Cinema
What Lies Beneath (15, selected cinemas)
Misplaced Hitchcockiana
Mark Steyn
What's happened to Harrison Ford? He seems to be shrivelling away before our eyes into a strange little walnut head topped with a grey rug modelled on George Michael in his Sony lawsuit period. Sometimes he has an earring. Mostly he has a permanently startled expression, like a gerbil who's just been told he's being delivered to a Hollywood party. His recent pairings — with Julia Ormond in Sabrina, with Anne Heche in Six Days, Seven Nights, with Kristin Scott Thomas in Random Hearts — have had all the chemistry of the Prince and Princess of Wales on their last Australian tour.
One of the big problems is the voice, which seems trapped in some close-miked late-night disc-jockey whisper. It's a mode that's utterly useless for most of the hum- drum transactions of daily life — ordering a quarter-pounder, large fries and vanilla shake at a drive-thru McDonald's, say — and, in his last three or four films, you can judge the effectiveness of his performance by how often the director's prevailed upon him to drop this ludicrous affectation. In What Lies Beneath, a ghost story, he spends a lot of time drizzling his voice like a salad dressing over his twitchy leading lady. That's about as engaged as he gets. The ghost goes around slamming doors, filling bathtubs, knocking over picture frames, and is actually a far more vivid presence than the ghostly Ford, shambling around his own movie like The Film Star That Time Forgot. The one good thing this time out is that he has Michelle Pfeiffer. Paired with cool Brits (Miss Scott Thomas), wacky lesbians (Miss Heche) and crashing bores (Miss Ormond), Ford could never quite hide his condescension. He knows better than to try that with a fellow Hollywood bluechip, and you can at least believe their two characters could conceivably co-exist in the same story. Miss Pfeiffer looks good, though not as good as the dream-house lakefront property in Vermont in which the story is set. I like my Vermont a little less air- brushed, personally, but, to modify the old rep actor's credo, if you're going to bump into the furniture, this is the furniture to bump into.
Norman (Ford) and Claire (Miss Pfeif- fer) have come back to the old family house to fix it up. But, when she's alone in the joint, she can't help but notice the strange goings on — the dogs barking at unseen threats, those doors opening and closing all by themselves, strange breezes, somebody playing a damn cello every hour of the day — no, hang on, that's the sound- track. Unfortunately, Norman is one of those driven scientists too busy with his work — he's trying to develop a sexual chemistry set for ageing leading men, or some such — to offer Claire any emotional support. So, instead, he sends her to a shrink. It's all taking its toll on Claire, much to the enjoyment of Pfeiffer Pfans who like those movies where she gets so wound up that that little vein on her fore- head starts pulsating like the hazard lights on your car.
In between the pulsating, Robert Zemeckis gets to do his hommage a Hitch- cock. Not another one, you sigh, but every other director gets to play Hitchcock, so why shouldn't he? There's a nod to Rear Window, with Claire watching the Ray- mond Burr-like heavy next door lugging what looks like a body bag out to his car. There's the old Psycho shower curtain, a soupcon of Vertigo and Suspicion. And there's a lot of stuff we've seen in a gazil- lion movies — the mirror that suddenly reflects an unexpected face, the harmless cove who suddenly appears and gives the heroine a start. We've seen the mirror rou- tine in real thrillers, ironic thrillers, parody thrillers, moronic spoofs like Scary Movie, and its hard to see why Zemeckis thought he could do anything new with it. The Hitehcockiana seems particularly mis- placed, since Hitch would have found a human explanation for the poltergeist turns, whereas the lame script Zemeckis has comes up with nothing better than the ghost of an old girlfriend — in other words, Blithe Spirit without the gags.
I don't want to give away the plot, but, if you've seen the trailer, you'll know every- thing that happens anyway. There seems little point to the slow build-up and the trickle of revelations in the first hour or so, when every single one of them is given away in the first 30 seconds of the studio promo. Indeed, the trailer tells the story with such economic flair that it leaves the film itself looking torpid and dopey. Zemeckis, a good professional entertainer not so long ago, now seems to be just going through the motions.
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