Cinema
Scrooged (PG', selected cinemas) High Spirits ('15', Odeon West End, Leicester Square)
A child is bored
Hilary Mantel
0 nce again it's time to put the holly- sprigged boot into the festive releases. Why must the films be so bad and boring at Christmas? If you go to the cinema week by week through the year, and especially to one of the shiny new multi-screens that have taken over in provincial towns, you form the impression that most people in the audience are in their late teens or early twenties; and from time to time the middle-aged totter forth, in the hope of catching something intelligent. But when December comes, the distributors seem to wish to discourage their year-round audi- ence. There is no point in going to the cinema unless you have or can arrange to borrow a child, because there is nothing new or worthwhile for you to see.
Last December was better; there was the worthy but very watchable Little Dorrit, and there was Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were Here, a film that was at least worth the effort of loathing. This year there's only trivia; yet January will see crowded schedules, too many releases for the public to take in. It's hard to imagine why the cinema year is organised like this, unless the distributors think that at Christmas the critics will be too inebriated to pay atten- tion to anything worthwhile.
High Spirits is directed by Neil Jordan, who made Angel, Mona Lisa and that damply dispiriting fantasy The Company of Wolves; but the only originality here lies in the special effects. Peter O'Toole and a baggy grey cardigan play Plunkett of Plunkett Castle, a crumbling Irish pile which is mortgaged to ruthless American Jim Brogan. Plunkett has turned the castle into a hotel, and has a loyal staff of animated Irish jokes. He hits upon the idea of pretending that the castle is haunted, to attract tourists, so his staff are pressed into 'I've just been positively vetted.' service as casual harpists, banshees and so on. To the castle come a fresh-faced all-American boy called Jack (Steve Gut- tenberg); his lovely but frigid Valium- addict wife Sharon (Beverly D'Angelo); Brother Tony (Peter Gallagher), a semina- rian about to take his final vows; a simper- ing air-head called Miranda (Jennifer Til- ly), for whom the seminarian will develop a passion; a sceptical parapsychologist, his wife, and assorted all-American brats. You will appreciate that to assemble all these people and get a plot underway needs no little painful contrivance.
Plunkett's carelessly arranged hauntings are a shambles, but then out of the cobwebbed shadows come the castle's real ghosts, Martin Brogan (Liam Neeson) and Mary Plunkett (Daryl Hannah). Martin murdered Mary on their wedding night, and the event has been re-enacted nightly for 200 years; the Americans blunder in and break the spell, and the dead fall in love with the living. It might be chilling, but is merely feeble. Daryl Hannah in particular is an unconvincing ghost. Perhaps her bones are too big, or perhaps it is that she always looks as if she has just fallen off a surf-board, and is trying to formulate a sentence to explain the event. The humour drifts uneasily between slap- stick and sitcom, and the sex scenes, which manage to be both coy and crude, have earned the film a '15' certificate, thus excluding the age-group most likely to enjoy it.
At least High Spirits has a desperate energy which is missing from Scrooged. Bill Murray plays Frank Cross, president of New York's IBC television. The net- work's plastic and sentimental Scrooge is the highlight of its Christmas program- ming; Frank himself is a sour misanthrope, monstrously selfish and miserly. As Christ- mas approaches, he sacks a whimpering employee, persecutes his underpaid black secretary, is mean to his only brother and cruel to his ex-girlfriend. A variety of gruesome and noisy ghosts come along to sort him out, and enlighten him about the true meaning of Christmas.
The film has no bite; of course, no heavyweight satire is intended, and there are some funny one-liners. But it's a long time between jokes. A lively central per- formance would have helped to carry it off, but Bill Murray's teeth seem to be stuck together with chewing gum, and judging by his anguished expression when he has to deliver a final on-camera homily to the surprised viewers, he probably wishes they were completely sealed. Only Carol Kane sparkles briefly, as a Sugar Plum Fairy with a penchant for violence. Long before the merciful end, this incoherent enterprise has granted seasonal indulgence to the very crassness it tries to parody. Don't go to see it unless you have to; stay at home and do something exciting, like making paper chains, or creating a Dozen Delicious Dishes with those Dull Turkey Left-overs.
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