“You’ve been very kind, Herr Gropius.”
“Dancing is one of the two things I do well.”
“And what is the other?”
“I am an architect.”
Since Alma already knows this, the movie misses a bet by not having her ask, winsomely, “Is there a … third … thing you at least do not do badly?”
There is. Another affair is with the sculptor and painter Oskar Kokoschka (Vincent Perez), who goes off to fight the war and is shot through the head and bayoneted after falling wounded. In what the movie presents as a dying vision, he imagines Alma walking toward him. Since his head is flat on the ground, she walks toward him sideways, rotated ninety degrees from upright. But, of course, a vision stands upright no matter what position one’s head is in, or dreams would take place on the ceiling.
Oskar’s mother posts herself outside Alma’s house with a pistol, seeking revenge for her son’s death. “I was never popular with mothers,” Alma sighs. She becomes involved with the writer Werfel. Just when we are wondering if Oskar’s mother is still lying in ambush outside the gates, Kokoschka himself returns a year later—alive!—and surprises her in her drawing room. “It’s not every man who is shot in the head, bayoneted, and lives to tell about it,” he observes. Then he sees she is pregnant and rejoices that she decided to have his baby after all, instead of an abortion. “But it has been a year,” Alma tells him. “Think, Oskar! A year.”
The penny falls. He stalks away, disgusted either at the fact that she is bearing another man’s child or that he cannot count. I meanwhile am thinking that when one is reported dead in action, it is only common good manners to wire ahead before turning up unexpectedly at a lover’s house. Ben Affleck makes the same mistake in Pearl Harbor.
Bride of the Wind was directed by Bruce Beresford, who has made wonderful films (Tender Mercies, Crimes of the Heart, The Fringe Dwellers, Driving Miss Daisy). At a loss to explain this lapse, I can only observe that another of his filmed biographies, King David (1985), was also very bad. Maybe there is something about a real-life subject that paralyzes him.
If Sarah Wynter is not good as Alma Mahler, the other actors seem equally uneasy—even the usually assured Pryce and Perez. Something must have been going wrong on this production. Even that doesn’t explain the lack of Bad Laugh Control. Filmmakers need a sixth sense for lines that might play the wrong way. For example:
After Alma has slept with as many Viennese artists as she can manage without actually double booking, she quarrels with the latest. Her winsome little daughter, Maria (Francesca Becker), whines, “Is he going to leave us? Are you going to send him away?” Alma replies, “What made you think that?” Wrong answer. At the end of the movie there are titles telling us what happened to everyone; Gropius moved to America and went on to become a famous architect, etc. We are not surprised to learn that little Maria went on to be married five times.
C
Cabin Fever
(DIRECTED BY ELI ROTH; STARRING RIDER STRONG, JORDAN LADD; 2003)
Unsure of whether it wants to be a horror film, a comedy, an homage, a satire or a parable, Cabin Fever tries to cover every base; it jumps around like kids on those arcade games where the target lights up and you have to stomp on it. It assembles the standard package of horror heroes and heroines (sexy girl, nice girl, stalwart guy, uncertain guy, drunk guy) and takes them off for a post-exam holiday in the woods where things get off to a bad start when a man covered with blood comes staggering out of the trees.
What they eventually figure out is that the man has some kind of disease—for which we could, I suppose, read AIDS or SARS—and it may be catching. When the nice girl (Jordan Ladd) comes down with the symptoms, they lock her in a shed, but before long they’re all threatened, and there is a scene where the sexy girl (Cerina Vincent) is shaving her legs in the bathtub and finds, eek, that she’s shaving a scab.
The film could develop its plague story in a serious way, like a George Romero picture or 28 Days Later, but it keeps breaking the mood with weird humor involving the locals. Everyone at the corner general store seems seriously demented, and the bearded old coot behind the counter seems like a racist (when at the end we discover that he isn’t, the payoff is more offensive than his original offense). There’s a deputy sheriff named Winston (Giuseppe Andrews) who is a seriously counterproductive character; the movie grinds to an incredulous halt every time he’s onscreen.
The drama mostly involves the characters locking the door against dogs, the locals, and each other; running into the woods in search of escape or help; trying to start the truck (which, like all vehicles in horror films, runs only when the plot requires it to) and having sex, lots of sex. The nature of the disease is inexplicable; it seems to involve enormous quantities of blood appearing on the surface of the skin without visible wounds, and then spreading in wholesale amounts to every nearby surface.
If some of this material had been harnessed and channeled into a disciplined screenplay with a goal in mind, the movie might have worked. But the director and coauthor, Eli Roth, is too clever for his own good, and impatiently switches between genres, tones, and intentions. There are truly horrible scenes (guy finds corpse in reservoir, falls onto it), over-the-top horrible scenes (dogs have eaten skin off good girl’s face, but she is still alive), and just plain inexplicable scenes (Dennis, the little boy at the general store, bites people). By the end, we’ve lost all interest. The movie adds up to a few good ideas and a lot of bad ones, wandering around in search of an organizing principle.
Catwoman
(DIRECTED BY PITOF; STARRING HATTE BERRY, BENJAMIN BRATT; 2004)
Catwoman is a movie about Halle Berry’s beauty, sex appeal, figure, eyes, lips, and costume design. It gets those right. Everything else is secondary, except for the plot, which is tertiary. What a letdown. The filmmakers have given great thought to photographing Berry, who looks fabulous, and little thought to providing her with a strong character, story, supporting characters, or action sequences. In a summer when Spider-Man 2 represents the state of the art, Catwoman is tired and dated.
Although the movie’s faults are many, the crucial one is that we never get any sense of what it feels like to turn into a catwoman. The strength of Spider-Man 2 is in the ambivalence that Peter Parker has about being part nerdy student, part superhero. In Catwoman, where are the scenes where a woman comes to grips with the fact that her entire nature and even her species seems to have changed?
Berry plays Patience Philips, a designer for an ad agency, who dies and is reborn after Midnight, a cat with ties to ancient Egypt, breathes new life into her. She becomes Catwoman, but what is a catwoman? She can leap like a cat, strut around on top of her furniture, survive great falls, and hiss. Halle Berry looks great doing these things and spends a lot of time on all fours, inspiring our almost unseemly gratitude for her cleavage.
She gobbles down tuna and sushi. Her eyes have vertical pupils instead of horizontal ones. She sleeps on a shelf. The movie doesn’t get into the litter box situation. What does she think about all of this? Why isn’t she more astonished that it has happened to her? How does it affect her relationship with that cute cop, Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt)?
The movie makes it clear that they make love at least once, but we don’t see that happening because Catwoman, a film that was born to be rated R, has been squeezed into the PG-13 category to rake in every last teenage dollar. From what we know about Catwoman, her style in bed has probably changed along with everything else, and sure enough the next day he notices a claw mark on his shoulder. Given the MPAA’s preference for violence over sex, this might have been one sex scene that could have sneaked in under the PG-13.