Cold Creek Manor was directed by Mike Figgis, a superb director of drama (Leaving Las Vegas), digital experimentation (Timecode), adaptations of the classics (Miss Julie), and atmospheric film noir (Stormy Monday). But he has made a thriller that thrills us only if we abandon all common sense. Of course, preposterous things happen in all thrillers, but there must be at least a gesture in the direction of plausibility, or we lose patience. When evil Dale Massie just stands there in the woods and doesn’t push Cooper Tilson down the well, he stops being a killer and becomes an excuse for the movie to toy with us—and it’s always better when a thriller toys with the victims instead of the audience.
Company Man
(DIRECTED BY PETER ASKIN AND DOUGLAS MCGRATH; STARRING DOUGLAS MCGRATH, SIGOURNEY WEAVER; 2001)
Company Man is the kind of movie that seems to be wearing a strained smile, as if it’s not sure we’re getting the jokes. If it could, it would laugh for us. It’s an arch, awkward, ill-timed, forced political comedy set in 1959 and seemingly stranded there.
Astonishing, that a movie could be this bad and star Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Anthony LaPaglia, Denis Leary, Woody Allen, Alan Cumming, and Ryan Phillippe. I am reminded of Gene Siskel’s classic question, “Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” In this case, it is not even better than a documentary of the same actors ordering room service while fighting the stomach flu.
In addition to the cast members listed above, the movie stars Douglas McGrath, its author and codirector, who is a low-rent cross between Jack Lemmon and Wally Cox and comes across without any apparent comic effect. He plays Allen Quimp, rhymes with wimp, a grammar teacher from Connecticut whose wife (Weaver) frets that he needs a better job. To get her and his own family off his back, he claims to be a CIA agent, and that leads, through a series of events as improbable as they are uninteresting, to his involvement in the defection of a Russia ballet star (Phillippe) and his assignment to Cuba on the eve of Castro’s revolution.
His contact agent there is Fry, played by Denis Leary, who looks appalled at some of the scenes he’s in. Example: As Fry denies that a revolutionary fever is sweeping the island, a man with a bottle full of gasoline approaches them and borrows a light from Quimp. Soon after, the man runs past in the opposite direction and they pass (without noticing—ho, ho) a burning auto. And not any burning auto, but an ancient, rusty, abandoned hulk filled with phony gas flames obviously rigged and turned on for the movie. How does it help the revolution to restage ancient auto fires?
But never mind. Fry introduces Quimp to Lowther (Woody Allen), the CIA’s man in charge, who also denies a revolution is under way, while turning aside to light his cigarette from a burning effigy of Batista (ho, ho). The mystery of what Woody Allen is doing in this movie is solved in a two-name search on the Internet Movie Database, which reveals that McGrath cowrote the screenplay for Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. Now Allen is returning the favor, I guess.
Well, that was a funny movie, and the same search identifies McGrath as the writer-director of Emma (1996), a nice little comedy with Gwyneth Paltrow. So he is obviously not without talent—except in this movie. Maybe the mistake was to star himself. He doesn’t have the presence to anchor a comedy; all those jokes about Quimp the nonentity ring true, instead of funny.
As bad movies go, Company Man falls less in the category of Affront to the Audience and more in the category of Nonevent. It didn’t work me up into a frenzy of dislike, but dialed me down into sullen indifference. It was screened twice for the Chicago press, and I sat through the first thirty minutes of the second screening, thinking to check it against a different crowd. I heard no laughter. Just an occasional cough, or the shuffling of feet, or a yawn, or a sigh, like in a waiting room.
Connie and Carla
(DIRECTED BY MICHAEL LEMBECK; STARRING NIA VARDALOS, TONI COLLETTE; 2004)
Connie and Carla plays like a genial amateur theatrical, the kind of production where you’d like it more if you were friends with the cast. The plot is creaky, the jokes are laborious, and total implausibility is not considered the slightest problem. Written by and starring Nia Vardalos, it’s a disappointment after her hilarious My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
This time, in a retread of Some Like It Hot, Vardalos and Toni Collette play Connie and Carla, two friends who have been a singing duo since schooldays. Now they’re in their thirties, stardom has definitively passed them by, and they perform a medley of musical comedy hits in an airport lounge that resembles no airport lounge in history, but does look a lot like somebody’s rec room with some tables and chairs and a cheesy stage.
The guys they date beg them to face facts: They’ll never really be any good. But they still dream the dream, and then, in a direct lift from Some Like It Hot, they witness a mob murder and have to go on the lam. The way this scene is handled is typical of the film’s ham-handed approach: They’re hiding in a parking garage when their boss is rubbed out, so what do they do? Stay hidden? Nope, they both stand up, scream, and wave their hands. They have to: Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any movie.
Connie and Carla hit the road, head for Los Angeles, happen into a drag bar, and inspiration strikes: They can pretend to be female impersonators! That way no one will find them, or even know where to look. One of the running gags in Some Like It Hot was that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis did not make very plausible women, but the movie handled that by surrounding them with dim bulbs like the characters played by Marilyn Monroe and Joe E. Brown. Connie and Carla is set in today’s Los Angeles gay community, where the other characters are supposed to be real, I guess, and where never in a million years could they pass as boys passing as girls.
Their danger from the mob is put on hold as the movie switches to another reliable formula, the showbiz rags-to-riches epic. Their act, of course, is an immediate hit, they make lots of buddies among the other drag queens, and there are many close calls as they’re almost discovered out of drag, or would that be not out of drag? The time scheme of the movie is sufficiently forgiving for them to suggest that their little club remodel itself and double in size; and there is actually a scene where the show goes on while plastic sheeting separates te old club from the new addition. Next scene, the construction work is finished. Forget the drag queens, get the names of those contractors.
Nia Vardalos was of course wonderful in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Toni Collette has proven she can do about anything—but she can’t do this. The movie masks desperation with frenzied slapstick and forced laughs. And when Connie meets a straight guy she likes (David Duchovny), we groan as the plot manufactures Meet Cutes by having them repeatedly run into each other and knock each other down. Uh, huh. I think maybe the point in Some Like It Hot was that Joe E. Brown fell in love with Jack Lemmon, not Marilyn Monroe. I’m not saying Connie and Carla would have been better if Connie had attracted a gay guy, or maybe a lesbian who saw through the drag, but at least that would have supplied a comic problem, not a romantic one.