Melvin and Howard (1980)
Capturing impotence is tricky business in the movies; as to do so is to court unintended flaccidity of narrative. Ask the overrated Carnal Knowledge or the underrated The Weather Man. There’s the issue of getting tied up in something overtly schematic; of choking the life out of your picture with a can’t-win-against-the-big-guy thesis that, regardless of validity, feels rigged and self-pitying. Melvin and Howard, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Bo Goldman’s film of a middling man stuck in indentured servitude to the myth of the “American Dream”, trumps the poor man card with repetition. Melvin Dummar’s (Paul Le Mat) failure isn’t the climax or a shock or a tragedy, it’s a constant, dependable, infuriating, comforting, given; a diaper this baby, truly, doesn’t want to outgrow. Melvin fails so often that it becomes a source of low-electric comedy; we get used to it, accept it, and move on to something of greater interest: the nature-the necessity-the ironic heroism-the sheer adventure-of delusion, specifically the very American delusion that we’re all going to one day “make it”. (We’re a country of Don Quixotes.) Melvin and Howard attains an uncompromised, compassionate, softly-melancholic-screwball tone; yet another picture that revels in Demme’s equal opportunity humanity; his belief in a flake’s unalienable right to be a flake.
The picture has a fixed lottery ending, the “American Dream” revealed yet again to be a piece of cheese that keeps the hamster’s wheel perpetually turning, but, unlike most pictures, Demme earns his pathos because he doesn’t try too hard. The warm lighting and shooting of the picture contributes, gracefully, to the energy of the characters’ defeat. (Demme favors a particular kind of loving dolly in on the characters that probably inspired certain shots in Boogie Nights.) The picture’s matter of factitude about Melvin’s eventual understanding that the courts will never accept Howard Hughes’ (Jason Robards) will is heartbreaking. Melvin, the puffy man-boy who squanders every opportunity he gets in the continued effort to quench various immediate thirsts sprung from feelings of inadequacy, grows up (kinda maybe) at the end of Melvin and Howard. Melvin drives off; appreciating his elusive night ride with the eccentric, near mythical Hughes for what it was and opting, one hopes, to move on and live his life.
Paul Le Mat is one of many actors that I wish we could’ve seen more from. Maybe it’s because his persona is so specific, so effective in certain molds, that unimaginative studio executives felt little could be done with him. Le Mat’s turn in American Graffiti is broad and sort of magical (how director George Lucas, with Le Mat, Richard Dreyfuss, Wolfman Jack, Candy Clarke, Charles Martin Smith, etc, manages to keep cutting to the aggressively boring Cindy Williams-Ron Howard pairing is beyond me, but that’s for another day). Le Mat brings that same blobby lack of definition to Melvin and Howard, but, again as in American Graffiti, he keeps surprising you, with sharp, off-kilter timing that keeps his character from slipping into the maudlin. Watch Melvin watch his favorite game show, bragging that he always picks the right door; this could easily too openly telegraph his pathetic disposition, too aggressively tug at the heart strings, but Le Mat dials down, without making a show of even dialing down. Le Mat appears to be, and maybe was, a found object.
Le Mat and Demme’s visions of this picture’s ungainly comedy of need are simpatico; and Mary Steenburgen is right there too; she’s, in my memory, never been better. Steenburgen, as Melvin’s eventual ex-wife, answers the phone in the middle of the night when Melvin calls to tell her of the inheritance, we see another man in the dark, his arm over her, but her face, in seconds, conjures that love that probably now itches like a phantom limb. Watch Steenburgen, a little girl who plays at being a sex kitten in a strip club, say (as if it requires no further explanation) that she likes to dance. Steenburgen is also given the dialogue that most consciously strives for poetry, and she assures that it reaches it. Fed up with Melvin (again), she says something to him in French as she leaves (again). Melvin asks about it, she says she always dreamed of being a French interpreter; he reminds her that she doesn’t speak French, she replies, through near tears, “That’s why it’s a dream.”
It’s a given that Jason Robards must disappear early on in Melvin and Howard, but his alienation haunts the picture. Robards exudes that specialty of his, a gruff disconnected man’s man intelligence that masks a surprisingly deep well of vulnerability. Melvin picks Howard up from the desert, where Howard has been sleeping after crashing his bike for an unspecified amount of time, and Melvin needles haggard, homeless-looking Howard into singing a song with him. Howard’s gradual, tentative opening up to this new, strange man is convincing and wonderful; an ideal movie fantasy of transcendent friendship and kindness. Demme confidently sells something here that’s harder to buy than a dinosaur reborn; or flying people, or whatever the physics compromise de jour may be: that we’re in this together.
Alligator (1980)
Special Thanks to Christian for this recommendation, you all owe it to yourselves to check the QT series he’s currently running on his blog.
The movies bring us beautiful women on a weekly basis, but there’s a scary, plastic Stepford quality to many of them nowadays that can be a bit of a turn-off, particularly for your traditional pasty, movie-going nerd who makes little in the way of actual money. These women are beautiful in that pre-planned way, seemingly more likely to ask for a resume than a drink. You may dream of them carnally (our principles, after all, only go so far) but they probably don’t inhabit your fulfilling, fanciful, dreams of companionship and romance. You don’t want to solve a mystery with most of these new girls. You don’t want to build a clubhouse or play under the covers with most of these new girls. And you most certainly don’t want to chase a giant runaway mutant alligator with these new girls.
In 1980, the girls of the not quite taken seriously genres seemed rougher, sexier, more mysterious and more human. These girls would most assuredly pass the entrance gate of your most intimate dreams too, but would be equally at home wielding a two by four or a pistol or drinking you under the table at your favorite bar. They could, needless to say, also contend with that big alligator that seems to keep intruding on our vague discussion of sexy girls.
Sorry, you probably care about the alligator, but it’s a mark of the appeal of John Sayles’ and Lewis Teague’s Alligator that I care more about the beautiful, almost convincingly nerdy, alligator expert Marisa Kendell, played by Robin Riker. The girl in horror movies normally functions as anesthetic for the boring exposition that normally eats up half of the film, but I actually liked Kendall, and you know from the moment she enters the picture that she’s the little girl in the opening whose pet is now a Jaws imitation, eating people sleazy or dumb enough to enter a sewer drain that looks like the Castle of Dr. Frankenstein if it was renovated and re-opened a few months later as an S&M dungeon. That she wanted a pet alligator is charm enough, that said alligator inspired her line of work is positively bewitching.
Riker is actually the sidekick here, the hero proper is Robert Forster’s David Madison, a rough and tumble, gruff, balding, instinctual guy who might not be the brightest bulb on the force (he needs Riker’s gator expert to underline things that your average four year old could grasp) but he makes up for it in lack of pretense and pure, no bullshit goodness. Forster, as he did in Jackie Brown years later, is one of the most laid back, appealing cops the movies have given us. He’s mournful and self-loathing, but it’s not the self-loathing of the manipulative, self-congratulatory 1980s cop variety. This guy has average guy issues and Riker, a closet nerd, sees that and goes to bed with him, and we believe it. Their scenes, while brief, have an off the cuff charm that many Oscar pictures could use. Forster gets Riker in his apartment and confesses that he thought she was a real tight-ass. Riker says she took one look at him and figured he’d have an apartment just like the one she currently, unexpectedly, finds herself in.
Ladies who read Bowen’s Cinematic (I’ve counted at least two): this is what men want, at least this is what the men you should want want: a dialed down bust your balls sass that really translates as true affection. Do Riker and Forster fall in love? Of course not. They have something that will probably age better and bring them more retrospective pleasure: a brief, sugary acknowledgement: a respite from cuffing perps and bagging gators.
John Sayles, the horror movies want you back. The horror movies need your gift for off the wall flakery, for airy parody that turns toward violence with unsettling ease. The horror movies need your gift for characters that you actually give a damn about despite the flimsiest of shadings. The well-intentioned but increasingly boring social conscience pictures are fine without you. Drop that genre and any fifty directors will happily be there to pick up the slack in the morning.
But I don’t want to discount director Lewis Teague. He doesn’t imbue Alligator with the erotic charge that Joe Dante brought to Sayles’ The Howling, but, truthfully, he probably doesn’t need to. Alligator is a blunter affair, a romping, stomping creature feature knock-off/spoof that was already exhibiting Sayles’ patent distrust of politicians of all sizes. Sayles’ bad guys here, including an amusingly sleazy Dean Jagger, are only slightly less subtle than his Dickie Pilager of Silver City. The rage that clearly drives Jagger’s death scene almost overwhelms the picture; the alligator, for a moment, isn’t an alligator, but a vengeful demon, crushing Jagger in his own cocoon of self-absorbed privilege. Teague keeps the picture and the gator moving, cutting the moments of violence into necessarily (for the budget) brief nuggets of chaos that prove that Teague and Sayles were hip to more in Jaws than just the giant critter. And bonus points to these gentlemen for the perverse explanation for the alligator’s enormity.
Mr. Tarantino needs to get Riker’s number.
★★★
Day Twenty-Nine: The Shining (1980)
I read in a Stephen King interview somewhere that claimed Stanley Kubrick aimed to make the scariest movie of all time with The Shining. He certainly made one of the most interesting, one of the most debatable. I’ve always been mixed on The Shining, it’s a very effective piece, but I thought the traditional emotional remoteness that goes with a later Kubrick picture sabotaged him a little here. In other words, I was with the Stephen King guys who said that Kubrick had undermined the humanity of the novel in favor of something more cynical and abstract.
It’s not surprising that Kubrick said that he wanted to make the scariest film of all time, Kubrick certainly had that chutzpah, but he doesn’t seem to like horror movies. The Shining feels like a professor’s doctorate on the limitations of the horror film. Kubrick doesn’t believe in anything, and he doesn’t want to really get his hands dirty. He’s Stanley Kubrick the Great American Filmmaker after all, why would he lower himself to make a typical haunted house movie, based on something by that novelist Stephen King of all people?
The above would have represented my thoughts on The Shining up until about a year ago. In high school, I revered Kubrick because I was supposed to. Then in college I wondered why I was supposed to and began to resent the idea that I’m supposed to like anything if I’m to appear well read. I began to dislike the films, and was frustrated by Kubrick’s overly deliberate technique, which I viewed as posturing to maintain his acclaim and nurture the legend. I preferred earlier, livelier work like The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, films that seem to be blessedly free of such pressure.
A year or two ago I began to revisit the films, and, excluding 2001, which I can’t bring myself to pretend to like on any level, I’ve gotten to a place where I authentically love the majority of Kubrick’s work. Both prior viewpoints were the posturing of an insecure child. Now I’m an insecure child who likes Stanley Kubrick movies. His films are remote, are chilly, but there’s an element of friction, particularly in the masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, you where sense the presence of two Kubricks on the set, the cynical intellectual, and a more approachable guy who’d like to believe in things beyond cruelty and isolation.
The Shining, upon revisitation, has a similar friction. This is Stanley Kubrick’s Death of the Family picture, and viewed in a particular light, it is a supremely moving achievement. Yes, Jack Nicholson appears to be crazy from the outsight, that’s one of the bigger cliches that detractors use to dismiss the film. But let’s think about that, yes, it subtracts something from the story that King wrote, but it adds something to the film that Kubrick made. That the Jack Nicholson character is crazy in the beginning is the point. The life of this family is a charade, and it’s through the intervention of The Overlook Hotel that the family is forced to realize it. This is a more original, more daring take than the story that Stephen King wrote (and I say that as an admirer of the novel.)
As in other Kubrick films, the only emotion that comes through with any real conviction is the malice of the Nicholson character. The nicer words, the exposition are plain and flavorless and delivered as so. The Nicholson character’s relationship with his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) is a farce of the father/son dynamic, and some of the most unsettling material in the film. The Shining is about Danny’s realization that the world is a violent, dangerous place, and it’s one of the least sentimental coming of age stories I’ve personally seen.
Wendy’s (Shelly Duvall) relationship with Jack is even worse. Jack addresses Wendy with naked contempt before they get to the Overlook, though she turns a frequent deaf ear to it. Jack’s hostility is a little harder to ignore when he picks up an ax. Here Kubrick again plays a different note than expected, Duvall’s character IS shrill, IS annoying, her sunny side up exterior a very real defense again her husband’s introverted self-absorption.
It’s a mark of The Shining that we’ve gotten this far before even mentioning the supernatural goings on that fuel the second half of the film. Again, Kubrick’s conflicted attitude powers the picture. He evidently didn’t believe in the supernatural, and it shows, the film has an uncertainty, a lack of conviction in the subject matter, that actually enhances the dread. Again, it does feel more like a college doctorate on the horror film, removed, aloof, a Godless world where anything goes, safety is guaranteed nowhere, particularly in your family.
Let’s go back to the cliche of the Nicholson casting, which is partially legitimate. Nicholson’s performance is problematic not for the “insane at first glance” reasoning, but for the “insane in a chic, stylized way” reasoning. Nicholson is doing his cool cucumber Nicholson thing here, and it’s a bit too much for the movie. We watch The Shining and think, “yeah that’s pretty cool, so cool in fact that Nicholson would spend twenty years doing it”, but it doesn’t mesh with the other performances, particularly Duvall, who is terrific. I’ve never much warmed to Shelly Duvall, but she’s fearless in playing someone so afraid; this is strong, raw work, and one of the best performances in the later Kubrick canon.
If The Shining had absolutely nothing going on beyond Kubrick’s technique in realizing it, then the picture would still be worth seeing. The amazing tracking shots have been endlessly elaborated upon, so I won’t belabor the point, but they accomplish a sense of geography that is rare in the horror film. Kubrick’s vision of The Overlook is amazing, the building is a timeless creature that waits to swallow it’s inhabits whole. My favorite shot is the very first, the God’s Eye View as we watch Jack drive to his interview as that iconic score sounds. The credits sequence is impressive the first time you watch it, the second and third and fourth it’s quite moving. There’s a mourning to be found in these opening images, an unforgettable inevitability.
★★★½
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