Cinema
The Piano ('15', selected cinemas) Rising Sun ('18', selected cinemas)
Pulling faces
Mark Steyn
Harvey Keitel's name appears before the title so often these days you'd be forgiv- en for thinking he works for the British Board of Film Classification. So far this month, we've had The Young Americans, now Rising Sun and The Piano. As these pictures were filmed in, respectively, Lon- don, Los Angeles and rural New Zealand, a rough calculation of the travel time sug- gests that, although Keitel releases a film per week, he can't possibly spare them seven days apiece.
The opening of The Young Americans is surely autobiographical: Keitel, flying Vir- gin from LA to Heathrow, is watching Jack Warner in The Blue Lamp flickering away in monochrome on his personal video mon- itor, as if an in-flight crash course in native culture is all the time he can spare for his British film debut. Naturally, his face is impassive. 'What's Harvey thinking?' you wonder. Odds are Harvey's thinking: limm. If I can rattle this scene off before lunch, I can make the early flight back to LA and fit in a quick cameo on the new Sean Connery'.
As for the face, it's mostly defined by the company it's keeping. In The Young Ameri- cans, surrounded by fat, pink, sweaty, unbuttoned, bent British coppers who look literally porcine, Keitel's kisser comes over like that of a second-division Hollywood leading man with a few blemishes the plas- tic surgeon hasn't yet got to. In Rising Sun, he plays third fiddle to fellow LAPD men Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes. Now it's Keitel who's the pig — fat, pink, sweaty, etc. In a business where 28-year-old pretty boys play the senior partners in law firms, we hail Keitel's face as raw blue-collar — which, in practical terms, means he screws up his eyes slightly and lets his lower lip and jaw jut out just a smidginette.
In Jane Campion's The Piano, he's face to face with Holly Hunter, the diminutive Georgia peach best known for Broadcast News but cast here as a mid-19th-century pallid Scots mute shipped out to a hut in the middle of a New Zealand bog for an arranged marriage. With nary a thing to say except for an eventual orgasmic whimper, Miss Hunter is left with no option but seri- ous face-acting, and there are moments when her idea of the role seems to be more or less Keitel in a bonnet; she even swipes his slightly jutting jaw routine. Her husband (Sam Neill) has swapped her piano for Keitel's land, but Keitel offers to sell it back to her, a key at a time, in return for an ascending scale of sexual favours. Whole scenes pass in his rude cabin with barely a sound, save for an occa- sional chromatic ripple on the keyboard: Hunter and Keitel sit in the gloom jutting jaws at each other but keeping their lips sealed — she because she's dumb, he because he wisely figures that his colonial English accent is best heard in small doses. It ought to be no contest: he has even daubed Maori symbols all over himself. But Keitel face-acts because the good Lord has given him few other choices, whereas Miss Hunter comes to the role fresh from play- ing a platinum blonde in The Firm, and Hollywood respects effort (place your Oscar bets now). It's no skin off Keitel's fleshy nose. His face may be his fortune, but on most out- ings he keeps his head down, invariably contriving to be the redeeming feature of .a disappointing picture. He's at it again in Rising Sun, Michael Crichton's tale of the Japanese march on corporate America blurred and hedged by Philip Kaufman into a so-what thriller. Sean Connery spends half the picture golfing, getting in some useful practice for this year's Bob Hope Pro-Celeb Classic; Wesley Snipes, the Sid- ney Poitier de nos fours, is only thereto deflect accusations of racism. Meanwhile, Keitel, chewing gum behind them, makes you feel he's what the picture ought to be about. He has a healthy contempt for faddy Oriental imports: declining sushi, he sneers that if he wanted mercury poisoning he'd eat a thermometer. But the battered xeno- phobe turns into just another Jap buy-out, and so, in an underwritten part in an inept film, his face pulls off its cutest trick yet; it is America.
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