All white male patriarchs must be guilty of something in modern women’s fiction, preferably the sexual abuse of their children, and I was not surprised to find out that Larry visited the bedrooms of Rose and Ginny. Rose describes the visits in lurid detail, but Ginny cannot remember, although they took place as late as her sixteenth year; her memory lapse, I think, serves to prolong the breathless scenes of description. (“Daddy might be a drinker and a rager,” Ginny says, “but he goes to church!”) The youngest daughter was apparently not molested, maybe because (in the movie’s laborious Lear parallels) she was the most favored.
Among the other subjects dutifully ticked off are a husband’s rejection of his wife after she has a mastectomy; a woman who has five miscarriages because no one told her the local drinking water was poisoned with pesticides; the alcoholism of the father and one of the husbands; the inadequate sexual performance of both husbands; the betrayal of Rose and Ginny by a handsome neighbor man (Colin Firth), who is such a cad he sleeps with both of them but only tells one about the other; and a man who buys a tractor that is three times bigger than he needs—a clear case of phallic compensation. Toward the end we get the tragedy of Alzheimer’s, the heartlessness of banks, the problem of unnecessary lawsuits, and the obligatory “giant agricultural conglomerate.”
All of these subjects are valid and promising and could be well handled in a better movie. In A Thousand Acres, alas, they seem like items on a checklist. The movie is so distracted by both the issues and the Lear parallels that the characters bolt from one knee-jerk situation to the next.
Then there is the problem of where to place our sympathy. In King Lear, of course, we love Lear and his daughter Cordelia, and hate the two older sisters and their husbands. In A Thousand Acres it cannot be permitted for a man to be loved or a woman to be hated, and so we have the curious spectacle of the two older sisters being portrayed as somehow favorably unfavorable, while the youngest, by eventually siding with her father, becomes a study in tortured plotting: She is good because a woman, suspect because a lawyer, bad because she sues the others, forgiven because her father evolves from monstrous to merely pathetic. Many of the closing scenes are set in a courtroom, providing the curious experience of a movie legal case in which the audience neither understands the issues nor cares which side wins.
The movie is narrated by Ginny, the Lange character, apparently in an effort to impose a point of view where none exists. But why Ginny? Is she better than the others? At the end of the film she intones, in a solemn voice-over, “I’ve often thought that the death of a parent is the one misfortune for which there is no compensation.” Say what? She doesn’t remember her mother and is more than reconciled to the death of a father who (thanks to recovered memory) she now knows molested her. What compensation could she hope for, short of stealing him from his deathbed to hang him on a gallows?
A Thousand Acres is so misconceived it should almost be seen just to appreciate the winding road it travels through sexual politics. Many of the individual scenes are well acted (Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange are luminous in their three most important scenes together). But the film substitutes prejudices for ideas, formula feminism for character studies, and a signposted plot for a well-told story. The screenplay is based on a novel by Jane Smiley, unread by me, which won the Pulitzer Prize—which means that either the novel or the prize has been done a great injustice.
Three to Tango
(Directed by Damon Santostefano; starring Neve Campbell, Matthew Perry; 1999)
Neve Campbell is amazingly cute. I have admired her in other movies, but now, in Three to Tango, which gave me nothing else to think about, I was free to observe her intently. She has wide, intelligent eyes, kissable lips, and a face both sweet and carnal, like Doris Day’s. I support her decision to never wear any garment that comes within a foot of her neck.
In Three to Tango she is mired in a plot of such stupidity that there is only one thing to do, and that is to look at her. In her more erotic moments she twinkles with enjoyment at her own naughtiness; consider a scene where she slithers in a bubble bath and describes a lesbian flirtation with her Brazilian roommate in college. She’s having as much fun with this dialogue as we are.
She’s telling the story to a character named Oscar (Matthew Perry), who she thinks is gay. It’s all a misunderstanding. Oscar and his business partner Peter (Oliver Platt), who is gay, are architects who desperately need a $90 million commission from a rich Chicago builder (Dylan McDermott). The builder is a married man and the Neve Campbell character, named Amy, is his mistress. He assigns Oscar to “keep an eye” on Amy, assuming that Oscar is safe because gay.
Why does everyone think Oscar is gay? Because this is an Idiot Plot, in which no one ever says what obviously must be said to clear up the confusion. That’s because they want that commission. We see a model for their $90 million project, which resembles the Lincoln Park Conservatory in the eighth month of its pregnancy.
Of course Oscar and Amy fall in love. And what a Meet Cute they have! On their first evening together, they go out for the evening, their taxi explodes (yes, explodes), and they run in the rain and wade in the mud and find a restaurant where they eat tuna melts that make them sick, and they run outside and hurl. This is the Meet Cute as Meet Puke. And on the same date she manages to cause Oscar incredible pain with a sharp door handle to his netherlands. No movie like this is complete without male pattern bruising.
Only about a week after first being considered gay, Oscar is named Gay Man of the Year. It’s like they’re waiting outside the closet with his trophy. He can’t decline the honor because he wants the commission. But then, at the awards banquet, a door in the back opens and Amy walks in. (This is the old Dramatic Late-Arriving Person Who Means Everything to the Speaker Ploy.) Looking into her wide, intelligent eyes, cunningly placed eighteen inches above her wide, intelligent breasts, Oscar blurts out the truth: “I am not gay!” Then we hear the Slowly Gathering Ovation (one brave man stands up and starts to clap slowly, others follow, applause builds to crescendo).
I was wondering how easily the Gay Man of the Year could get a standing ovation for announcing at the awards banquet that he was not gay, but my question was answered in the end credits. Although skyline shots and one early scene create the impression that the movie was made in Chicago, it was actually shot in Toronto. Those Canadians are just so doggone supportive.
This review would not be complete without mention of a scene where Oscar grows distraught and runs through the streets of Chinatown. As he approaches the camera, several Peking ducks, or maybe they are only chickens, are thrown at him from offscreen. Why? Why, indeed. Why, oh why.
Tidal Wave
(Director uncredited; starring Andrew Meyer; 1975)
Bad movies are really getting awful these days. It seems like only yesterday we were savoring bombs like The Vengeance of She and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster—movies so terrible they achieved a sort of greatness. Movies in which there were lines like “I have waited 3,000 years for this day” and newspaper reporters who let their voices trail off at the end of declarations like: “But, doctor, if your predictions are correct, this means the end of civilization on Earth. . . .”