Financial Times (London)

1995

Legend turns into a tall tale

By STEPHEN AMIDON

LEGENDS OF THE FALL (15) Edward Zwick

CAPTIVES (15) Angela Pope

EXOTICA (18) Atom Egoyan

EYES WITHOUT A FACE Georges Franju

THIN ICE (12) Fiona Cunningham Reid

An unabashed, full-blown melodrama, Legends of the Fall will be best enjoyed if taken far less seriously than intended. Based on Jim Harrison’s 1978 novella, it traces the catastrophic fortunes of the Ludlow clan as they battle the world in early 20th-century Montana. Like the family it portrays, the film starts out strong, only to fade into chaos and hyperbole. The Ludlow patriarch (Anthony Hopkins) is a former US Army Colonel who resigns his commission in disgust at the treatment of the Plains Indians. He retires to the rugged western wilderness, where he raises three sons with the help of a sagacious old Cheyenne warrior. His idyll is eventually shattered, however, by the debased civilisation he sought to escape. His youngest boy Samuel (Henry Thomas) is killed in the first world war, leaving his middle son Tristan (Brad Pitt) consumed with grief and guilt that drive him around the globe for a half-decade. To make matters worse, the eldest, Alfred (Aidan Quinn), becomes a celebrated member of the government the Colonel so despises. In the Roaring Twenties things fall further apart – there is a broken marriage, a murder and then a suicide. It is only a showdown stemming from Tristan’s activities as a bootlegger that finally brings the family back together. For a while, Edward Zwick’s film is a passionate, rip-roaring view of a clan being ground to bits by a century in which it does not belong. With their god-like patriarch, unstinting filial devotion and deep love of the untrammelled land, the Ludlows suggest an Edenic perfection, a family that is a world unto itself. The story’s tragic irony is that boys do not care about paradise – they want more earthly adventures. Brad Pitt is eminently watchable as he portrays this youthful energy smashing against the rocks of the tumultuous world. Although his flowing locks and fashion-spread preening seem a bit out of place in the 1920s, his performance is shot through with a barely controlled passion, particularly when he resorts to scalping German soldiers in revenge for Samuel’s death. Quinn and Thomas are also fine as his very different brothers, as is Julia Ormond in the tricky role of the beauty beloved by all three. Unfortunately, like the officers commanding the Ludlow brothers in Flanders, director Zwick allows his film to go over the top once too often. He ladles too much importance into what should have been a cracking family saga. The film is too long by a good half-hour, allowing in bogus spiritualism, redundant mountain panoramas and overly fraught encounters. And the concluding shoot-out is both long in coming and short on credibility. Worst of all is Hopkins, who cooks up a great smoked ham of a performance. His frenetic sputterings as the stroke-ravaged Colonel remind us that a film that wants to be a legend sounds a lot more like a tall tale. * Captives is another movie that starts out strongly only to lose its way. Angela Pope’s feature debut is the story of Rachel (Ormond, again), a recently divorced dentist who finds work in a London prison, where she meets an intriguing convict, Philip (Tim Roth). They commence a clandestine affair, though their happiness is threatened when Rachel discovers that her lover is in prison for killing his wife. Matters grow thornier when Philip’s co-prisoners try to force Rachel to sneak drugs and weapons into the jail. The film’s early moments are plausible and affecting, thanks largely to some deft writing by Frank Deasy and good performances by the leads. Roth is particularly beguiling, combining innocence and danger in a way that makes credible his attraction for a lovelorn yuppie. And the film’s suggestion that there is an erotic undertow in dentistry is a truism of modern life that is too seldom probed. Unfortunately, what promised to be a quirky story of bar-crossed lovers soon becomes a decidedly rote thriller. The concluding spasm of violence resolves none of the emotional issues raised in the early scenes. What started out as an intriguing mind game winds up as hackneyed gun play. *

The Canadian director Atom Egoyan has always been easier to admire than like. Up to now, his films have proved puzzles with few clues and no real solutions. With Exotica, however, Egoyan has made an accessible, compelling movie. This time, the psychosexual conundrum can be solved by the viewer. The film’s action is centred around a high class strip club, where Francis (Bruce Greenwood), a grief-stricken tax inspector, nightly hires the services of a young private dancer (Mia Kirshner) to soothe his anguish. By day, he audits a homosexual pet shop owner (Don McKellar) who is involved in the illegal importation of exotic bird eggs, while by evening he employs a teenage babysitter to ‘look after’ his daughter, who was found murdered several years earlier. Back at the club, meanwhile, a brooding disc jockey (Elias Koteas), jealous of Francis’s intimacy with his beloved stripper, plots to ruin him. Although the film’s various storylines appear to be unrelated at first, Egoyan ultimately draws them cunningly together in a network of grief and loneliness. His characters all hunger for the exotic in an effort to forestall their pain; they all want to return to some prefab Eden. Each fails, yet these failures lead to more real, more lasting connections. Exotica is a superb film – subtle, nuanced and deeply moving. *

An equally uncompromising view of the human condition is on display in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, re-released this week 36 years after its debut. Time has done little to dampen the power of this bleak story of an arrogant surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) who kidnaps young women to slice off their faces and graft them on to his mutilated daughter (Edith Scob). Although still effective as a deliriously warped horror flick, what is most impressive about the film is its stark beauty. Franju is nothing if not a poet, and his finest film is shot through with unforgettable imagery. Its final scene, in which the still-ravaged Scob wanders into the night surrounded by wild dogs and escaped doves, is one of the most powerful finales in cinema history.

Thin Ice is a movie with admirable intentions not always matched by the talent on display. Fiona Cunningham Reid’s story of a lesbian ice dancer (Sabra Williams) who enlists an apparently straight partner (Charlotte Avery) for her same-sex routine at the Gay Olympics is good natured and occasionally incisive, at times bringing to mind such feel-good fare as Strictly Ballroom. Budgetary constraints, dead-slow pacing and a paltry story line, however, saddle it with an unshakeable air of amateurism.