Although their child is now three or four, this is a Mitch she has not seen before in their marriage. Where did this Mitch come from? How did he restrain himself from pounding and strangling her during all of the early years? Why did she think herself happy until now? The answer, of course, is that Mitch turns on a dime when the screenplay requires him to. He even starts talking differently.
The plot (spoiler warning) now involves Slim’s attempts to hide herself and the child from Mitch. She flees to Michigan and hooks up with a battered-wife group, but Mitch, like the hero of a mad slasher movie, is always able to track her down. Along the way Slim appeals for help to the father (Fred Ward) who has never acknowledged her, and the father’s dialogue is so hilariously over the top in its cruelty that the scene abandons all hope of working seriously and simply functions as haywire dramaturgy.
Slim gets discouraging advice from a lawyer (“There is nothing you can do. He will win.”). And then she gets training in self-defense from a martial arts instructor. Both of these characters are African-American, following the movie’s simplistic moral color-coding. The day when the evil husband is black and the self-defense instructor is white will not arrive in our lifetimes.
The last act of the movie consists of Slim outsmarting her husband with a series of clever ploys in which she stage-manages an escape route, sets a booby trap for his SUV, and then lures him into a confrontation where she beats the shinola out of him, at length, with much blood, lots of stunt work, breakaway furniture, etc. The movie, in time-honored horror movie tradition, doesn’t allow Mitch to really be dead the first time. There is a plot twist showing that Slim can’t really kill him—she’s the heroine, after all—and then he lurches back into action like the slasher in many an exploitation movie, and is destroyed more or less by accident. During this action scene Slim finds time for plenty of dialogue explaining that any court will find she was acting in self-defense.
All of this would be bad enough without the performance of Tessa Allen as Gracie, the young daughter. She has one of those squeaky, itsy-bitsy piped-up voices that combines with babyish dialogue to make her more or less insufferable; after the ninth or tenth scream of “Mommy! Mommy!” we hope that she will be shipped off to an excellent day-care center for the rest of the story.
Jennifer Lopez is one of my favorite actresses, but not here, where the dialogue requires her to be passionate and overwrought in a way that is simply not believable, maybe because no one could take this cartoon of a story seriously. No doubt she saw Enough as an opportunity to play a heavy, dramatic role, but there is nothing more dangerous than a heavy role in a lightweight screenplay, and this material is such a melodramatic soap opera that the slick production values seem like a waste of effort.
Everybody’s Famous
(DIRECTED BY DOMINIQUE DERUDDERE; STARRING JOSSE DE PAUW, WERNER DE SMEDT; 2001)
Everybody’s Famous opens at a dreary talent contest at which the plump, desperate Marva demonstrates that she cannot sing, and could not deliver a song if she could. The judges, including the local mayor, hold up Olympic-style paddles scoring her with twos and threes, and we feel they’re generous. But Jean, Marva’s father, remains fanatically convinced that his daughter is talented and has a future—this despite the thankless girl’s rudeness toward her old man.
Poor Jean (Josse De Pauw) is a good man, endured by his patient wife, Chantal (Gert Portael), treasured by his best friend, Willy (Werner De Smedt), and chained to the night shift at a factory where he has to inspect endless lines of bottles for hours at a time. At home, he joins his family in admiring the concerts of a pop singer named only Debbie (Thekla Reuten), who wears an incandescent blue polyester wig.
One day a bolt of coincidence joins Debbie and Jean. He finds an opportunity to kidnap her, and does, enlisting Willy to help him. His ransom demand: Debbie’s manager (Victor Low) must record and release a song that Jean has written and that Marva (Eva van der Gucht) must sing.
This sets into motion a plot that begins with the same basic situation as The King of Comedy, where the Robert De Niro character kidnapped a TV host played by Jerry Lewis, but the difference here is that Everybody’s Famous is cheerful and optimistic, and if by the end everybody is not famous at least everybody has gotten what they want in life.
Three of the characters—the mother, the best friend, and the pop star—are so bland they’re essentially placeholders. Josse De Pauw does what he can with the lead role, as a simple, goodhearted man who can’t even get a goodnight kiss from the daughter he has sacrificed everything for. Victor Low seems like a very low-rent pop impresario, especially considering he can get a song scored, recorded, and on the charts in about twenty-four hours. But Eva van der Gucht brings some pouting humor to the role of the untalented daughter, whose costumes look like somebody’s idea of a cruel joke and who is bluntly told that she sings with a complete absence of emotion.
The big scene at the end involves one of those TV news situations that never happen in real life, where a reporter and camera materialize at a crucial point and are seemingly at the pleasure of the plot. And there’s a surprise during a televised talent show, which will not come as that much of a surprise, however, to any sentient being.
The movie, from the Flemish community of Belgium, was one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best foreign film, leading one to wonder what films were passed over to make room for it. It is as pleasant as all get-out, sunny and serendipitous, and never even bothers to create much of a possibility that it will be otherwise. By the time the police spontaneously applaud a man they have every reason to believe is holding a hostage, the movie has given up any shred of plausibility and is simply trying to be a nice comedy. It’s nice, but it’s not much of a comedy.
F
Failure to Launch
(DIRECTED BY TOM DEY; STARRING MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, SARAH JESSICA PARKER; 2006)
During the course of Failure to Launch, characters are bitten by a chipmunk, a dolphin, a lizard, and a mockingbird. I am thinking my hardest why this is considered funny, and I confess defeat. Would the movie be twice as funny if the characters had also been bitten by a Chihuahua, a naked mole rat, and a donkey?
I was bitten by a donkey once. It was during a visit to Stanley Kubrick’s farm outside London. I was the guest of the gracious Christiane Kubrick, who took me on a stroll and showed me the field where she cares for playground donkeys after their retirement. I rested my hand on the fence, and a donkey bit me. “Stop that!” I said, and the donkey did. If I had lost a finger, it would have been a great consolation to explain that it had been bitten off by one of Mrs. Stanley Kubrick’s retired donkeys.
But I digress. Failure to Launch is about a thirty-five-year-old man named Tripp (Matthew McConaughey) who still lives at home with his parents. They dream of being empty nesters, and hire a woman named Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker), who is a specialist at getting grown men to move out of their parents’ homes. Her method is simple: You look nice, you find out what they like, and you pretend to like it, too. You encourage them to share a sad experience with you. And you ask them to teach you something. In this case, he likes paintball, her dog has to be put to sleep, and he teaches her to sail. Actually, it’s not her dog and it’s not really put to sleep, but never mind.