Cinema
The Horse Whisperer (PG, selected cinemas) Mr Nice Guy (15, selected cinemas)
Poor old Kristin
Mark Steyn
Nice horse, shame about the whisper- er. The Horse Whisperer is a movie based on the book by that British guy who wrote a book in order to get a movie based on it. The title is cunningly designed to appeal to Hollywood Man's sense of himself: the `horse' bit says 'rugged', the 'whisperer' says 'sensitive'. No wonder Robert Redford leapt at the role of Tom Booker, a Monta- nan who rehabilitates psychologically dam- aged horses by whispering to them. What gal wouldn't love a guy who whispers at horses? I realise now why my own venture into this field — The Couch Potatoer, about a man who rehabilitates damaged sofas by rubbing them with extra-large fries — was so fundamentally ill-conceived.
So, whatever one's reservations about the finished product, one must give credit where it's due: if you see only one film about horse whispering this summer, make it this one. Kristin Scott Thomas plays a driven Englishwoman who's made it big in the glamorous world of New York maga- zine publishing — think Tina Brown with hobbies. Robert Redford plays a Montana Marlboro Man who fixes up horses think Harry Evans in chaps. Actually, I may be doing Evans an injustice, since Redford seems an awful lot wrinklier these days. Anyway, the Kristin/ Tina character has a daughter, Grace, and a horse, Pilgrim, and both of them take a bad fall. Grace loses a leg, and Pilgrim loses it. Period. Nothing seems to work. Kristin/Tina tries everything — a photo shoot with Herb Ritts, front cover guarantees — but Pilgrim remains traumatised. So Kristin decamps to Mon- tana and tells Robert Redford that her horse needs whispering. Most guys would reply, 'I'm sure it does, baby' and put the old bearskin-rug music on the hi-fi. But Redford takes it in his stride, or at any rate in his lope, which is where he seems to take pretty well everything. He is a whisperer who loves horses. 'I help horses with peo- ple problems,' he whispers, hoarsely.
Yes, but . . . We all know that this story's supposed to be as much about rejuvenating not just her mount but also poor old Kristin — who's married, but not so's you'd notice. There's a hit film in America at the moment called Stella Gets Her Groove Back, about a 40-year old black gal called Stella who has sex with a much younger guy and thereby gets her groove back. The Horse Whisperer is meant to be a white- bread white folks' equivalent: Kristin Gets Her Ride Back. For Redford, director as well as star, the attraction in the property was that it gave him a chance to do what Clint Eastwood did with The Bridges of Madison County: take some pulpy mush and turn it into a soft-focus valentine to himself. Redford even hired Madison's screenwriter, Richard LaGravenese, and, taking their cue, the gossip writers started calling it The Horses of Madison County. But there's a huge difference: The Bridges of Madison County is not, in the end, about bridges. I'd wager that, in the film, Clint, as a National Geographic photographer, spends maybe two and a half minutes shooting bridges; the rest of the time he's shooting for Meryl Streep. It's different with The Horse Whisperer: for a start, the film is two and three-quarter hours long, and (by my rough calculations) Redford spends two and a half of them whispering at the horse. Kristin barely gets a look in.
Movie-goers accept the convention whereby Redford can never play opposite a woman his own age or, indeed, within 20 years of it. If Jane Fonda, his leading lady in Barefoot in the Park or the lovely Katharine Ross from Butch Cassidy turned up in a Redford movie now, they'd be play- ing his mother. Fair enough. But, in return, we're entitled to expect the guy to make a bit of effort. There's no equivalent of the erotic tension Clint generates when he offers to help Meryl Streep in the kitchen. Instead, there's absolutely zero chemistry between Rob and Kristin. Apparently, the film was edited in versions with three love scenes, two love scenes and just one love scene. But Redford eventually decided to get rid of them all: 'Hey, we've only got two and three-quarter hours. Let's get a bit more horse whispering in.' The result is a slo-mo scenic dud.
If you want art in motion pictures, check out Jackie Chan, the Fred Astaire of kung- fu chop-suey action flicks, the Harold Lloyd of drug busts, the Buster Keaton of warehouse shoot-outs. In Mr Nice Guy, Jackie is a TV chef in Melbourne who finds himself caught in a gang war between cocaine dealers. The film has many beauti- ful moments, from the opening scene — in which Jackie flips and spins his pasta dough into angel-hair spaghetti with all the grace he brings to kick-boxing Triads — through to a Magritte-like sequence — endlessly connecting blue doors and concrete walls on a construction site — to (my personal favourite) a dazzlingly choreographed rou- tine in which Jackie has to fight the bad guys with a garbage can wedged on the end of his bottom. Terrific.
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