Most of the movie takes place at an expensive resort, where she goes to await the arrival of her husband (Henry Fonda). She hasn’t told him about the face-lift: “At first,” she says, “I didn’t say anything because I was afraid it would seem like a silly thing to have done.” A pause, and then: “Now my only regret is that I didn’t do it years ago.” Her husband is delayed in Washington on “business,” which is part business and partly an affair he’s having with a girl younger than their daughter. Taylor carries on a flirtation with Helmut Berger, mostly to test her new attractiveness, and eventually they make love. The fact that this affair takes about half an hour to develop, and requires yards of schmaltzy Maurice Jarre music to consummate, adds little to its interest.
The whole movie, indeed, feels longer than it is. It’s fifteen minutes short of two hours, and still it takes forever to be over. The problem is that not enough happens; she waits at the resort, she drinks, she eats, she meets her daughter for a tearful lunch, she talks with a friendly fashion photographer, she waits, she has the affair, she waits, sighs, telephones, looks at herself, and models the Edith Head wardrobe. It’s all so slight.
And yet, as I suggested, the movie may interest some audiences. Stars of Elizabeth Taylor’s magnitude lead lives so public and famous that the details of their beauty become important to millions of people. Has she really had a face-lift? Does she need one? It’s that kind of off-screen gossip that gives Ash Wednesday a sort of separate reality. The movie’s story is not really very interesting, but we’re intrigued because the star is Taylor. Weak as the role is, she was nevertheless just about the inevitable choice to play it. The unofficial crown for most beautiful woman in the world gets passed around a lot; one year it’s Ursula Andress, then it’s Candice Bergen, then Catherine Deneuve. But Taylor has won it so many times she ought to get possession. She’s forty or forty-one now, and she looks great. There’s a kind of voyeuristic sensuality in watching her look at herself in the mirror (which she spends no end of time doing). If you’re Elizabeth Taylor, it’s not vain to appraise your beauty, just as if someone’s really after you, you’re not paranoid. Maybe the fundamental problem with the movie is that we can’t quite believe any man would leave Elizabeth Taylor. It’s a good thing we never see Henry Fonda’s bimbo, because if we did, we wouldn’t be convinced. It’s the same problem that sunk Ryan’s Daughter: What woman would leave Robert Mitchum for . . . Christopher Jones? And the final confrontation between Taylor and Fonda is stiff and unconvincing; the movie has really been about the woman, not about the marriage, and Fonda doesn’t so much interact with her as recite an announcement of termination. We can’t buy it.
The movie’s title was inspired, I guess, by the Catholic practice of wearing a smudge of ash on your face on Ash Wednesday as a reminder of man’s inescapable mortality. In Taylor’s case, however, mortality has at least temporarily been held at bay. For that, we can all be thankful—and she, I imagine, most of all.
Assassins
(Directed by Richard Donner; starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore; 1995)
I know how to believe stuff when it happens in the movies. I believe bicycles can fly. I believe sharks can eat boats. I even believe pigs can talk. But I do not believe Assassins, because this movie is filled with such preposterous impossibilities that Forrest Gump could have improved it with a quick rewrite.
The movie stars Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas as professional hit men. They haven’t met when the movie opens, but they receive their orders on matching laptops (the kind where you just put one hand on the keyboard and rattle it in one place, and words get perfectly typed). Stallone is sent to kill a guy at a funeral, and is startled when somebody else does the job.
It is Banderas, hiding behind a nearby tombstone, and he’s soon captured by the police—only to escape and get into a taxi that Stallone has stolen, in order to pick him up and find out who he is. (Stallone’s own brilliant plan for the hit was to conceal a weapon in a cast on his arm and mingle with the mourners. His getaway plan was not explained.) The men are soon shooting at one another, for reasons that are explained without the explanations explaining anything, if you get my drift.
Soon the two men find themselves once again working on the same case and competing for the same prize—a $2 million reward for a stolen computer disk. The disk is in the possession of a woman named Electra (Julianne Moore), a cat fancier and computer whiz who has set up an elaborate scheme for exchanging the disk with some Dutch bad guys. (She has a radio-controlled toy truck in a hotel air shaft . . . but never mind.) Once again, Stallone and Banderas leave bodies littered all over the hotel, and then, as the reward is raised to $20 million, they find themselves in Mexico for a final showdown.
What follows is a *Spoiler,* so please stop reading if through some insane impulse you are compelled to see this movie. The endless last sequence of the film (which is very long and very slow) involves a situation where Stallone plans to enter a bank, collect $20 million in cash, and leave, and Banderas plans to shoot him from the window of the ancient abandoned hotel across the street. But Stallone knows that Banderas will do that, and enlists Electra in a plan to sit in a café and radio him updates.
He knows (for reasons buried in the past) that Banderas will eventually grow impatient while waiting, and after six or seven hours will be compelled to go into the bank to see if Stallone is still there. And Banderas will of course have to leave his guns outside. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happens; the two men nod and chat a little, Banderas goes back outside and returns to his sniping post in the crumbling hotel, and Stallone collects the money and goes outside to be shot.
Say what? Well, there’s some kind of a cockeyed plan in which Electra is supposed to sneak into the hotel while Banderas is in the bank, and snatch his rifle. But this hotel is really crumbling, and she falls through the floor. It is the first of many times in which several characters fall through so many floors it is a wonder the hotel is standing at all. And so when Stallone emerges from the bank, Banderas is in the window with the rifle aimed at him, and what does Stallone do? Duck for cover? No, he turns to accept his fate, or whatever, but then is saved through a unique application of the Fallacy of the Talking Killer. That is of course the old movie ploy where the killer talks instead of shooting. This is the first time I can remember where the killer is talking to himself.
There were many, many moments in this movie that left me puzzled. One of them involves the movie’s key shooting. When you see it, you will know which one I mean, and you may find yourself, as I did, puzzled about how it happened. The mechanics of it seem to violate the laws of logic, not to mention physics.
Other problems in the movie: (1) How, when a guy is hanging outside the window of a cab and you crash it against the side of a bus, can he avoid being hurt? (2) If you hold a table up in front of you, will it really save you after a gas explosion blows you out of a third-floor window? (3) If you were holding a briefcase containing a bomb, would you throw it out of the car window, or hold it until you could drive down an alley and place it in a convenient Dumpster? (4) If you knew a sniper was waiting for you to emerge from the front door of a bank, would it occur to you to leave through the back, sneak up on the guy, and kill him—rather than depending on a ditzy computer nerd who says she’s unable to shoot anyone? (5) Would you question the political and history credentials of a man who tells you he had to fake his death in 1980 because “the cold war was ending?”