Cinema
Getting Even With Dad (PG', selected cinemas) North (PG', selected cinemas)
Kiddie flicks
Mark Steyn
Summer means movie moppets, and all a grown-up star can do is try and keep his head down until October. A year ago, in The Last Action Hero, cute adorable Austin O'Brien terminated Arnold Schwarzeneg- ger's stratospheric rise, reducing him from muscle-bound invincibility to a wimp who listened to Mozart and recited Shake- speare: from Conan The Barbarian to Conan The Sad Aryan in one fell career- detonating swoop. This summer's box- office duds in America are Getting Even with Dad, in which Macaulay Culkin does for Ted Danson, and North, in which Elijah Wood boots Bruce Willis into touch. Pre- sumably having misheard the old prohibi- tion on appearing with children and animals, Willis appears with children as an animal — a fluffy pink Easter bunny with three-day stubble and trip-up aphorisms: `If you can't stand the heat, stay out of Miami.'
If you can't stand defeat, stay out of the kindergarten. The kids, whether Little Mac or some smaller fry, always get top billing yet always escape blame for the picture's failure: 'Mac Is Back!' proclaim the posters, but it's Ted who's dead. In Cheers, Ted Danson wore a short-back-and-sides and had the biggest sitcom hit of the Eight- ies; in the final season, he pulled off his rug to out himself as a baldie and the ratings went through the roof; in Getting Even with Dad, he sports a luxuriant ponytail and the grosses go through the basement. Perhaps he, too, was trying to appear with children as an animal.
He looks like Black Beauty (the umpteenth remake is due shortly) and his function in the film is much the same — a dumb animal whom the kid takes for a ride. A bozo ex-con out to pull one last job, Ted soon discovers that he and his accom- plices are no match for Mac.
That's the spooky thing about these movies: with Arnie, Ted and even Bruce Willis, it's the grown-ups who are the child- like innocents. Think of Schwarzenegger the two-ton Teuton who in the whole of Terminator II uttered 72 words; or Danson as Sam the barman in Cheers — a sexist jock with a four-alarm fire in his shorts, but played as a lovable, harmless clown. Willis is a more complicated case, since he's always fancied himself as the Thin Man with pectorals. But listen to him deliver the film's moral, as he drops little Elijah back with his folks: 'Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. With the possible exception of Vegas when Sinatra's in town.' It sounds cool, but that's all — like the cocky punk who talks big in the playground without ever quite knowing what he's on about.
The child stars, meanwhile, are major weirdsmobiles. Movie brats were always naughty, but now they're sly, manipulative, street-wise ... Hearing Elijah Wood on the radio droning in an eerily measured baritone about how he's very comfortable at this stage with his self-esteem makes the flesh creep. Mac's an 11-year-old blonde, the Woodman's an 11-year-old brunette, but behind those saucer eyes all you can read are steely-cold calculation and man- nerism. Come back, Mickey Rooney.
Where Getting Even With Dad panders to the worst in America's tyrannical tots and their appeasing parents, North is a much subtler movie and, in its way, a timely assault on poppet power. North (Wood) is a frustrated kid who divorces his bickering mom and pop and sets out to audition their replacements. Rob Reiner shoots the film through a child's-eye view of the world: North's Texan parents are yee-hawing bro- cade-dripping cowboys who sing the theme from Bonanza, his. Eskimo parents live in a suburban cul-de-sac of neat little igloos, his Amish parents are Kelly McGillis and Alexander Godunov, reprising their roles in Witness.
But what 11-year old has any memory of Witness (1985)? or Bonanza? Or Fifties sit- coms like Ozzie and Harriet? This isn't a kiddieflick at all: Reiner is projecting the accumulations of a middle-aged grown-up through the distorting mirror of childhood fantasy, and as such it's oddly touching certainly more than today's video-game fantasies would be. So, when North flies to his Parisian parents, French television is showing, on every channel, a Jerry Lewis movie. The French have all kinds of other stereotypical characteristics — onions, gar- lic, Gauloises, Sacha Distel — but, no: to an American, France is the country where the poor schmucks take Jerry Lewis seri- ously. Reiner probably fancies he's making quite a sophisticated joke, but it's almost sweetly naive in its cinecentric parochial- ism. Forget Mac and Elijah; this is the most endearingly childlike moment of the week.
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