Financial Times (London,England)

April 28, 1994, Thursday

Buddha from Seattle

By STEPHEN AMIDON

LITTLE BUDDHA (12) Bernardo Bertolucci

DEADLY ADVICE (15) Mandie Fletcher

ROMEO IS BLEEDING (18) Peter Medak                                              MOTHER’S BOYS (15) Yves Simoneau

ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE (12) Tom Shadyac
Bernardo Bertolucci has always been fascinated by tensions arising when West meets East, whether it be the fate of an anglicised Chinese Emperor or American expats adrift in the Moroccan desert. Now, with his sumptuous Little Buddha, this thematic concern becomes even more explicit as the Italian director abandons the tragic slant of his recent work to depict an attempted merger of the two cultures.
The film concerns a nine-year old American boy (Alex Wiesnedanger) who is suspected by Buddhist monks of being the reincarnation of a recently deceased saint. An ageing lama (Ying Ruocheng) travels from Bhutan to Seattle in order to convince his parents (Bridget Fonda and Chris Isaak) that he should be allowed to return to the monastery to see if he truly does possess the blessed soul. Not surprisingly, the wealthy yuppies resist the idea at first, though after suffering personal loss they agree to take the boy East for the spiritual examination.

Bertolucci’s story contains the germ of what might have been an intriguing film. After all, what would you do if four charming, saffron-robed monks showed up on your doorstep claiming your child was a minor deity? Send them packing? Demand proof? See the possibility of saving money on boarding school? Believe them?
The dramatic possibilities are rich, and the film comes to life when Bertolucci explores them. Unfortunately, he then proceeds to add long, digressive sequences dramatising the life of Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves), the young prince who became the Buddha. While these lyrical passages are often spectacularly filmed, their schools programme tone saps the film of its dramatic strength. By the end, when the true nature of the boy’s soul is revealed and the old lama is tossed into the cosmic recycling bin, it is hard to feel any emotional connection with either of them. That is the problem with tackling the universal – you lose the personal. And while abandoning the personal may be what Buddhism is about, there is little room for it in screen storytelling.
Deadly Advice calls itself a black comedy, though a more appropriate colour would be drab gray. Former Blackadder director Mandie Fletcher’s first feature deals with a bookish wallflower (Jane Horrocks) who decides to kill her domineering mother (Brenda Fricker) on the strength of advice given to her by the ghosts of notorious murderers such as Dr Crippen and Jack the Ripper. The body count escalates as the locals become suspicious, until the once retiring Horrocks stands ready to join the company of serial killers who have been haunting her.
Although the film’s premise is ripe for dark laughter, Fletcher and writer Glenn Chandler have trouble raising even the lightest chuckle. Instead of the delirious unpredictability and cheery nihilism of previous British black comedies such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, we are instead left with a cosily inoffensive little picture that refuses to challenge either itself or the audience.
There is nothing cosy or inoffensive about Romeo is Bleeding, Peter Medak’s woefully misguided attempt to venture into the mean streets that belong to Martin Scorsese and Abel Ferrara. Gary Oldman plays a corrupt New York policeman in the pay of the mob. When they order him to murder a renegade hitwoman (Lena Olin), he unwisely falls in love with her instead, putting his job, marriage and life in dire jeopardy. By the time the smoke clears there are countless victims, none in worse shape than our credulity.
Hilary Henkin’s absurd and pretentious screenplay was once chosen by a leading magazine as one of the ‘Ten Best Unproduced Scripts in Hollywood’, which makes you think that, until recently anyway, Tinseltown knew what it was doing. For his part, Medak seems to believe that if he throws enough pace and blood at us we will not notice the mess. None of the actors fares very well, although commiseration must be extended to the usually fine Olin, who spends the entire film wearing Wonder Bras and little else. Even after losing her arm she still has to play the bimbo.
For its first half hour, Mother’s Boys promises to be the sort of serious family drama Hollywood is reluctant to make these days. It concerns a feckless woman (Jamie Lee Curtis) who comes back to her family after having abandoned them without explanation three years earlier. Her husband (Peter Gallagher) is none too happy about her return, especially when she announces that she wants to resume mothering their three sons. But there is little he can legally do to stop her, even after she shows herself intent on wrecking his relationship with his new girlfriend.
Early on the director, Yves Simoneau, sketches this uneasy tangle of relationships with care, particularly in the scene where Curtis performs a mock-innocent striptease to win back the affections of her estranged 12-year-old boy. But the film soon becomes a preposterous thriller, culminating in a final scene in which half the cast dangles on the edge of a Californian cliff in a Volvo.
I am not sure what it says about the state of modern cinema when the most accomplished film on offer in a week is Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, but it cannot be good. This is the sort of shaggy dog film that some people love, while the rest will be left slack-jawed in wonder that such daftness ever got made. The convoluted plot of dolphin-napping is little more than an excuse for the antics of the American comedian Jim Carrey, undoubtedly one of the more original talents to hit the screen of late. With his rubbery face and cartoonish voice, Carrey is like a manic blend of Pee Wee Herman and Lassie. His Ace Ventura only takes on cases involving animals, drives with his head out the side window and keeps a flap on his freezer door so his pet penguins can get in and out. When his admiring girlfriend says that he must really love animals, he answers: ‘If it gets cold enough.’ A must for pet owners everywhere.