Cinema
Gettysburg ('PG', selected cinemas) Colour of Night ('18', selected cinemas)
Hair and muscle
Mark Steyn
When Raymond Massey played Abraham Lincoln, the joke around Broad- way was that he wouldn't be satisfied with his performance until he was assassinated. Ronald F. Maxwell, writer/director of Get- tysburg, opts for an easier measure of authenticity: size. At the end of the pic- ture, like the surviving infantrymen of the 2nd Maine, you pack up and trudge weari- ly back to the friends and family and fish- ing village you haven't seen in three long years only to be amazed that the movie isn't quite that lengthy - just four hours and eight minutes. The Civil War Ken Burns' TV epic (shown on BBC2), was also long, but its power derived from its restraint: interviews with Ivy League professors, sepia stills and lingering, elegaic shots of the historical sites today, quiet empty green fields in the grey of dawn that had once been filled with noise and men and smoke. It was confident enough of its sub- ject to be simple and modest and, thereby, incredibly moving.
For Maxwell, momentousness means massiveness. Same sites as Burns used, but you can't see the wood or the trees for all the running back and forth going on in the foreground. It looked to me like an English school sports day, late in the after- noon when they're behind with the heats and trying to catch up. In the re-enactment of Pickett's Charge on the actual battle- field, there are five thousand extras; there are almost as many in the orchestra; there are certainly more in the beard-making department. Across the fertile farmland of Pennsylvania march beard after beard, all in that distinctive Civil War stick-on style that looks like wall-to-wall broadloom just after it's been shampooed. Beneath the beards, you can barely make out your favourite movie stars - Tom Berenger and Jeff Daniels and Martin Sheen and Sam Elliott and that British actor who used to play the young stud who bedded all those women with names like Bliss and Caress and Sable in the spin-off to Dynasty (there are no women called Bliss or Sable or any- thing else in this film, or, if there are, they're wearing beards, too). Being merely a supporting player, the English guy from the Dynasty spin-off has only minimal facial hair. Usually, on location, star status is graded by trailer size. Here, it's beards, moving up from Sheen's Robert E. Lee (a bib-and-tucker job) through Daniels' Colonel Chamberlain (two huge dangling moustaches) to Tom Berenger as General Longstreet, who walks around with a set of ruched curtains taped under his nose.
The period detail, though, is only beard deep. Underneath the hair, Berenger and co give contemporary performances with no hint of an 1860s sensibility. Colonel Chamberlain even gives a Bill Clinton pep talk: "We came because it was the right thing to do. We are an army out to set other men free ... Here you can be some- thing, here is the place to build a home. But it's not the land, it's the idea - that we all have value. What we're fighting for, in the end, we're righting for each other ..." His men gulp, lumps in their beards, and Daniels goes off to comb his moustaches. Even if it were true (which it isn't), there's something dismal about the way we recre- ate history only to impose this week's cot- ton-candy nostrums on it.
At the other end of the scale is Colour of Night, a psychological thriller so ruthlessly edited and compressed it comes out virtu- ally as parody. From the opening scene - a high-rise suicide set against the Chrysler Building - Richard Rush gives the film a sheen of stylised, heightened reality, emphasised by lush and lurid supporting performances led by Lesley-Ann Warren and her fellow group therapy patients. In ironic juxtaposition to all this visual over- ripeness is a Hitchcockian conceit: the psy- chotherapist is colour-blind. The finale goes for broke, tossing in bits of Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds with bewildering speed. Just one problem: in the role of the haunt- ed shrink - the Jimmy Stewart role - is Bruce Willis. If there's one thing Willis cannot play, it's a fellow who's riddled with self-doubt. Riddled with bullets, fine (see Die Hard). But self-doubt? His pectorals keep getting in the way. The film has to keep inventing pretexts for him to take his shirt off. But then, instead of pumping iron, he pumps Jane March. If there's a second thing Willis can't play, it's sex scenes. He's a guys' guy, not a chicks'.
Previous page
