Financial Times (London,England)
May 25, 1995, Thursday
RICHIE RICH (PG) Donald Petrie
ANGELS (U) William Dear
A FEAST AT MIDNIGHT (PG) Justin Hardy
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF THE BELGIANS (18) Jan Bucquoy
Less than two decades after Superman, writes Stephen Amidon, Hollywood seems to have reached the dump bin of its comic book store. Having exhausted the supply of well-known cartoon heroes, movie makers are now foisting such arcane characters as Richie Rich upon us.
Produced by the acting-flick magnate Joel Silver and starring, inevitably, Macaulay Culkin, Richie Rich tells the story of the world’s wealthiest boy as he strives to lead a normal life while also saving his parents from an evil businessman. But while the production values are high, director Donald Petrie misses just about every available opportunity for knockabout humour and satirical fun.
What pleasures the film does offer are incidental and unintended, such as the deeply ironic spectacle of the overpaid and embarrassingly untalented Culkin playing a spoiled rich kid who is desperate to earn the love and respect of his peers. Instead of creating the sort of clever wickedness that young audiences responded to in Home Alone, Culkin and his handlers have tried to buy them off with high-tech gimmicks and cheap sentiment. To paraphrase Richie’s butler – ‘there was something missing, something money could not buy.’ Those things turn out to be, of course, talent and originality.
Another kids’ film that sinks in a sea of sentiment is Angels, the story of a motherless young boy (Joseph Gorden-Levitt) whose prayers for heavenly intervention to help his favourite baseball team are answered when a squad of angels arrives to join the game. Since it is only the boy who can see which players the angels bless, he soon becomes an invaluable asset to the team’s beleaguered coach (Danny Glover, between jobs).
Director William Dear has managed to take a perfectly fine 1951 comedy, Angels in the Outfield, and transform it into a cringe-making paean to family values – there is even a warning to children not to smoke lest they wind up prematurely robed and haloed. It is hard to determine which member of the veteran supporting cast suffers most, though Brenda Fricker as a dewy-eyed foster mother and Christopher Lloyd as the frenetic chief angel will probably not be placing this one prominently on their curriculum vitae.
More limp kiddie fare is on offer in A Feast at Midnight, the story of a ten-year-old boy (Freddie Findlay) who finds himself exiled at a down-at-heel British boarding school. At first his life is hell as he is tormented by both a sadistic head boy and a cruel Latin teacher (Christopher Lee), and his crush on Lee’s winsome 18-year-old daughter goes unrequited.
Everything changes, however, when Findlay discovers the school’s kitchen, where he wins friends and gets the girl by cooking up bootleg confectionery. Anyone expecting a cross between Tom Brown’s School Days and Babette’s Feast, however, will be sorely disappointed – Justin Hardy’s first feature is a cloying, predictable affair more suited to children’s television than the big screen.
If Woody Allen were Flemish and had no sense of humour, The Sexual Life of the Belgians would be just the sort of film he would make. Jan Bucquoy’s feature depicts the sentimental education of a young Belgian lad as he picks his way through the sexual and political mine fields of the 1960s. Although it starts out with a promising section on our hero’s bizarre childhood, the film’s portrayal of the budding writer’s romantic tussles in Brussels soon becomes a series of unfunny set pieces and wayward homages to Godard.
