Cinema
Dancing at Lughnasa (PG, selected cinemas) Twilight (15, selected cinemas)
Nothing doing
Mark Steyn
They won't dance, don't ask them. Or so, on behalf of her four dowdy younger sisters, older dowdier Kate Mundy has ruled. If you saw Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa on stage in the West End, you'll quickly gather that Pat O'Connor's film version is scrupulously faithful. On the other hand, you'll also wonder where the play went — all its life seems to have bled away, leaving an enervated drone. The usual problem, when a small English or Irish film feels the need to snag a Holly- wood bigshot, is that the star seems outsize for the picture, like an elephant squeezed into a Mini. The problem here is quite the opposite: Meryl Streep is eerily in tune with the film's production-line drabness, but her performance is all technique one more for the accent collection — and no acting.
It's 1936 in Catholic Ireland and Kate, as played by Miss Streep, is wedded to the proposition that life sucks and ain't that grand. When her younger sisters (Catherine McCormack, Sophie Thompson, Kathy Burke, Brid Brennan), weary of mooching about their dank hovel, gaze wistfully out of the window and murmur wistfully about how nice it might be to go to the local dance, Kate reacts as if they've just suggest- ed a bisexual bondage session with a couple of bishops. Energy in drama does not mean a lot of running around; you can have ener- gy in the stillest place. But O'Connor has made the mistake of thinking that you can only make a film about repressed emotions by making a repressed film.
Dancing at Lughnasa does, of course, work its way up to a big dance number, which in theory ought to be a life-affirming finale that sends us out exhilarated and uplifted. But the girls let rip and kick up their clogs with such instant abandon that it makes about as much a sense as Hedda Gabler bursting into 'I'm Just A Girl Who Cain't Say No'. Again, O'Connor misses the point: there can be enormous power in tentative, gradual surrender to dance look at the lead-in to the Merry Widow waltz, and a zillion other examples since. And, if he was trying to convey the liberat- ing properties of dance on humdrum lives, the transition worked a lot better in Step- ping Out.
Robert Benton's Twilight never quite explains its title, except insofar as, in ageist Hollywood, most of its cast are in the twi- light of their careers — Paul Newman, James Garner, Gene Hackman and, given Hollywood's attitude to women over 23, probably its younger female stars as well, Stockard Channing and Susan Sarandon. Youth is represented by the perky breasts of Reese Witherspoon, glimpsed early on as Newman, an ageing dick, lurks in a Mexican hotel room to nail Miss Witherspoon with her boyfriend and return her to her movie- star parents, Hackman and Sarandon. In the course of this humdrum engagement, the private eye winds up getting shot damn near the eye of his privates. When next we see him, it's two years later and he's retired, living over the garage at Hackman's place, a pleasant arrangement whose perks include Miss Sarandon skinny-dipping in the pool every morning. The only possible disrup- tions to this undemanding routine are Hackman's deteriorating health and a mys- terious death from deep in the past that returns to haunt Newman's friends.
The film — a reunion for Benton, New- man and their Nobody's Fool writer Richard Russo — just sort of luxuriates in its stars; the wry twinkle of Newman, the cool power of Hackman, the sultry opulence of Saran- don, the genial ease of Garner, the sexy street smarts of Channing. Newman. with help from Russo, is working out an old- timer's persona for himself: still blue-eyed, still sexy, but with a kind of self-deprecating weariness. The shallow cockiness of the youthful Newman has gone, but I'm not sure what's replaced it is much more per- suasive. When he plays a scene with the good-natured Garner, you can't help notic- ing that he has, as the television shrinks say, intimacy issues: the camera's intimacy is something he shies away from. Garner could make his 1970s Polaroid commercials with Mariette Hartley seem like master- pieces of compressed wit and character illu- mination, whereas Newman sometimes just seems like a slick commercial. Still, it seems churlish to keep a score card: Garner, Sarandon, Hackman and Channing slip into their roles effortlessly, and they blow most Hollywood casts out of the water.
But, enjoyable as it all is, after a while you begin to notice that nothing's hap- pened. The mystery about this film is that there's no mystery, no plot twist, no inge- nuity. And, in writing specifically for the screen rather than adapting one of his nov- els, Russo seems to have lost his touch: there's a lame gag about folks thinking Newman's had his pecker shot off that just goes nowhere, no matter how desperately the director underlines it with crass reac- tion shots. Benton is not the first director to try to cook up a contemporary film noir, but what a waste to assemble all this talent and then have nothing to give them.
Previous page
