as he wanders through dreams, moods and situations. Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin writes with more maturity and less sentimentality than he brought to bear on his earlier film, Ghost, refusing pat answers or easy outs. Only at the very end does his story falter by adding one layer of meaning too many. Lyne’s direction is both less steady and more inspired than in 9 1/2 Weeks or Fatal Attraction. The expected remarkable effects are all here – the heart-beat-like thump of a helicopter as it hovers above a wounded soldier, the stroboscopic bestiality of Pena’s demonic dance, the charnel terror of an imaginary hospital. And yet, there is now a sense that Lyne is not so much creating imagery for its own sake as using it to explore a man’s haunted mind. He stumbles occasionally in this attempt, especially by letting things drag a bit midway, though even here I felt these were the flaws of a virtuoso pushing himself for once, rather than playing it safe. It is a pleasing change to witness. Another director who seems to be changing course in mid-career is Istvan Szabo. Meeting Venus marks a radical departure from the epic profundities of Mephisto and Colonel Redl, showing Szabo to be a satirist with a pleasingly light touch. Unfortunately, he cannot in the end resist the temptation to weigh his work down with symbol and meaning, making for a film that leaves you feeling a little cheated. Meeting Venus details the tribulations of a Hungarian conductor (Niels Arestrup) as he attempts to stage a major production of Tannhauser in Paris. Despite his high aspirations, rehearsals soon degenerate into farce, with union trouble, international infighting and a temperamental Swedish diva (Glenn Close) combining to turn an artistic undertaking into a bureaucratic nightmare. In this show, even the understudies turn out to have dirigible-sized egos. Szabo’s rendering of these backstage squabbles is often hilariously telling, such as when a cacophony of alarm watches interrupts a Wagnerian chorus to indicate that it is time for a coffee break. Satire is abandoned, however, the moment that Close and Arestrup share an umbrella during a Paris rainstorm and fall madly in love. Suddenly, light artistic folly is replaced by brooding amour fou, making for an ineffective melodrama that tries to echo the high themes of Wagner’s work. And that’s the problem – Szabo renders the lovers’ emotions in operatic terms, with big lines and inflamed emotions that have no grounding in reality. When Arestrup gets arrested trying to break into Close’s hotel room, or she tells him he’s the love of her life, you wonder if you’ve missed some scenes. The profundity Szabo hints at here is a big empty. It is as if he forgot what he was poking such wicked fun at in the first part of the film. Arestrup labours heroically to keep up with the script, though Close’s inexplicable transformation from a headstrong diva to a doe-eyed, crush-ridden girl seems to have befuddled even this most canny of actresses. You cannot help but wish that the lovers had gone on hating each other – it would have made for a more consistently enjoyable film. Love of a rather less ethereal nature can be found in A Rage in Harlem. Set during the 1950s, it tells the story of a pious undertaker (Forest Whitaker) who becomes involved with a voluptuous gangster’s moll (Robin Givens) after she arrives in Harlem with a cache of stolen gold. Unfortunately, Given’s double-crossed boyfriend is hot on her trail, forcing Whitaker to seek help from his conman half-brother (Gregory Hines). A series of raucous, violent episodes ensue, leading to a finale neater than anything you would ever find in real life. Despite the temptation to lump it with the current wave of African-American cinema, A Rage in Harlem is really conventional Hollywood fare, blending love story and crime drama into a concoction that is smooth and sassy in parts, violent and vulgar in others. Young director Bill Duke shows flashes of stylish talent, especially in the atmospheric opening scenes, but too often relies on stagy violence. Worse, several of the minor characters, including Zakes Mokae as a transvestite pimp, are ludicrously underdeveloped. Although Whitaker and Hines are as fine as always, and the stunning Givens is better than you would expect, this is a film that needed a steadier, more patient hand behind the camera to make it really work. Akira Kurosawa’s genius has always been his ability to paint on a large canvass, colouring the screen with broad cinematic strokes and epic tales. In Rhapsody in August, the great Japanese director tries with mixed success to draw in miniature. The film tells the story of an elderly widow (Sachiko Murase) who is visited by her half-American nephew (Richard Gere) when he comes to Japan to make an atonement for the fact that Murase’s husband was killed by the atomic bomb at at Nagasaki. The film is occasionally moving, especially the scene in which Murase’s grandchildren visit the school playground where their grandfather died, their shadows on the naked pavement suggesting the vaporised victims of the atomic bomb. But for the most part Kurosawa relies on good old-fashioned sentimentality, an approach which seems singularly inappropriate to the film’s difficult subject matter. And Gere is completely out of place, looking more bemused than normal, as if he’d wandered onto the set from another shoot. For die-hard Kurosawa fans only. Someone who seems to have no trouble at all working on a small scale is writer/director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whose The Object of Beauty proves to be a finely crafted little comedy. It tells the story of a hedonistic American couple (John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell) living far beyond their means at a posh London hotel. They decide to stage the theft of a small Henry Moore statue in order to collect on the insurance, yet are beaten to the punch by a deaf-mute chambermaid who develops a deep love for the piece while cleaning their room. Although it could just as easily have been a stage play or a television drama, the film is full of witty writing and strong acting.