The Grouchy Editor

I don’t often get nostalgic, but if pushed I might get a bit sentimental about, oh … let’s say the year 1991.  That was the last time my favorite baseball team won a World Series (or even played in one).  I was on the verge of getting married back then, and buying my first house, and it was a year in which my future wife and I often went to the movies.  One of the films we saw in 1991 was made by a young married couple making a big splash in Hollywood.  They were considered the most glamorous film combo since Dick and Liz.

“Our modern equivalent of Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh,” gushed the New York Daily News, referring to Irish actor Kenneth Branagh and his English wife, actress Emma Thompson.  (For you youngsters, Branagh and Thompson would go on to play Gilderoy Lockhart and Sybil Trelawney in the Harry Potter films.)

The Branagh-Thompson collaboration that we saw, Dead Again, is a silly film with a preposterous plot involving hypnosis, reincarnation, and an evil boy with a nasty stutter.  But if you buy into its premise – some mumbo jumbo about a 1940s murder and its resulting bad karma – the movie is a lot of fun.  Classically trained actor Branagh, who also directed, took a clever script by Scott Frank and delivered something special:  an entertaining puzzler with lots of thunder and lightning – even though it was filmed in sunny Los Angeles.  Watch the film twice if you can:  There is an excellent twist, and not until The Sixth Sense came along ten years later had a movie so rewarded second viewings.

But try not to weep (or laugh) at the ironic dialogue.  Says young Branagh to young Thompson:  “[We’ve] become two parts of the same person.  Nothing can separate [us], not even death.”

“So we’re stuck with each other?” she replies.

Alas, apparently not.  Branagh and Thompson divorced in 1995, and so did my wife and I.  My baseball team has not returned to the World Series.  There is, however, one thing unchanged since 1991.  Actor Derek Jacobi, who in Dead Again plays a scoundrel with a speech impediment, is still acting in films about stutterers.*       Grade:  B+

Note:  Smokers, beware of this film.  I am a smoker and I’m not likely to quit anytime soon.  Having said that, there is an infamous scene in Dead Again featuring actor Andy Garcia that is so nauseating that it almost makes me want to chuck my smokes.

* Jacobi plays Archbishop Lang in The King’s Speech.

Director:  Kenneth Branagh   Cast:  Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Andy Garcia, Derek Jacobi, Wayne Knight, Hanna Schygulla, Robin Williams, Campbell Scott, Jo Anderson, Christine Ebersole  Release:  1991

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“Quirky” is a style that can be tough to pull off.  When a filmmaker sets the right tone, the result can be delightful.  Ghost World got it right.  So did Wonder Boys – it had a story to tell, but what lingers are its off-the-wall attitude and images:  Michael Douglas in a ratty bathrobe, stoned out of his skull; a dead dog in a trunk; a police car rolling down a hill.

The Royal Tenenbaums aims for quirky, and it’s certainly packed with offbeat characters, but with one notable exception, it falls flat.  That exception will come as no surprise.  The venerable Gene Hackman, as family patriarch Royal Tenenbaum, is as usual a joy to behold.  Hackman’s aging father, befuddled and estranged from his brilliant-but-odd New York family, might (or might not) have cancer and a short time to live.  Having squandered his fortune and happy home life, Royal decides to attempt a family reconciliation.

This is where Tenenbaums misses the mark.  Although the Tenenbaum children are certainly eccentric, there is nothing remotely sympathetic about them.  Gwyneth Paltrow, as adopted “rebel” and erstwhile dramatist Margot, and Luke Wilson, as her ex-jock brother Richie, are presented as star-crossed lovers.  But the two of them sleepwalk through the movie in a morose condition straight out of Night of the Living Dead.  It would seem more of a kindness to drive a stake through their aching hearts than to place rings on their fingers.

Ben Stiller plays what – unfortunately for him – Ben Stiller plays extremely well: annoying.  His Chas Tenenbaum is a widower with two young boys and a gigantic chip on his shoulder.  If I were his estranged father, I would take one look at this obnoxious offspring and bolt for warmer climes.  Chas’s transformation at the end of the movie is utterly unconvincing – in fact, Tenenbaums’s entire happy ending is absurd.

There is lovably eccentric, and then there is irritatingly eccentric.  Offbeat is not always funny, and the road not taken does not always lead to wisdom.  Tenenbaums is a near miss in the realm of quirky, but a miss it certainly is.          Grade:  C-

Director:  Wes Anderson  Cast:  Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, Seymour Cassel, Kumar Pallana  Release:  2001

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I don’t know a thing about director David Lynch’s personal history.  I haven’t read any Lynch biographies, and am not even sure where he hails from (although I have a vague recollection that it might be Montana).  But after watching his films, I get the impression that young Mr. Lynch was raised prim and proper, a good little Protestant boy who on one fateful day wandered across to the wrong side of the railroad tracks – and was subjected to one massive dose of weird.

I speculate about that because filmmaker Lynch is famously obsessed with the macabre, the odd, and the surreal, and Blue Velvet is a prime example.  Essentially a Hitchcockian spin on a Hardy Boys story, Blue Velvet follows young Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student who on one sunny afternoon discovers a severed human ear in a vacant field and decides to conduct his own investigation.  As the story progresses, Jeffrey learns that it is a strange world, indeed.  But whereas Hitchcock used humor to break tension, Lynch opts for bizarre interludes.  There is one scene near the midpoint in which – completely out of the blue – a gay man croons Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” to a rapt, crazed Dennis Hopper.  The scene still has me shaking my head.  What on earth has it to do with the plot — or anything whatsoever?

But it wouldn’t be a Lynch film without such scenes.  Sociopathic Frank Booth (Hopper) and pals are unfathomable to Jeffrey and to us, and yet Lynch makes them feel very real.  Isn’t that a great recipe for what’s truly frightening in life?

Jeffrey learns that there are two sides to everything.  “I’m seeing something that was always hidden,” he tells his girlfriend Sandy.  The small town he calls home is a bucolic Mayberry in daytime – and a dangerous haven for joyriding thugs at night.  Jeffrey has a virginal, sweet-faced blonde (Laura Dern) to woo at a Norman Rockwell soda shop – and a rough-sex-loving lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) to corrupt him in bed.  There are red robins, blue velvet, and a “Yellow Man.”  There is weirdness galore, or, as Sandy and Jeffrey repeatedly tell each other, “a strange world.”

All of which makes me wonder again:  What in the world did young David Lynch stumble into when he crossed those railroad tracks?        Grade:  B+

Director:  David Lynch  Cast:  Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell, George Dickerson, Priscilla Pointer, Frances Bay, Jack Harvey  Release:  1986

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