Cynical Cinema

There is an absolutely phenomenal box set being released on August 26th. Woody Allen has been one of the greatest American directors for many years, and while he is mostly remembered for his all-time classics, Manhattan and Annie Hall, every one of his films is worth watching for one reason or another. With his latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona in theatres, Alliance Films decided to release Woody Allen: The Collection today, August 26th. Every movie in this box is good, some are great. And while six of the discs have been readily available before this on DVD, the seventh is the bonus.

Wild Man Blues, a 1997 documentary film about Woody Allen, has been a hard-to-find item for some time. Not a film about Allen the film maker, but a film about Woody Allen the jazz musician. Allen, when not making films, plays jazz clarinet at a New York club. This film, directed by Barbara Kopple, follows Allen around as he takes the jazz ensemble on the road. The documentary was made right around the time when the public image of Allen was at it’s lowest. He had just left Mia Farrow for their stepdaughter Soon Yi Previn, and people were beginning to look on him as some kind of sexual predator. This film was accused of apple-polishing by some critics upon it’s release. As though it were some kind of brown-nosing attempt by Kopple to repair Allen’s tarnished image, and the movie was quickly forgotten. But in watching it now, it is merely a window into the man’s private life, his relationship with Soon-Yi, which really does appear to be pretty normal, and his relationship with his parents, which is eye-opening.

The other films in the set are all second-rate Woody Allen films, which would be first-rate films by almost anyone else. Mighty Aphrodite, the film for which Mira Sorvino won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, is a pretty fluffy film that works best as a reminder that Mira Sorvino CAN actually act. Bullets Over Broadway is a brilliantly funny comedy about gangsterism and the roaring twenties, featuring terrific performances by Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest. Everyone Says I Love You is a musical comedy that is absolutely jammed with star power, and as such is one of the only Julia Roberts movies, AND one of the only Drew Barrymore movies, that I actually enjoy. Deconstructing Harry is a very dark comedy that is equally star-studded, with Robin Williams, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal and dozens of others in perhaps Woody Allen’s most under-rated movie. Celebrity is also jammed with big names, but isn’t one of Allen’s best efforts. And Scoop is likely the low point of the box set, with Scarlett Johanssen turning in a surprisingly mediocre performance and Hugh Jackman being a little more irritating than necessary. Not a horrible movie, but weak by Woody Allen standards.

Woody Allen: The Collection is a must for fans of his work, with Wild Man Blues being the icing on the cake. Get this box set, then pick up Annie Hall, Manhattan and Crimes And Misdemeanors, and you have all the Woody Allen you’ll ever need.

My biggest complaint about Grace Is Gone is the very first scene. John Cusack is obviously some manager at some company, and he is leading his co-workers in one of those office cheers. You know - “who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “THE CUSTOMERS!” And then everyone runs off to begin their day. I once worked at a place like this. Every morning, before they began, they would put their arms around each other in a circle, close their eyes, and listen to Eye Of The Tiger all the way through. I’m not even joking. They really did this. I’ll tell you, my time at that job before I quit was the longest eleven hours of my life! Well, watching The Postman, twice, on the same overseas plane ride, with Mission To Mars sandwiched in between the two showings, was the longest eleven hours of my life. But this job was a close second.

Thank God the movie is actually decent, because it sure left a bad taste in my mouth when it began. When Cusack gets home from work, we find out that he has two charming little girls, one twelve-year-old and one eight-year-old. The older one seems wise and mature beyond her years, and a little too serious for a normal little girl. The younger one is innocent and vivacious, and seems maybe a little too young for her age. We learn quickly that their mother (and Cusack’s wife) is a soldier in Iraq. The little girl sets her watch to go off at the same time every day, which is when her mom’s watch will go off in Iraq, and they’ll think of each other. And blah blah sentinemtality…blah blah. The older daughter is an insomniac. She falls asleep in school because she can’t sleep at night, because she is thinking about mom fighting a war.

Then two military men show up at the door. Mom (Grace) is dead. And this is where the movie really starts. Cusack, losing his mind just a little, scares the hell out of his older daughter and thrills his youngest when he decides that rather than tell them about their mom, he will spontaneously put them in the car and take them on a road trip across the country to some kind of Dinseyland-type amusement park, the name of which escapes me just now. The whole movie is this road trip, and although that seems boring, enough happens that we are reasonably entertained. Cusack and his daughters, with their support-our-troops ribbon on their car, meet up with his brother, an anti-war jobless bum. I don’t think the movie as a whole is trying to say that those who question the war are shiftless losers, but it sure feels that way during the scenes with the brother, ably played by Alessandro Nivola.

And it really is the performances that hold what could be an awfully thin movie together. Most notably Cusack himself, who appears to have put on a few pounds, and forgoes his usual stutter-bitter-confused delivery for something more sympathetic and damaged. His relationship with the girls, while it starts off as sort of arm’s-length and cautious, improves throughout the trip until, at the end, he tells them their mom is dead. (I’m not ruining anything here - you had to know this movie was going to end that way, right?) It’s a pretty good scene, in the sense that the entire movie has been leading up to that moment, and it would have been very easy to make it maudlin, to contrive a tear-jerking moment, but director James C. Strouse doesn’t do that. Instead the revelatory moment is nicely understated and subtle.

The older daughter Heidi (played very well by Shelan O’Keefe), throughout the movie, knows something is amiss. She puts a lot of clues together, but can’t quite figure out what’s really going on. It seems simple enough to us watching that she should understand completely, but she is unable to conceive something of the magnitude of the death of her mother. After all, she’s just 12 years old. So that option doesn’t really occur to her, or if it does she chooses not to explore the possibility any further. And although Cusack is considerably older than Heidi, he too can’t conceive of this happening either. And the two of them are the glue that holds Grace Is Gone together. Two terrific performances that raise the level of this movie from maudlin to moving. It comes out tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.

Martian Child is coming out Tuesday on DVD from Alliance Atlantis. It’s worth watching with your kids, if your kids are having a tough time adjusting at school, or if they are just plain really weird. But as an adult, it is just plain not worth watching. It starts out with a laudable premise, and then degenerates into the sort of movie sentimentality that would make John Wayne beat the living crap out of Hugh Grant and John Cusack were he still alive, God rest his violent macho soul. I now feel confident that this review will break new ground, as it is sure to be the only review of Martian Child that mentions The Duke. So, on with the review. Martian Child is a movie along very similar lines to K-Pax, the Kevin Spacey movie where Spacey plays a man who may or may not be from outer space. Although K-Pax was not that good, it is still far better than Martian Child. John Cusack is a single father (a fantasy writer) who adopts a boy who believes he comes from Mars. This movie obviously wants us to wonder, at least for a time…is he? Isn’t he? Where does he come from? Maybe, just maybe, he is from Mars.
K-Pax did the same thing. And not that either plot is within the realm of likelihood or believability. But if you want to make the case that someone is from outer space, possibly an alien being, then choose K-Pax. Not Mars. We have heard of Mars. We know where it is. We can see it with our naked eyes on certain days. It is the most familiar planet to all of us. We know that there is no life on Mars, and certainly no small-child-shaped life. Pictures like the one above notwithstanding. Therefore, we know the answer right away, and even if we were to suspend our disbelief for the sake of the story, we would have a hard time buying in. There are scenes that try to convince us otherwise. A baseball scene, a traffic light scene, a scene with some M&Ms, that are basically red herrings in a movie that cries out for no red herrings.
In the end, the movie is about John Cusack’s relationship with his adopted son, and it gets this mostly right. When he adpots the boy, he believes very strongly that he is from Mars. (The boy does. Not John Cusack. Or us.) The kid is extremely weird, and Cusack tries to cope as best he can, using sappy talk like never, never, never, never, ever give up and such like. Their relationship seems to hit a breakthrough, and the kid goes (extremely suddenly) from barely ever speaking to laughing and joking and having a good time. We believe that Cusack cares, we believe the boy likes him, and then the Children’s Aid people show up. These people have just given the child to Cusack. They know he believes he is from Mars. And now they want to review his case, because they may have to take the child away. There has to be some kind of huge problem like this at this point in every movie. The review is taking place maybe six weeks after Cusack gets the boy to begin with. And if he still believes he is from Mars, he will be removed from the home. OK…here’s a kid with obvious problems, serious social and mental issues, and if you, the foster parent, can’t cure him of those problems completely within six weeks, he’s gone.
There may well be some super-parent out there who could have effected this change that quickly. But I have not met that super-parent, nor, I wager, has anyone else. But, that is the conflict that must arise at the one hour and ten minute mark of the movie, so arise it does. Other characters populate the movie, including Olvier Platt, who is obnoxious, Joan Cusack, who is in every John Cusack movie so that she gets work playing - go figure - his sister, who is irritating and looks as though she went on the no-food-plus-lots-of-heroin diet to weigh in at a feisty 49 pounds, and Anjelica Huston. Huston plays Cusack’s publisher and delivers the one, painful line that drops this movie off the cliff of heartwarming into the sludge of Hollywood sentimentality and schmaltz: “Why can’t you just be what we want you to be?” COME ON! This leads, inexorably and annoyingly, to a final scene straight out of the worst Hitchcock imitator’s reject pile, a chase and a confrontation on top of an observatory.
John Cusack is a very likeable guy. It is tough not to LIKE his character in this movie. When the kid finally comes out of his Martian shell a little bit, it is tough not to like him as well. But there isn’t one other character in the film that is easy to like, and whatever points the movie scores with us in terms of a connection between the man and the boy are destroyed and wasted as soon as Anjelica Huston says “why can’t you be what we want you to be” and Cusack has an epiphany and runs home from his big gala event to tell the boy that all is forgiven and…whatever. A movie with high ideals such as this one can’t be crammed into that Hollywood cookie-cutter of “this happens here. This sets off that”. It’s like you’re Rembrandt. And you have this great idea for a painting called Belshazzar’s Feast. And you start to paint it, but your boss tells you that paintings have only three people in them, tops, and crowns don’t go on top of Turbans, and you’ll have to make that writing on the wall English so the people reading it can understand. Would you still paint the picture? I’m guessing not.