Cinema
American Buffalo (15, selected cinemas) Kansas City (15, selected cinemas)
A script in search of a film
Mark Steyn
Here's an old gag, best done in a Cockney, Brummie or possibly Aussie accent: What's the difference between a buffalo and a bison? You can't wash your hands in a buffalo. This gag floated into the back of my mind about halfway through the first of this week's films. You can't wash your hands in American Buffalo: as a film, it's dry, arid, airless, dusty, parched, to the point where the cramped set seems to be visibly flaking. As it goes on, it resembles one of those stock torture scenes in action adventures, where the hero's trapped in a room whose ceiling, floor and walls are closing in on him. The close-ups never let up: the camera's virtually flattening the actors' nostrils, and the only surprise is that no one punches through the lens and grate- fully gulps down the fresh air.
We are in that murky territory some- where between stage and screen, where the producers are so keen to make a film of a good play that they've forgotten to make a good film. David Mamet's expletive-explo- sive drama was a New York hit in 1975 and has been frequently revived since. Set in a junk shop, it's nominally about the theft of the eponymous and extremely rare buffalo- head nickel. But, of course, its main con- cerns are the usual Mamet ones: friendship, betrayal and the all-American hustle. The playwright himself adapted the script, and, awed by his presence, no one else seems to have adapted anything. I mis- read the credits and thought it said 'Direct- ed by Michael Corleone', which would have been fun. But, instead, it's Michael Cor- rente, whose reverence for the source material is such that he might as well be He sues Greyfriars for not stopping the ragging.' photographing the typescript. There's one set, though occasionally he cuts to an empty, decrepit city street with nobody in sight; and there are three characters — the junk-shop owner, his pal and a young kid who wants to be let in on the action, though, actually, there's no action to be let in on: except for a burst at the end, all they do is talk.
No doubt Corrente wanted to avoid the banal 'opening up' that's Hollywood's stock response to theatrical material — see About Last Night . . . , a conventional brat- pack romance with Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Elizabeth Perkins and James Belushi which shows not a trace of having ever been anywhere near David Mamet. By con- trast, Corrente, you assume, was aiming to duplicate the intensity of a stage perfor- mance. But, if so, he's got the wrong cast. The model in this field is Louis Malle's amazing Vanya on 42nd Street, in which a bunch of actors in mufti in an abandoned theatre do an entire Chekhov play sitting around a table, and it's gripping. The per- formances, though, are fluid, relaxed and without guile. Here, Corrente has Dennis Franz as the junk-shop man and Dustin Hoffman as the friend. Franz, from NYPD Blue, is concerned to show us that he knows he's in a heavyweight drama and so 'drags his small-time disillusionment around like a ball and chain; Hoffman, as usual, makes a meal of everything, has a zillion tiny obtrusive details, but makes his charac- ter's treachery boringly transparent. The best performance comes from Sean Nelson as the 15-year-old would-be accomplice.
Mamet's ear for bewildered macho observations is still on the money, but on screen it comes off flat. Perhaps it's that all that tough-guy patter has since been appro- priated by Quentin and the Taranteeny- boppers and oomphed up in post-modern rock video style. Unfair but there it is.
If Buffalo's a script in search of a film, Kansas City is a terrific incidental score in search of a drama to be incidental to. Robert Altman's latest is a jazzy valentine to Kansas City in the Thirties, when he was growing up there. It's increasingly clear that Short Cuts was a fluke return to form for Altman, deriving in large part from the Carver short stories on which it was based: you'd think, granted his notorious con- tempt for writers, that this might have occurred to him by now. But, no, here he goes again, with a generic plot in which a cranky blond called Blondie discovers that a local gangster called Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte) has kidnapped her husband and so in retaliation she kidnaps a politician's wife. Blondie then drags her and the usual massed ranks of Altman sub-plots around the city for a couple of hours. Jennifer Jason Leigh and our own Miranda Richardson make the second worst double- act of the week, pouting and sulking, twitching and scowling like a synchronised swimming team with PMT. Skip the movie, buy the album.
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