Shots that miss the mark
By STEPHEN AMIDON
WYATT EARP (12) Lawrence Kasdan
MR JONES (15) Mike Figgis
COLOR OF NIGHT Richard Rush
WRESTLING ERNEST HEMINGWAY (12) Randa Haines
DARKNESS IN TALLINN Ilkka Jarvilaturi
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (U) Powell and Pressburger
It is easy to see why Lawrence Kasdan’s sprawling biopic Wyatt Earp runs for nearly twice as long as most other features – it wants to be two very different films. The first is a standard Western, complete with elegiac vistas of blood-red sunsets, free-swinging bar-room brawls, good-hearted whores and laconic heroes with droopy moustaches. The second film, meanwhile, is a wayward effort to demythologise the gunslinger icon along the lines of Clint Eastwood’s masterful Unforgiven. Not surprisingly, these two antagonistic strands tend to cancel each other out, making for a distinctly unaffecting exercise in film-making. This problem is crystallised in Kevin Costner’s performance as Earp. Even after more than three hours in his company it is still hard to know what to make of the man. Is he a brutalising bully who hides behind a sheriff’s badge and stoical cowboy code? Or is he the wise and strong patriarch of the Earp clan, reluctantly employing violence to protect his kin? Or simply a very human mixture of both? Neither Kasdan nor Costner are able to provide the answer to these questions, leaving a big empty at the film’s core that all the action and scenery in the world cannot fill. That said, Kasdan keeps things moving at a good pace, taking the viewer through the story’s inordinate span with relative ease. Owen Roizman’s photography looks great, and the shoot-out at the OK Corral is wonderfully understated, with the two groups of combatants gunning at each other from just a few feet away, most of their shots missing the mark. The best thing about the film is Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of Doc Holliday, an acerbic, cynical turn that makes you wish Kasdan had stuck to his deconstructionist guns instead of muffling them with all those lovely desert vistas and Calvin Klein outerwear.
British director Mike Figgis’s second American movie, Mr Jones, arrives on his native shores surrounded by a cloud of Hollywood horror stories about studio interference, including the classic about an executive who wanted the depressive parts of the hero’s manic-depression to be edited out, leaving just the ‘up’ sequences. As it is, the film seems to have weathered these crass assaults fairly well, making for a largely involving psychological drama that only comes unstuck in the final reel. In it, Richard Gere plays a gifted thirty-something who suffers from the severe mood swings inherent in manic depression – at one moment he will be charming everyone out of their socks; the next finds him muttering, dishevelled and suicidal. It is easy to see why the Method-trained Gere would opt for such a role, especially given Hollywood’s recent proclivity for awarding Oscars to actors who portray disabled characters. While his performance certainly is not on that sort of level, Gere does have several fine moments as he spars with shrinks, leaps on stage to conduct a symphony orchestra and steals a kiss from a babe on the street. Lena Olin is his match as the psychiatrist who forgets her Hippocratic oath as she falls in love with her patient. Where the film is less than convincing is in the deeper things it has to say about Mr Jones’s mental illness, which at times is presented as a curable condition while at others depicted as the central part of a winning personality which would be a shame to extinguish. One occasionally suspects that the film-makers’ primary interest might lie in the cinematic possibilities of the disease’s symptoms rather than in its true nature. This is nowhere more apparent than in the absurdly rosy conclusion, which has Olin abandoning her career to live with her uncured patient, as if love were a clinically effective substitute for lithium.
Psychological disruptions are also the order of the day in Color of Night, though they are just as likely to occur in unsuspecting audience members as on screen. It has been 13 years since the American director Richard Rush released his last film, the critically acclaimed and genuinely brilliant The Stunt Man. It is the sort of hiatus that usually means the artist either has a masterpiece up his sleeve or is suffering some sort of creative distress. Unfortunately, Rush’s new film indicates the latter. The woeful plot involves Bruce Willis as a psychologist who takes over a murdered colleague’s therapy group in order to find out which of its members committed the crime. Willis labours heroically to portray someone with a sensitive nature and a three-figure IQ, but carries too much tough-guy baggage to pull it off. By mid-film he seems positively relieved to be involved in a monumental car chase. His love interest is portrayed by Jane Marsh, who introduces herself to him as ‘a struggling actress’. These prove to be the film’s truest lines.
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway is a pleasant, understated drama about two elderly men striking up an unlikely friendship. Richard Harris plays a 75-year-old former sailor who finds himself washed up in a dingy Florida town, abandoned by his yuppie children and spurned by landlady Shirley MacLaine. All he has left are his memories (hence, the title) and his burgeoning friendship with retired Cuban barber Robert Duvall. The best thing about the film, not surprisingly, are the performances by the two leads, particularly Duvall, whose musical Cuban accent never once falters. Unfortunately, director Randa Haines has made the mistake of having the film’s pace match that of its heroes’ lives, adding a half-hour to its optimum length and creating an unnecessary sense of torpor.
Viewers not sufficiently motivated by the prospect of seeing a Finnish-Estonian film should spare a second thought for Darkness in Tallinn, which turns out to be a highly enjoyable caper flick that is only incidentally set in the Baltics. In it, a group of marginally competent criminals schemes to steal the entire gold supply of the fledgling Estonian government by blackmailing a young electrician into turning off the entire nation’s power. The resulting mayhem involves as many shocks and twists as the wiring of an old circuit box. Ilkka Jarvilaturi’s direction of Paul Kolsby’s knowing script eschews gore and political commentary to create a funny, well-paced thriller. A multi-million dollar Hollywood remake seems all but inevitable.
Finally, this week sees the re-release of a cleaned-up print of Powell and Pressburger’s sublime A Matter of Life and Death. What is perhaps so striking about viewing this 1946 masterwork amid the rest of the current releases is to realise how daring and unfettered the filmmakers were 50 years ago, how alive they were to the possibilities of the medium. Despite the occasionally quaint dialogue and even quainter wartime ethics, this story of downed bomber pilot David Niven pleading his case before a celestial court in order to stay on earth with lover, Kim Hunter, looks and feels more giddily modern than most films being churned out nowadays.
