Joan Allen is having a great year at the movies. First came her transcendent performance in the recent Upside of Anger and now she's pulled off the amazing feat of making iambic pentameter a/k/a rhyming dialogue sound … normal. Next up: Joan Allen performing the phone book. OK, though Allen isn't likely to do that yet, she really does make writer-director Sally Potter's gimmicky conceit in Yes, her new picture, seem perfectly natural. After awhile you stop thinking about the Dr. Seuss phrases you'd like to toss back at the characters and just let Allen and her marvelous supporting cast—Simon Abkarian, the always dreamy Sam Neill and Shirley Henderson—get on with it.
Henderson, who played the baby-voiced best friend of Renée Zellweger in both the Bridget Jones movies and Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter pictures, addresses the camera directly at the outset of Yes. She's the housekeeper for the affluent couple played by Allen and Neill and as she cleans she begins monologuing about how hard it is to really get the dirt out of things. Things that appear neat and tidy really aren't, she says, and it's apparent that we're in for a lot of philosophizing. Periodically throughout the movie Henderson returns to speechify and comment on the action, a sort of one-woman Greek Chorus. And this being a treatise on class and cultural differences, there's a lot to comment on.
Allen plays an American-Irish scientist living in London whose marriage to Neill has become a loveless matter of convenience. Quite by accident she meets a Lebanese expatriate ( Abkarian ) who was trained as a surgeon but works as a chef. On impulse she hands him her all-important cell number and he, also on impulse, gives her a ring at just the right moment. An affair begins and spirals into directions that neither planned on. Both characters, drawn together against their will, spend lots of time analyzing and reflecting on the differences between each other. With all the divisions between the two ( including the usual male and female generalizations ) and the various subplots that crop up, somehow the affair holds together. Inexplicably, each has found his physical and emotional mate.
Gay audiences will be most familiar with Potter's 1992 film version of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending novel Orlando. Potter cast Tilda Swinton in the title role of the nobleman who eventually switches from male to female and stays young forever at the urging of Queen Elizabeth. Potter, adding more twists to the gender transformations, cast the late gay activist Quentin Crisp in that role and singer Jimmy Somerville as a singing Angel ( in falsetto, natch ) . The film, with its breathtaking cinematography, sets and costumes made a bit of a splash, but Potter's subsequent films, though arty and beautiful, haven't resonated much for me. This one does primarily because Potter's two leads are, at first glance, such an unlikely pair.
Neither the swan-necked Allen nor the rather ordinary looking Abkarian are physically mesmerizing, but there is a decided sexiness to their couplings. Whether this is from the acting, writing or Potter's constant arty camera angles and tricks I'm not sure. But in the end, against all odds, these two do seem to belong together and the fact that Allen and Abkarian get this across, in spite of all the weight Potter has given their characters to shoulder, is reason enough to say 'Yes' to Yes.
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No one, it seems, has been able to articulate our sci-fi dreams with the assurance that Steven Spielberg has, first with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and then E.T.
Now, with War of the Worlds, he speaks to our nightmares and what he envisions for us—and has the budget to put on the screen—is so over-the-top apocalyptic that you finally just want to cry, 'Uncle!' The picture's a triumph of unrelenting terrorist horror in which the director realizes one terrible thing after another. Thousands of extras are laid to waste, jet planes are crashed, ferries toppled, people disintegrated and sucked up by the marauding alien invaders. It's the biggest car crash onscreen I've ever seen and like the rest of the audience, I didn't want to blink or bat an eye and miss the next epic, queasy thrill. Once during the screening I noticed a young woman trotting down the aisle, heading toward the bathroom. 'How can she leave the theater?' I thought to myself incredulously, 'She's going to miss the next wave of death!'
Who other than Spielberg has the clout to command such gigantic set pieces? He's become our C.B. DeMille—making populist spectacles for the masses. Though the picture has its share of special effects, its use of old-fashioned extras—thousands of 'em—packed into the enormous sets and seen fleeing in terror from the 'tripods' is frankly enthralling. I also loved that the tripods announce their presence with a deep, evil-sounding trumpet blast ( it's like Gabriel's trumpet sounding ) . This is an ironic, bitter reversal of the friendly Mother Ship's musical tutorial in Close Encounters, also scored by longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams, and a cool touch.
Though the movie is book ended with the story of the divorced Everyman, played by Tom Cruise, trying to reconnect with his two kids, Spielberg quickly dispenses with it—to the good. We don't care much about the mundane lives of these everyday characters and Spielberg understands that ( and who cares about cuckoo Cruise and his bizarre proselytizing at this point, anyhow? ) . We want to get to the extraordinary circumstances and so does the director. He's still as much of a kid as the rest of us and understands that destruction on this grand scale is still pretty neat-o. Not quite as neat-o as it once was, of course.
The tragic reality of 9/11 has set the bar for imagined destruction unbelievably high, but Spielberg, without hesitation, jumps right over it. Odd to be able to breathe a sigh of relief over that, but comforting, too. As War of the Worlds makes eye-poppingly clear, our reality could get much, much worse. Let's hope those elusive terrorists never get a hold of Spielberg and force him to plan their next attack. We'd be in a helluva fix.
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Department of Corrections: The Great Water which was mentioned in last week's column, is a film from Macedonia NOT Russia and the correct Web site for the Gene Siskel Film Center where the movie ran is www.siskelfilmcenter.org . Apologies.
Joan and Bette
Joan Crawford died in 1977. Bette Davis in 1989. But here they are again, in their newly released, simultaneous DVD boxed sets, The Joan Crawford Collection and The Bette Davis Collection, still battling it out decades later. It's very canny of Warner Bros. to be bringing out these two boxed sets ( which were released last month ) at the same time, with their matching art direction and containing five films from each star. June, after all, is gay pride month, and who else other than middle-aged gay men still carry the torch so highly for these battling Hollywood titans?
The winner of the ongoing contest between the two feuding actresses who appeared onscreen together only once ( in the enthralling, over-the-top thriller, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ) is still a draw—but fans of the divas will be running to the stores to grab these jam-packed sets to decide for themselves. Davis will always have the edge, acting-wise but Crawford certainly held her own and easily trumped Bette in the glamour department—evident when viewing the films included here.
The Davis collection includes the previously released masterpieces The Letter and Now, Voyager and the new to DVD melodrama supreme Dark Victory, silly but lush soap opera Mr. Skeffington, and the cheaply made but riveting The Star. These films provide an almost perfect overview of Davis's superstar years at Warner Bros. while the little-seen The Star from 1952 with Bette as the has-been actress exclaiming to her Academy Award, 'C'mon Oscar, let's you and me get drunk!' is the height of her post-WB years ( All About Eve, aside ) .
Crawford is represented by repackaging of the previously released The Women and her Oscar-winning performance in film noir supreme Mildred Pierce along with the new to DVD dark romance of Humoresque and Possessed and perhaps Crawford's finest hard-bitten dame in The Damned Don't Cry. Though I love The Women, it's not a Crawford star vehicle and I'd have much preferred the inclusion of George Cukor's masterful 1941 melodrama A Woman's Face, which has yet to make it to DVD. It features Joan as the scarred ringleader of a group of blackmailers and contains one of her best performances.
The re-releases on both sets contain the original extras ( the best being the full-length Anjelica Huston-narrated Crawford documentary on the Mildred Pierce disc ) while new material includes short featurettes and full-length commentaries on each of the new films. All the movies are in glorious black and white, are sure to be the basis for gay screening parties for months to come and, hopefully, will inspire a younger generation of gay men to help keep the Crawford-Davis rivalry alive. It's just too much fun to let it die.
