Financial Times (London,England)

September 2, 1993, Thursday

The wheelchair as star vehicle

By STEPHEN AMIDON

PASSION FISH (15) John Sayles
SLIVER (18) Phillip Noyce
THE VOYAGE (12) Fernando Solanas
ERASERHEAD (18) David Lynch
NOBODY LOVES the disabled more than a screenwriter. And it is not because people who write movies are so charitable and big-hearted. Rather, the simple truth is that crippled people are easy on the author. With someone of sound mind or body, it takes a lot of time and effort to uncover their inner demons and desires. However, slap some shades and a stick on a character, plop him in a wheelchair or a mental institution, and you get instant crisis. Four of the five last actors who won the Oscar played disabled men.

So it is worrying that the first scene of Passion Fish takes place in an intensive care unit, where a soap opera star, May-Alice (Mary McDonnell), has just learned she has been made paraplegic in a car accident. But within a few moments it is clear this is not your basic wheelchair weepie. For the most part, writer / director John Sayles refuses to indulge in the short cuts inherent in the genre, providing us with a drama that allows us to feel good without feeling bad about it.
The story is strong and simple – a bitter May-Alice returns to her ancestral home in Louisiana, attended only by a series of nurses whom she alienates with her self-pitying behaviour. She winds up with Chantelle (Alfre Woodard), a strong-willed young black woman fleeing a troubled past in Chicago. After the obligatory pyrotechnics, the two form a friendship that provides the backbone of the film.
It is an old tale, and Sayles the writer does not have much that is new to add to it. What he does provide is a lively and largely cliche -free script that gives his two leads plenty of elbow room. Woodard is particularly fine, displaying the smouldering dignity for which she is rapidly becoming famous. McDonnell makes the trek from self-pitying ‘bitch on wheels’ to noble heroine smoothly, helped by a strong sense of irony that allows her to make the most of lines like ‘I was the best voider in my rehab group’.
Sayles’s direction has never been better. It is only at th e film’s end, when May-Alice nobly turns down an offer to exploit her disability by appearing both legless and blind in her old soap, that Sayles succumbs to the sort of murky righteousness to which films about the disabled are so often liable.

If Passion Fish is a lesson in how cinema can respectfully make viewers feel good, then Sliver has to serve as some sort of standard as to how to disrespectfully make them feel bad. Trying to pass itself off as an erotic thriller, it is instead nothing more than a boring and confused mile of celluloid, a rock video in which there is no song.
The story concerns a book editor (Sharon Stone) who moves to a high rise ‘sliver’ in midtown Manhattan after the break-up of her marriage. She soon learns that her apartment was previously inhabited by a woman who looked like her and committed suicide for no apparent reason. Undaunted, Stone hops in bed with a creepy neighbour (William Baldwin) as well as bantering with creep number two (Tom Berenger). It is only when the woman next door is murdered that Stone twigs that her own life is in peril.
The movie’s main liability is its woeful script, written by Joe Eszterhas, who penned Basic Instinct, which at least possessed a certain tawdry momentum. No such luck here. Scenes are cobbled together without concern for pace or structuring; the mystery is solved and then unsolved without regard for logic or the viewer’s intelligence; the dialogue seems to have been translated from another language. The film’s greatest mystery is that Eszterhas is the highest paid screenwriter.
Given the poverty of the script it is hard to assess the actors, though Berenger has never been more unpleasant and Baldwin’s attempts to summon the ghost of Tony Perkins are misjudged. Stone comes off worst. She is one of the few actresses around who can shine at the bottom of a flesh pile, though this has always depended on her steely toughness. Here, vulnerable, confused, her nether lip aquiver, she is just another bimbo in a film which tries to make bimbos of us all.
Most teenagers think they are stuck at the end of the world, but Martin Nunque has good reason for thinking he is in Nowheresville: his home town is Tierra del Fuego. His girlfriend is pregnant, his school has run out of heating fuel and his stepfather is a bullying bore. So Martin decides to run away, setting out on his bicycle in search of his long lost father, a journey that takes him up the entire South American continent.
Argentinian writer / director Fernando Solanas has a reputation for political controversy – he was recently wounded by a masked gunman the day after criticising President Menem. With The Voyages, his polemics gets the better of him. What starts out as a pleasantly wacky view of teenage angst gradually turns into a rant against the victimisation of Latin America. Solanas’s imagery is bold but hardly subtle – Buenos Aires is covered in two feet of sewage, Peru is menaced by vans collecting tax daily. The climax comes when Martin arrives in Mexico, where Latin American leaders are hosting the US President at a reception in which they must all move about on their knees. By then, Martin’s quest has long slipped from the viewer’s mind, numbed by Solanas’s relentless, often clumsy pamphleteering.
David Lynch’s Eraserhead, has been re-released after 16 years. The only thing that has changed is the soundtrack, which has been cleaned up a bit, though it remains one of the most abrasive in memory. There is no reason to relate the plot; it still does not make any sense. What does make sense is the unsettling mastery of film imagery Lynch mustered at such an early point in his career.
Eraserhead makes fascinating viewing, showing how the director’s resolutely art house talent was able to blossom into the big time without (until, perhaps, recently) losing its street cred. For those like me who saw it when it first came out what is striking is its enduring familiarity. Henry’s eraser haircut, his baby that just might be human, the tiny man-made roasted chickens, the visionary radiator, the tap dancer with her swollen glands – the imagery is as fresh as last night’s dream. It established Lynch as one of those rare film-makers who is able to put our collective nightmares on the screen.