Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

November 30 , 2003

Who can resist In America? A few do, but I give in willingly. The Cat in the Hat is old news, but Bad Santa is still the freshest gust of venom this season. Plus Ron Howard on The Missing and its links to John Ford's The Searchers, New Suit, Swag the Dog.

Goat world

"It's a Wonderful Hangover"?

Here's true holiday joy: the scalding, splenetic, unrelenting, profane, almost relentless misanthropy of Bad Santa, as directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (who did uncredited rewrites on Looney Tunes: Back in Action). Reeking of booze, The Bad News Bears and South Park, Billy Bob Thornton is sour comic genius as Willie T. Stokes - a character and a moniker W. C. Fields could toast. Willie's a super-soused safecracker who spends each Christmas season with Marcus, his partner in crime (Tony Cox), an elf-sized but not elfin black man, playing Santa and his sidekick at a different shopping center, which they proceed to rob on Christmas Eve. Willie's been burning both ends of the Yule log for a long time, and Thornton plays this drunken, sexually compulsive Santa with epic self-loathing - scrawny, face scratchy with salt-and-pepper grizzle - on the prowl for women who share his particular sexual predilections.

Lauren Graham is a freckled delight as a frisky bartender with a Santa fetish: is this the first mainstream movie that contains the mantric dialogue, "F--k me, Santa, f--k me, Santa, f--k me, Santa, f--k me Santa!"? Supposedly only the Brian DePalma-Oliver Stone version of Scarface has more
iterations of the f-word, and a lot of it's in the company of young Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly), a hangdog yet kind-hearted loner, a steroidal seraphim whom everyone bullies, but who sort of adopts Willie. Thornton's exclamations of disgust for the world have some of the fervor of R. Lee Ermey's DI in Full Metal Jacket. When Thornton roars, "Kid? Are you FUCKING with me?," there's a terrifying comic potency. Zwigoff keeps the frames almost Laurel-and-Hardy simple, as he did in Ghost World, and much of the movie is inspired scatology, as well as truly, truly hilarious. With Bernie Mac, a wasted Cloris Leachman, and in his last role, John Ritter as a prissy store manager offended by the sight of Santa's red trousers around his ankles and the sounds of sex coming from a fitting room in the large-size Ladies' department.

Petty Lane

In America is one of the year's great delights, and in the December 1 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane burns up the second sentence of his review with a snotty (and irrelevant) reference to Don Johnson's Miami Vice costuming. "Nobody's Perfect," Lane's doorstop of writing from the New Yorker in the past decade that should be in paperback soon, is painfully schizophrenic. Lane's particularly smart and insightful when taking on novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G. Sebald, as well as timelessly great filmmakers Robert Bresson, Preston Sturges, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. Photographer-filmmaker William Klein is a particular favorite of Lane's (and mine) and his writing on Klein is, well, picture-perfect.

But has he ever met a movie he doesn't condescend toward? Does he ask for assignments for movies he knows he's bound to disdain? His In America? "... Hectoring rather than melancholy, precisely because it strives to badger us with the sadness at its core..." His description of Samantha Morton strives for precision: "Is there a more bewildering presence in modern movies? ... Those hard, elfin features don't match the bosomy fullness below - you don't know whether to read Morton as voluptuous or inwardly stricken, she seems to possess one less layer of skin than other actresses, wincing and bruising at gestures that would slide off calmer flesh." Lovely. Beats the late Pauline with a stick. But to complain that the movie "takes only halfhearted measures to root itself in a recognizable world"? Lane doesn't get In America, doesn't give Sheridan the credit that his movie might just have been shot that way, reshot that way, edited that way, because he knew the mood he meant to craft. To describe the collaborative script between Sheridan and his daughters Naomi and Kirsten as "one of the most impressive group efforts since the demise of the Andrews sisters" is on a level of snarkiness unbecoming a gifted writer.

Even though New York's Peter Rainer didn't particularly care for the picture, he does have his eyes open, flagging the moments that give in to "the sheer bliss of ordinary magic."

Work of heart

Would it be too much to say that Jim Sheridan's In America is an elusive, special delight, the work of an Irish Fellini, a transcendent work of kitchen sink magical realism?

After seeing it three times over the course of a year, I could make that argument for this sturdy, wistful, timeless fable. While there are sophisticated dramatic dichotomies and thematic strands, they flow quietly beneath an uncluttered surface. This is not a perfect movie, but the third go convinced me it's a great one. (Roger Ebert has some nice reflections on the movie, as opposed to the New Yorker's Anthony Lane (see above).

An Irish family slips into circa-1982 New York from over the Canadian border, their heaviest baggage the seldom-spoken-of death of a young son a few years earlier. Sheridan's movie is closer to memory than documentary; the details of family intimacy are more important than making certain details consistent. The family moves into a Lower East Side building, at once claustrophobic and airy, full of drug addicts and immigrants from warmer climates. The father auditions for roles between driving a cab. The children integrate themselves into the teeming city, the even-more-teeming building. The father and mother are played by two of the most gifted actors working -- Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton, the thinking man's mute-but they are outshone by a pair of sisters named Bolger, Sarah and Emma, two marvelous, exquisite little human beings. Sheridan is the sort of director willing to watch in wonderment at the marvel of curiosity and hope that is a child's face. There is one unforgettably played scene where the two watch their parents, proud, learning the knowing play of tease between their mother and father. (Their downstairs neighbor, a frustrated artist who looses the emotions the family cannot, played by Djimon Hounsou, helps to open the family's constricted emotional world.)

Sheridan accomplishes some of what Wim Wenders once did so well with little girls magically protected on urban adventures like Alice in the Cities. He draws from his own life, when he moved into New York's Hell's Kitchen, and the script is co-written with his daughters Naomi and Kirsten (who directed the little-seen but likable Disco Pigs). Sheridan's made marvelous movies from books like My Left Foot, as well as the luminous and underrated The Boxer, but he also understands the magic of personal mythology, which stands out of time and is one of the few filmmakers to so simply dramatize the intimate singularities of any family, its whispered, handed-down fables, meaningless to those outside that tribe, beyond that tight, modest, life-giving circle. This movie is unsentimental yet tender enough to make sweet creamery butter of a grown man. I still tear up at the memory of a child who quietly complains, "I have no one to play with... I have no one to tell my secrets to."

Hounsou has a speech about secrets, too, one that some would call "on-the-nose," where the movie's themes are elucidated quickly and simply, but the words and the performance are etched as if with the lightning that fills the film: "I'm in love with your wife... I'm in love with your beautiful daughters... I'm in love with you! I'm even in love with your anger! I'm in love with anything that lives!"

Sheridan moved to New York in 1983. "There was a plague, like everyone was dying of AIDS," he tells me in his sly Dublin lilt during his recent national press tour. But the time, and the disease, are blurred in the movie. Sheridan has his reasons. "It's easy to do gritty, socially aware pictures that nobody goes to see. It's actually very easy to do! I tried to keep it buoyant," he says, adding a self-deprecating and unnecessary, "I might not have done it."

Declan Quinn's cinematography is calm with furious bursts of quiet invention. "Declan allowed me to be a madman," Sheridan says, "trying to film all my aberrations." Trained in the theater, Sheridan says to him film is the actors and more of the actors: "When people say I'm in too close, I want to go closer." He also wants to keep everyone on the set confused. "You're in school when you're trying to direct. I say, 'Tell me about the scene.' Ten, fifteen minutes, everyone sits around and talks about it, than I say, 'Let's just shoot this and figure it out."

But Sheridan's also the kind of theatre-trained talker who can toss off a sentence like this about the movie's bright and stormy nights: "Y'know, in Shakespeare, the storm always presages a spiritual change or an internal transformation." Or, straightforward apothegms about his job contained in an anecdote about trying to satisfy a child actor's curiosity. "Directing is easy, it's answering simple questions that's difficult." He continues, "It's a real mindwarp when you work with children. People say, 'Don't work with children, don't work with animals.' It's a sick sentence, y'know. It just does my head in."

So does autobiographical reflection; the death of the son in the film is based on his brother's passing, so in effect, Considine is playing both Sheridan and Sheridan's father. "It's a weird thing, making a movie about your life, you're both making it, and it's making you. People don't realize the story is telling them. Y'know, they're not telling it."

The movie's ending breaks every rule in the book, particularly in terms of the suspension of disbelief, and it is magical, transporting, and effective beyond any expectation. "The end is to say, make your own pictures," Sheridan says. Why break those rules. "I dunno. 'Cos I'm perverted?" (He trills the word as "par-varrrted.") I thought I'd challenge everybody. The suspension of disbelief is hard to get off the ground, like a plane." But at the end of a movie, Sheridan says, if he can't challenge the audience, "If they're distanced already, I say to hell with them at that point." A character turns to the camera. The face is beautiful. The expression is beautiful. The image slows. The heart breaks. "It's like at the end of Beckett's 'Endgame,' right? What does Hamm say? 'Get over here and love one another.'"

Littered

I neglected to add my claw marks last week to the ghastly disaster, the Cat in the Hat, yet the print ads have quotes from three critics, two of whom I've never trusted anyway. Does Joel Siegel believe "It doesn't get much better than this"? Or Jeffrey Lyons that the movie is "enormously funny"? Ick. Fooey.

I've been able to miss a lot of clinkers in my career, but my memory isn't dredging up much worse than Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat.

With frosting made of potato paste,
and jimmies of aspartame,
The Cat in the Hats' a waste,
but goes down with a mighty flame.

(Manohla Dargis did a much better job than that in her entirely Seussian review in the Los Angeles Times; she apologized to Theodore Geisel on her own behalf, but not on Mike Myer's.) Weighing in at a floundering eighty-one minutes, including credits, Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat, nominally directed by veteran production designer Bo Welch (Edward Scissorhands), is shocking for how much worse it is than it sounded. Welch's work with Burton has amazed, but this is just a mess. I'm reminded of the career of Blade Runner's production designer afterwards, compared to Ridley Scott's: Scott's sustained that level of invention, whereas his collaborator's work with other directors lacked the never-ending invention of Scott's film.

Cute red-and-blue animated credits do Seussian stuff to the corporate logos of Universal Pictures, DreamWorks and Imagine Entertainment, but then the movie starts. To cite but a single example, the production and costume design is vomitous: the unbearable Sean Hayes is called upon to roll his eyes and R's while sheathed in a suit the color of puked-up pea puree.

Mike Myers' expressionless face seems fashioned from dimestore felt, looking nothing like Seuss' character, a cat, or anything you'd watch to watch for more than the length of a coming attractions trailer. The strenuous, "Hey Look At Me!" gags lack either the weight of character or the weightlessness of Austin Powers-style free-association. And a way is found for the ass-centric megastar to introduce a trucker-mechanic character who pushes two fat cheeks in the faces of the child stars. How verbally witty is this Cat? "Ohhhh, yeahhh" is Myers' cat-phrase this time out.

Another peculiar element: Alec Baldwin as the insistent suitor from next door, a role Baldwin plays more like a creepy, bachelor uncle of unspecified sexual predilections. There's also a bizarre interlude set at a subterranean rave where Mr. Hat briefly, inexplicably, makes interspecies eyes at very tan, very dim-looking, very young-looking, newly-minted reality (and reality porn) star Paris Hilton. Parents who take their kids to this botch could be accused of child abuse, unless they let them sneak into another movie in the multiplex

Ethan religion

Cate Blanchett as John Wayne?

The Missing, Ron Howard's latest movie, drawn from Richard Eidson's little-known and almost unreadable pulp novel "The Last Ride," is a gritty, brutal, often unpleasant portrait of a family crisis in 1885 New Mexico, in what Howard describes as "warped and strange and tragic" times.

Blanchett plays Maggie, a single mother of two daughters, trying to keep her family together when her estranged father Jones (Tommy Lee Jones) shows up on her stoop one day, followed by a band of white and Indian outlaws led by Pesh-Chidin (Native Canadian Eric Schweig, fully invested in the role) a maniacal Apache who follows, in Howard's words, "his own psychotic nature." The men kidnap girls for sex slavery. Maggie's oldest daughter, the rebellious Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood, from Thirteen) is abducted. Maggie and Jones set out to reclaim her daughter, against the indifference of the Army, the law and the unforgiving wilderness.

"It's an adult, sophisticated kind of family story," Howard insists of his disagreeable follow-up to A Beautiful Mind. The Missing opens with Blanchett in the outhouse. "In the first few minutes of the movie, we wanted to say, even when life is good out there, it's hard," Howard tells me, with the same seeming guilelessness as in his roles as a child actor. "It's uncomfortable. In establishing the world, we're also saying, these aren't movie star turns you're going to be watching, these are characters we're going to be trying to bring to the screen. I was staking out that ground."

Howard claims he wasn't especially looking for a Western after Disney fired him from its hundred-million-dollar plus The Alamo-they wanted a PG-13 rating, but Howard and Grazer wanted to make a bloody, R-rated film like The Missing -- but that this script, already written appealed to him, with its dark and troubling canvas of revenge, and also the idea of working quickly, on locations in New Mexico and with a cinematographer (Salvatore Totino, who shot Any Given Sunday and Changing Lanes) who had never considered shooting period pictures. (Totino's work is superb, a fresh eye cast upon an old genre.)

But Howard likes Westerns. "Y'know, the audience breaks into two groups. There's a large group that does yearn to see a Western and I think that group will find enough of what they expect to respond to it positively. But then there's this whole other group out there that says, "Western? I don't think so. Not interested.' My partner Brian Grazer was in that group. Y'know? That's why I was so shocked when he loved the script. I read it, I love these characters, I love these situations, just I wonder what Brian's going to think. It's a Western and he hates 'em. He doesn't believe in them!"

Gathering up steam to mimic Grazer's rumbustious delivery, Howard says the producer said, "'Wow! Wow! It's so intense! And the violence is so original! And the emotional circumstances of these characters is moving!' How do you get that into a marketing thing? It's kind of impossible. So the studio's just chosen to say, don't call it a Western.

Still, I had to wonder about how the endangerment to Lilly is shown. Unlike the 1950s discretion of a movie like John Ford's influential The Searchers, which The Missing invites comparisons to, Evan Rachel Wood's character is repeatedly shown in peril: bound and gagged, threatened with rape, forced to eat dirt, lipsticked crudely, but next seen as carefully dolled-up as an Olsen twin on a first date. What were the boundaries, I ask, trying not to sound angry.

"I wanted it to be, y'know, intense, but not, um, not graphic, not... I didn't necessarily want to play for shock value. But I did want to present sort of an authentic sense of the world and the times. Y'know, you mentioned The Searchers. John Sayles, the writer (Apollo 13, Lone Star), is a friend of mine. When I was telling him what I was doing, and the storyline, he said, 'Well, that sounds a little like The Searchers, a movie that I really like,' and I said, 'Yeah, I like it, too, it's a lot like The Searchers, except for theme, plot and characterization."

Okay, but the contrast that came to my mind is that in The Searchers, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) spends decades in the wilderness searching for his kidnapped niece (who grows up to be Natalie Wood) who's lived all those years in the bed of an Indian. We never see that side of the story, but the secret beating heart of Ford's film is this all-consuming rage of Wayne's character, fearing the despoiling of his kin.

In The Missing, however, we get near-pornographic flashes of a beautiful teenager in bondage, being abused. "Well, there is... Look, it's the inciting incident," he tells me, using a screenwriting term of art that describes what sets a plot into motion. "A white girl taken by... Indians. And the pursuit, y'know, an attempt to rescue." He pauses, continues. "That's taken from the pages of history. And other movies as well. but we do share that with The Searchers, certainly. But I think what I found interesting about the script when I read it was that the nature of the brujo" - Schweig's Apache madman antagonist - "was so strange and metaphysical and the father-daughter storyline between Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett was really, relatable in contemporary terms."

So it's timeless? "You could literally pick this storyline up and put it into any city," he insists, "make a couple of changes an the basic storyline would still really work."

Video killed the cinema star

New Suit is one of the most inspiring movies I've seen shot on high-definition video: it's bad and it demonstrates so many of the pitfalls of a low-budget feature that probably should never have gotten made. While the forbidding cost of film often served as a barrier to would-be filmmakers both bearing talent and having not a lick of it, the lower cost of video technology has also lowered the bar for movies like this lame effort to get made, shown and forgotten. Shot in a reported twenty days, New Suit has a plenitude of Los Angeles locations shot at many times of day, which would be an impressive bit of production value if the foreground story about a bidding war for a nonexistent script by a nonexistent writer were more compelling, or the actors were actually doing a competent job with screenwriter Craig Sherman sometimes-agreeable dialogue. New Suit? Forget "The Emperor's New Clothes." Instead, think of Gertrude Stein's comment about her hometown of Oakland: "There's no there there."

Swag the dog

Focus continues its less-weighty-than-the-movie promotion for 21 Grams, whose title has been described variously as the weight of life, or of a chocolate bar, a hummingbird or five nickels. Last week: five nickels attached to a postcard. This week: a Hershey-sized sweet chocolate bar, embossed with the film's title treatment.

DreamWorks hasn't sent out copies of Andre Dubus III's novel, House of Sand and Fog in which Vadim Perelman's dark drama is based, but the unabridged audio version thumped over the threshold a few days ago: Fifteen hours across ten cassettes, as read by Dubus and his wife, Fontaine Dollas Dubus. I'm always suspicious of any movie reviewer who insists on intimate knowledge of source material, but I'm even more suspicious of a movie reviewer who'd have to have an entire novel read to them. (Unless they were blind, which some reviewers very well may be.) Or maybe the stack of tapes would just be a good accompaniment for Thelma and Louise on their final road trip.

Email Ray Pride