Cinema
It's A Wonderful Life! (U, selected cinemas) The Myth of Fingerprints (15, selected cinemas) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (12, selected cinemas) Lawn Dogs (15, selected cinemas)
That's life, or is it?
Mark Steyn
Iseem to be the only guy around — at least among Her Majesty's subjects — who finds Frank Capra's view of small-town America in Its A Wonderful Life! insuffi- ciently rosy. I'm not particularly partial to upstate New York, but, in letting Capra's Bedford Falls dominate their image, they're getting a bum deal. Even discount- ing the suicides, chisellers, whiners and floozies, the Bedford burghers are almost to a man cramped and joyless — a long way from the taciturn stoicism of most upstate citizens. You can't blame Jimmy Stewart for wanting to leave — and even Capra's happy ending seems more like sur- render. We wouldn't have needed so much `Capra-corn', so much life-affirming warmth, if the director had only been a bit more life-observant, of the colours and rhythms of real small-town America.
He's not the only director to make this mistake, of course. Consider Bart Fre- undlich and. The Myth of Fingerprints, yet another dysfunctional family film in which, a picture-postcard New England clapboard house plays host to a bunch of sour, hostile, unlikeable relations gathered for Thanks- giving. I yield to no one in my sour, hostile, alienated dysfunctionalism, but I wouldn't mind a cheerier view of a family Thanksgiv- ing, if only for variety's sake. If there's any truth to Tolstoy's line about every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way, Holly- wood doesn't seem keen to let us see it: films like this and Jodie Foster's Home for the Holidays peddle a dreary production- line dysfunctionalism that leaves old-time back-porch picket-fence fare like Young at Heart looking courageous by comparison.
Currently, the best account of modern American living comes in a British film, Lawn Dogs. This is even more impressive when you consider the difficulty British directors have in skewering their own cul- ture. It would be hard, for example, to make a more comprehensive screw-up than Robert Bierman does of Keep the Aspidistra Flying — George Orwell's account of a Thirties ad man who forsakes the glib cer- tainties of commercial copywriting to strug- gle as a poet in the slums of Lambeth. Despite the best efforts of Richard E. Grant, the film manages to miss every one of Orwell's points — and, indeed, winds up as little more than one big 1930s commer- cial itself: Quality Street exteriors, Ovaltine interiors, Lyons' Corner House dialogue CI want to kiss you.' I'd rather have a cup of tea'). Ghastly.
By contrast, the producer Duncan (Four Weddings and a . . .) Kenworthy and direc- tor John Duigan have decamped to Ameri- ca and managed a haunting dissection of one of the most dispiriting trends in the more prosperous parts of the south and west of the great republic: the 'gated com- munity'. The first gated community I came across was in a town called, seasonally enough, Santa Claus, in Indiana, on a visit to their annual Christmas festival, when the homes and gardens of Candy Cane Lane, Mistletoe Drive, Rudolph Road and sur- rounding thoroughfares are festooned in spectacular lights. Not until I got there did realise that what's left of the old Santa Claus town is little more than a windswept shopping plaza and a flaking giant-sized Santa statue: Candy Cane Lane et al. are tucked away in a 'secure community' behind manned gates. The awful deadness of such a world is brilliantly caught in Lawn Dogs.
Duigan's film is set in Camelot Gardens, which offers manicured lawns as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, as every execu- tive dwelling belongs to an upper-income professional, there's no one in Camelot Gardens who actually knows how to mani- cure a lawn. So, instead, they're serviced by muscular mower man Trent (Sam Rock- well), who lives in a rusting trailer in the woods, part of the wild world beyond the gates. Trent has to get permission from the security chief to remain within this subur- ban fortress after 5 p.m.; the little girl he befriends, on the other hand, can't wait to bust out. Devon (Mischa Barton) is a ten- year-old with a heart murmur and a father who wants her to have plastic surgery because her chest scar gives him the creeps. The directorial hand is occasionally a mite intrusive: when Trent takes Devon to his parents' rundown trailer park, we see the kids frolicking gaily through the streets, in heavily underlined contrast to the lonely cul-de-sacs of Camelot; in my experience
trailer parks have just as much festering social isolation as anywhere else. Nor is the last five minutes entirely persuasive. And what's the title mean? Lawn Dogs has a lawn in it, and a dog, but its immediate effect is to lead you to expect a Quentin Tarantino parody set in Pinner. But other- wise Duigan and a superb cast have created a true and compelling portrait of a so- called 'secure community' which proves instead to be imprisoned by its own para- noia. A gem.
Back in 1984, another British director, Sally Potter, made her first feature, a femi- nist fiasco called The Gold Diggers. Her lat- est is more like a post-modern Gold Diggers of 1933. Instead of Ginger Rogers or Joan Blonde11, The Tango Lesson, written and directed by Sally Potter, stars Sally Potter as a film director called Sally Potter who takes tango lessons in Paris from a young Argentinian whom she plans to star in a film with Sally Potter. The ideal audience — possibly the only audience — for The Tango Lesson is . . Sadly Potter.
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