Cinema
Female bonding
Mark Steyn
Summer is meant to be the time for all- action blockbusters in which hunky guys blow away large numbers of extras. This year, for some reason, there's been an epi- demic of chicks' pics, in which women sit around bonding with each other at length. Most of these female-bonding movies recognise that even sensitive women get sick of watching sensitive women sit around sharing their feelings for a couple of hours, so to break up the talking they usually fall back on flashbacks: Now and Then has them, so does How to Make an American Quilt — although in the latter the integrity of the female-bonding aesthetic is pre- served by making the flashbacks as inactive as possible, save for a few shots of crows flying in a metaphorical sort of way. Moon- light and Valentino goes even further: there are no flashbacks at all. Gradually, it dawns on you that you're going to be stuck in a room with these characters for as long as it takes. By the time you get to the scene where the poetry professor and the potter are arguing about who's the most self- absorbed, you may be wondering if it isn't a brilliant parody of the genre. Rebecca (Elizabeth Perkins), the poetic one, begins the picture by discovering that her husband has been killed by a car while out jogging. She seeks comfort from her best pal, her sister and her ex-stepmother. It's a condition of these films that the friends have to represent the divergent paths of womanhood — so divergent that you can't see why on earth they'd be friends in the first place. American Quilt has a lonely widow, a spirited bohemian, a frustrated housewife, all members of the same quilting circle. In Moonlight and Valentino, the pal is a married woman drift- ing towards divorce; the kid sister Lucy is a confused bohemian virgin, played by Gwyneth Paltrow; and the ex-stepmom, a severely suited and cropped Kathleen Turner, is a hard-nosed executive divorcee with a ton of problems starting with her name, Alberta — which is a very large Canadian province, though not as large as Kathleen Turner these days. There is an unwritten rule with female-bonding films that one of the friends is black, that she's the solid, reliable rock among all the flaky white chicks, and that she's always played by Whoopi Goldberg. The exception is How to Make an American Quilt, where the Whoopi part has gone to Maya Angelou, who has the same hair. But otherwise, in Moonlight, Whoopi fulfills much the same function as she did in Boys on the Side, binding together the quarrelsome, neurotic sisters. How come she always has to be so wise and good? Why can't she be a sadistic lesbian serial killer for once?
It's not surprising this genre attracts the best actresses, when the alternative is being the helpless gal sidekick in a moronic thriller. But their faith in these pictures is misplaced. American Quilt seeks to make its subject a plausible metaphor — for the threads of our lives — but it can't even make it plausibly literal: it never convinc- ingly creates the assumed intimacy of real quilting bees. Moonlight's problem is its script by Ellen Simon, daughter of Neil. She has inherited her father's tendency to zig-zag nervously between quips and senti- mentality, and the result is too talky, too stilted for even as persuasive an actress as Elizabeth Perkins to pull off. Every line seems to have been weighted and mea- sured, as when her dad says of her late mom: 'I miss her most on my birthdays. And weddings. And whenever I eat ice- cream.' Ice-cream is too crudely manipula- tive an image.
Most of these films are shot in autumnal hues. Thus, Jocelyn Moorhouse's American Quilt is almost wholly beige. But, among the autumnal performances of Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft, Jean Simmons et al, there is the luminous presence of Winona Ryder as the young student seek- ing counsel in love from the older women. Moonlight could use someone like that. If American Quilt is beige, Moonlight is a study in grey. Director David Anspaugh, a lone male on a female team, has been paralysed into using only tasteful muted tones. Rebecca's clothes are grey, her win- dow trim is grey, her front door is grey, her picket fence is grey, her car is grey and so's the upholstery, her lipstick is grey, the chairs in her classroom are grey, even the toy dog with the nodding head on a street vendor's gift stand is grey. The colour scheme advertises the film's sober purpose, and immediately undermines it: for how can anything so crassly over-designed be real?
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