Cinema
A Matter of Life and Death ('U', Barbican) Wyatt Earp ('12', selected cinemas)
Too much droop
Mark Steyn
he besetting sin of today's Hollywood, from Aladdin to The Three Musketeers, is its inability to tell a tale except in standard contemporary American shorthand. Even life after death. Ever since the Civil War, when the young republic's first experience of premature death on a massive scale prompted a spate of plays deploying the then-new 'Pepper's Ghost' illusion, public intimations of mortality (a very un-Ameri- can concept) have found an echo in show business. Recently, with youthful promise succumbing to drugs, gang wars, Aids and random homicides, Hollywood has soothed its audience with films like Ghost, reassur- ing folks that, though cruelly terminated, Patrick Swayze is still out there some- where: not just as a wispy essence, but in his very blue jeans and hairstyle, still celes- tially grooving to the same hip toons he dug on earth. But, if death is just like life, what's the diff?
In A Matter of Life and Death, briefly res- urrected this month, there are real things at stake. David Niven is the RAF pilot whose 'plane is downed but who, due to the heavenly equivalent of a processing error, survives. Like all Powell-Pressburger films, it's freakishly original, from its very look — the sort of heightened unreal reality of a vivid dream. Many movie-goers find Powell and Pressburger just too weird, but not every subject should be hedged by the limi- tations of American pop culture. If the most memorable moment in a movie about love enduring beyond the grave is the Righteous Brothers' recording of 'Unchained Melody', that's a very small take on a very big subject.
Fifty years ago, when Powell and Press- burger made the film, Hollywood was pumping out turn-of-the-century backporch Americana with cutesy ethnic stereotypes like S. Z. Sakall. Oozing homey charm and small-town values, they were discreetly pro- pagandist. Today, bizarrely, there's no war, but the movies reek of propaganda of the dreariest kind: they make no contribution to the debate, but, as paralysed with fear as any Goebbels flunkey, cling for dear life to this year's received opinion. When a Man Loves a Woman is a classic of the genre: it tells us that Andy Garcia ought to listen more to his alcoholic wife, Meg Ryan, and then he'd understand her; but we listen to her for two hours, and she's got nothing to say. Given the number of stars who've passed through the Betty Ford clinic, you'd think this is one area where Hollywood knows the turf. At least, Oprah et al have the savvy to select their case studies, push- ing them to extremes, testing them before the howling mob in the studio, presenting authentic American experience in a one- hour TV pressure cooker. By comparison, When a Man Loves a Woman just falls asleep in the middle of the road: this is the Miller Lite of drunk movies.
No genre has been so wholeheartedly colonised by political correctness as the Western. The Wild West, it turns out, was populated by feminist gunslingers (Bad Girls), black gunslingers (Posse) and wily Native Americans who easily outsmart the white folks (Maverick). Hollywood is just too squeamish to contemplate the awkward fact that the West was won by sexist, racist brutes who had more respect for their horses than for women, African-Americans and aboriginal peoples. The present trend started with Kevin Costner's Injun-friendly Dances With Wolves. The Costner line on any subject is usually the one to take, from JFK (blame the CIA and LBJ) to his forth- coming The War, which climaxes with two kids fighting over a tree house in a South Carolina oak. 'We hired a tree specialist,' says the director, 'to ensure we left the oak in better condition than when we started.' In other words, no trees were harmed dur- ing the making of this film.
But it's easy to be for Injuns and trees and against the CIA. In Wyatt Earp, Cost- ner finds himself playing a fellow who, to some, is a hero and, to others, a revenge junkie, and can't decide which is the line to take. From its overblown symphonic score, this is an incredibly portentous movie, eager to be as solid and even as the two halves of Costner's droopy moustache. Instead, it's even droopier. I see his pro- duction of Rapa Nui, filmed on Easter Island, has been accused of exploiting the natives and causing increased alcoholism among them. Perhaps they should have shot the Meg Ryan movie there.
Previous page
