Cinema
Ms American Pie
Mark Steyn It may be time to re-think at least the front half of the old injunction against working with children or animals. In, respectively, A Perfect World and American Heart, Kevin Costner and Jeff Bridges are both teamed with photogenic ragamuffins, and both wind up with far more absorbing screen partnerships than, say, Costner and Whitney Houstoti in The Bodyguard or Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabu- lous Baker Boys. Admittedly, that's not say- ing much, but still, if I were a movie actress, I'd be a bit worried that Hollywood seems to be taking the same line as the ancient Greeks: women for breeding, but boys for pleasure. Perfect World and Ameri- can Heart have some perfunctory passes at bit-part waitresses, but in both it's token sex, just going through the motions. The real action is: boy meets Jeff, boy loses Jeff, boy gets Jeff; boy meets Key, boy gets Key, boy loses Key. And don't worry about the kids: Equity moppets like T. J. Lowther (Costner's co-star) and Edward Furlong (Bridges') can more than hold their own. Pity instead Bridges' nominal leading lady: a miss is as good as a mile, but a Ms is unlikely to be as good as a Furlong.
The titles of A Perfect World and Ameri- can Heart are, naturally, ironic — neon-lit signals warning, in case we hadn't noticed, that the American dream sometimes plays as nightmare. Both Bridges and Costner play ex-cons — bridges on parole, Costner on the lam. 'You keep me straight, I'll keep you straight,' Bridges tells his young son.
Costner never spells it out quite as explicit- ly to his kid (a hostage), but the relation- ship is founded on the same mutual dependency. In both cases, when the star and his boy sidekick are off-screen, the pic- ture simply treads water.
American Heart doesn't deserve Bridges and Furlong, whose performances are the
only true things in an ersatz documentary full of trite observations about urban despair. Martin Bell, ex-BBC, has in effect re-made his much-praised documentary
Streetwise as a feature film. Unfortunately, it commits that routine sin of BBC docu-
mentaries, assuming that getting the stuff on camera is its own justification: gosh, marvels Bell, here are all these pimps and
punks and pushers and parolees having a really tough time on the streets. Yes, but why should we be interested in these partic- ular ones?
Even worse, but also par for the docu- mentary course, Bell can't resist underlin- ing: what does Bridges sing to his son down by the docks, when they're flat broke and about to be evicted? 'Grab your coat and get your hat, leave your worries on the doorstep. . . ' Incredibly, Bridges gets away with it. Hirsute, tattooed, he gives the best Hollywood drunk turn in years, merely because it isn't a turn: he just totters woozi- ly into shot like a bloke who's come back from the pub and, fumbling for the light, switched his camcorder on.
In the old days, the tough guy got paired with some sassy chick, who'd turn out to be the real brains of the outfit. Bridges and Furlong offer a variation: the tough guy gets nursed through one crass misjudgment after another by the youngster. A Perfect World goes one better, showing us the old double-act and its latest retread side by side. While Costner and the abducted Lowther are giving the Texas cops the runaround, back at HQ (a high-tech mobile home), Clint Eastwood is squabbling over strategy with Laura Dern, one of those psy- chological experts assigned to the case over Clint's head.
The ritual introduction, in which the female agent is mistaken for the new secre- tary, is played with tremendous dignity. Thereafter, Clint squints, glints and never stints on the unreconstructed old charmer routine which saw him through In The Line of Fire — except that, mysteriously, he looks about 20 years younger. Possibly aware we've seen it all before, Eastwood, as the film's director, has cut his and Dern's scenes to the minimum, leaving him like a bit-player in his own picture. Either that or he figured he and Dern couldn't compete with Costner and Lowther. The real tension in traditional screen relation- ships boils down to: who's wearing the pants? With Clint and Laura, the trousers are purely metaphorical. But, when Cost- ner abducts Lowther, the unfortunate lad is wearing only his underwear. Thus, in this relationship, the question is reframed liter- ally. There's life in the old formula yet.
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