Here’s another one of those movies where a Caribbean voodoo cult wants to practice a blood sacrifice using the child of a Manhattan psychiatrist. Can’t they think of anything new to make a movie about? I’m getting tired of the dingy tenements in Spanish Harlem with the blood-soaked chicken feathers on the floor, and the scenes where the shrink realizes he needs a witch doctor to save his child.
Most religious movies are about peace and love and friendship, and how one day all of humanity is going to hold hands and be brother and sister. Movies about Caribbean religions are always about guys with blank eyes who stare at you for ten seconds and you’re volunteering to wring the chickens’ necks yourself.
I am as ignorant as most people on the facts about such religions, including the ancient Cuban cult in The Believers, which keeps its diabolical gods a secret by disguising them as Catholic saints. I would like to imagine that most Caribbean religions, like most religions everywhere, are a comfort to their believers, and hold up a prospect of a saner, more joyous life.
I would like to believe that, but the movies give me little reason to. Every voodoo movie ever made has depicted bloodthirsty cults of savagely sadistic murderers, vengefully thirsting for innocent blood. There has been a lot in the papers recently about “Arab-bashing,” the practice of creating strongly negative stereotypes of Arabs on TV and in the movies. I’m in agreement. But what about voodoo-bashing? Isn’t it just as prejudicial?
In The Believers, which is an awesomely half-witted movie, Martin Sheen plays a psychiatrist whose wife is electrocuted by touching the coffeemaker while standing barefoot in a pool of spilled milk. This event has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story. It’s simply a pretitle sequence. So much for the wife.
After Sheen and his young son start anew in Manhattan, they attract the attention of a Cuban cult that sacrifices children in order to gain all sorts of fringe benefits, such as success, a better mental attitude, and so on. Sheen has these benefits explained to him by an old friend who secretly is a convert, but demurs at the opportunity of sacrificing his own child.
Meanwhile, he has a tempestuous pre–AIDS-era affair with his gorgeous landlady (Helen Shaver), while a police lieutenant (Robert Loggia) investigates a series of child killings. (One of Loggia’s big scenes involves missing his coffee cup with the little plastic container of cream, so that Sheen can stare at the puddle on the desk and have a flashback to his wife’s death.)
This is one of those movies that use the paraphernalia of expertise instead of the expertise itself. “Are you a Catholic?” people keep asking Sheen, who is, and there’s the implication that his church affiliation somehow will protect him or endanger him—it’s not clear which. There are lots of shots of ashes and blood and weird little voodoo charms, but no real explanations of what’s going on—possibly because it doesn’t matter. The Believers should be ashamed of itself.
Ben
(Directed by Phil Karlson; starring Joseph Campanella, Meredith Baxter; 1972)
I wonder how Ben learned English. I seem to recall from Willard, last summer’s big rat movie, that Willard trained Ben to heel, beg, roll over, play dead, and sic Ernest Borgnine. Not bad for a rat. But when did Ben learn English? It takes Berlitz six weeks of intensive training to get a French businessman to the point where he can proposition an American girl, and here’s Ben learning instinctively.
Ben also talks in his new movie. It’s hard to understand what he says, however, because all he does is squeak in various octaves. He sounds like Rubber Ducky being goosed. The movie’s hero is Danny, an eight-year-old with a heart condition. Danny loves Ben. Danny apparently understands Rubber Ducky talk, too, maybe because he’s a graduate of Sesame Street. Do you ever get the feeling that when Earth is finally conquered, it won’t be by rats but by tiny, beady-eyed, preschool superintelligences who attack us with nuclear alphabets?
Ben and his friends head for the sewers and plan their assault on mankind. This involves being thrown through the air by invisible animal trainers, so that they land onscreen and scare hell out of sewer workers. Everyone knows this is nonsense. If Art Carney could go down in the sewers day after day and fearlessly face alligators, what’s a few rats?
Doesn’t matter, though. This isn’t a thriller but a geek movie. In a thriller, we’re supposed to be scared by some awesome menace to mankind—the Green Blob maybe, or Bigfoot, or the Invincible Squid and his implacable enemy, red wine sauce. But in a geek movie, the whole idea is to be disgusted because the actors have rats all over them.
You know what a geek is, or at least you do if you grew up near a county fairgrounds like I did. He’s the guy who bites the head off a living chicken. I used to hate the geek show, but I sat through it manfully because that was a test of your courage. If you passed it, you got to pay the extra quarter and see the lady who was tattooed all over. Also the Half-Man, Half-Woman, who, to my intense disappointment, turned out to be the wrong half of each.
Besieged
(Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci; starring Thandie Newton, David Thewlis; 1999)
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie about whether two people with nothing in common, who have no meaningful conversations, will have sex—even if that means dismissing everything we have learned about the woman. It is also about whether we will see her breasts. How can a director of such sophistication, in a film of such stylistic grace, tell such a shallow and evasive story?
But wait. The film also involves race, politics, and culture, and reduces them all to convenient plot points. The social values in this movie would not have been surprising in a film made forty years ago, but to see them seriously proposed today is astonishing. In a hasty moment I described the film as “racist,” but it is not that so much as thoughtless, and lacking in all empathy for its African characters, whose real feelings are at the mercy of the plot’s sexual desires.
The film opens in Africa, with an old singer chanting a dirge under a tree. We see crippled children. A teacher in a schoolroom tries to lead his students, but troops burst in and drag him away. The young African woman Shandurai (Thandie Newton) sees this. The teacher is her husband. She wets herself. So much for the setup. The husband will never be given any weight or dimension.
Cut to Rome, where Shandurai is a medical student, employed as a maid in the house of Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis). He will always remain “Mr. Kinsky” to her, even in a love note. He is a sardonic genius who plays beautifully upon the piano, and occupies a vast apartment given him by his aunt and hung with rich tapestries and works of art. Given the size and location of the apartment she was a very rich aunt indeed. The maid’s quarters are spacious enough for a boutique, and Mr. Kinsky’s rooms are reached by a spiral staircase to three or four levels.
Thandie Newton is a beautiful woman. She is photographed by Bertolucci in ways that make her beauty the subject of the shots. There’s a soft-core undertone here: She does housework, the upper curves of her breasts swelling above her blouse. Little wisps of sweaty hair fall down in front of those wonderful eyes. There is a montage where she vacuums and Mr. Kinsky plays—a duet for piano and Hoover.
It is a big house for two people, very silent, and they move around it like stalkers. One day she drops a cleaning rag down the spiral staircase and it lands on Mr. Kinsky’s head. He looks up. She looks down. Mr. Kinsky decides he loves her. There is a struggle. “Marry me! I’ll do anything to make you love me!” She throws him a curve: “You get my husband out of jail!”