Cinema
The Truth about Cats and Dogs (15, selected cinemas)
Postponing the sex
Mark Steyn
They must be teaching it in film school — the first rule of Nineties date movies: postpone the sex as long as possible. The most successful example is Sleepless in Seat- tle, where boy meets girl but not until the final scene. In its wake have come While You Were Sleeping, in which boy meets girl but she's pretending to be engaged to his brother who's in a coma, and French Kiss, in which boy meets girl but ... well, to be honest, I forget the 'but' and anyway, in that film, by the time they did get around to sex, nobody cared.
As you can tell, ever since Sleepless, it's been hard to figure out a way of delaying sex that doesn't seem hopelessly contrived. True, you could always just make them a nice young couple who don't want to rush into things. But in Hollywood, where sex is as easy as taking 60 bucks out of the cash machine and heading down Sunset, not having sex is such an unnatural state that it requires a bewildering maze of plot devices to bring it about.
So in Michael Lehmann's The Truth about Cats and Dogs, Abby (Janeane Garo- falo) is the host of a radio veterinary phone-in called The Truth about Cats and Dogs. One day, Brian, a photographer hav- ing difficulties with an unto-operative Great Dane, calls up and is so impressed by her advice, he asks her out. But Abby is insecure, convinced that Brian will be expecting a glamorous on-air personality, and sends along her next-door neighbour Noelle (Uma Thurman) to impersonate her — Noelle being a tall, willowy blonde, whereas Abby is short and dumpy and mousey. From this unlikely stratagem, the inevitable complications ensue. As an old radio man and ex-glamorous on-air personality, I was unpersuaded by the premise. In my experience, even quite unattractive radio hosts do OK on that front. A fat ugly sports announcer I knew in Montreal liked to wander into singles bars, sidle up to the best-looking babe and schmooze, 'Hey, honey. I do the sports on the radio. Interested?' A surprisingly high number were. (I need hardly add that this ploy is even more effective with 'Hey, honey. I'm the motion picture critic of The Spectator.') But Lehmann isn't one to fret about the details. The Truth about Cats and Dogs is the old beauty vs brains routine: Uma Thurman is the purring sex-kitten, Janeane Garofalo is the dog. She isn't real- ly, of course. Hollywood is terrified of ugli- ness, although the physically unattractive are surely as entitled to positive role mod- els as anyone else (you have to go back to the actress who played Lucy Schmieler in the 1949 film of On The Town). So instead Miss Garofalo is required merely to wear shapeless clothes, muss up her hair and look as if she's not wearing make-up even though, in the close-ups, you're very aware of how much make-up she needs to look unmade-up (if you follow).
Still, she gamely plays on, for her advan- tage is that Abby (Janeane) is deep, while Noelle (Urns) is shallow. Brian, being a sensitive type who takes artistic pho- tographs, will sooner or later come round. In the shorthand of Hollywood characteri- sation, his sensitivity is signalled to us by his gift to Noelle of Simone de Beauvoir's letters to Jean-Paul Sartre.
At which point, every self-respecting female will be heading for the hills. Hand- ing out Simone & Sartre's greatest hits doesn't mean you're sensitive; it means you're a pillock who thinks that's the sort of thing sensitive people are supposed to do. It means you're the sort of creep who's trying to advertise your sense of your own status while flattering her sense of hers. Here, that impression's compounded by the casting of Ben Chaplin, an English naif with wavy black hair and an estuary accent. Chaplin was touted in America, for about ten minutes, as 'the new Hugh Grant', but this is one of those rare occasions where the old Hugh Grant would have been infinitely preferable. In the most squirm- inducing scene, Chaplin and Garofalo indulge in a lengthy late-night phone-sex session, full of explicit masturbatory activi- ty. Many British actors have gone to Holly- wood and wound up looking like tossers, but never quite so literally.
In an ideal world, both gals would recog- nise Brian as a ghastly poseur and embark on a lesbian affair instead. But, with that option not available, I'm cheering on Noelle. Presented with Brian's Wretched gift, she tells Abby she's been given a book of letters by 'some guy called Simon'. She's the only one in the picture who's at ease with herself — and ease vs pose is far more decisive than brains vs beauty.
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