Cinema
Outbreak
(`15', selected cinemas)
Worse than bad acne
Mark Steyn
outbreak is about a killer virus which, within hours, reduces its victims to gibber- ing wrecks, dripping sweat, splattered with lesions and oozing pustules, begging for release. How do you catch the virus? Prob- ably by watching movies like this. In its extreme form, you may even end up writing movies like this. In its very extreme form, you may even end up as Dustin Hoffman. Perhaps Outbreak is meant to be a parable of modern Hollywood: a small town infect- ed by a virus so deadly that everyone looks and acts the same. Here yet again is a movie that boasts of being on the cutting edge, yet seems wholly assembled from off- cuts of earlier, proven successes.
I find Hoffman almost impossible to watch these days: from Midnight Cowboy to Rain Man, all that business, all that making a meal over everything, all that acting. John Schlesinger likes to joke about the studio wanting Sammy Davis Jnr for Midnight Cowboy, but, as actors go, I'll take Sam over Dustin any day. For all the show he puts on, a Hoffman performance only works when he's playing a prat. He was a prat in The Graduate and, even more tri- And you call that little thing terrorism, why back in the States...' umphantly, in Tootsie. He does unlikeable very well. And now he's a prat again, though whether deliberately or not is hard to say. In the first scene, he essays some comedy, desperate to get a non-running joke about his dogs off its knees. I think he's aiming for Mel Gibson auto-banter, but Hoffman doing comedy is, as they say, no laughing matter: he finds it hard to throw away lines; they come at you with weights attached. So wisely he abandons the comedy and gets back to heavyweight pratting.
He plays a military doctor, a virus trou- bleshooter who is, inevitably, something of a maverick. So, whenever it gets to any- thing of even moderate seriousness, Hoffman puts on his super-serious expres- sion, jutting out his jaw and letting his mouth go lop-sided. It has the makings of a good Kate Adie impression. Then he deliv- ers the line, which is usually something along the lines of 'We got a fuckin' war on our hands' or 'Get your fuckin' ass in gear.'
The . gear in which Hoffman's ass is ensconced for much of the picture is an ,orange anti-contamination suit. His ex- wife, played by Rene Russo (Clint's chick from In The Line of Fire), has a matching suit. They pass the film scowling and bick- ering at each other through visors. Is it, you wonder idly, some sort of metaphor for safe sex? Alas, no. If only Outbreak's killer virus had half the symbolism of Aids. HIV is interesting in a dramatic sense because it is, in the west, a behavioural epidemic: it preys on our weaknesses, seizing those moments when our need for sex or drugs overwhelms our judgment. Outbreak's virus — which is called something like the Lam- bada — is much weaker dramatically. There's no choice, the germs are in the air, you just get it. It's as arbitrary as acne, though not as visually horrifying: there are some things even film stars won't do. Sportingly, Rene Russo contracts the virus, though it's hard to spot because, in striking contrast to the other victims, even on her deathbed she just gets a bit pasty faced — like the 'before' bit of a `combination skin' commercial. This killer virus is so destruc- tive it's reduced Miss Russo from Holly- wood star to, well, just a regular looking woman.
Hollywood has all the good ideas and then it hems them in with the same old phoney baloney: the maverick scientist, the broken marriage, the life expectancy of each character determined by casting, Don- ald Sutherland as the villain. Only the last ought to be compulsory.
So the virus attacks Cedar Creek, a Cali- fornian community straight out of the 1950s. Sutherland, as a Machiavellian gen- eral, has come up with a brilliant wheeze to save the nation: he wants to bomb the townsfolk to hell to stop the disease spreading, and, amazingly, he persuades the President to go along with it. As the President concerned is Bill Clinton, this executive decisiveness is pretty implausible. But in this picture, if you stop to think about anything too long, it's all implausi- ble. For example, the virus is so lethal in its attack on your kidneys and pancreas that it leaves your insides 'liquidised'. So how then does the serum work? A couple of shots intravenously and suddenly these guys are back on their feet.
By now, though, the film is hitting its stride. Hoffman is pitched into a tense race against time to save the town of Cedar Creek and the life of his ex-wife. There's a glorious, exhilarating helicopter chase straight out of Top Gun, but with the added attraction of a sedated monkey, whose bare pink bottom proved such an easy target for the stun dart. Perhaps that's the lesson of the film: the poor monkey didn't get his ass in any gear at all.
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