Note: In stark contrast to the fairy-tale events of I Am David, the 2003 film In This World, by Michael Winterbottom, tells the story of a sixteen-year-old Afghan boy who journeys to London from a refugee camp in Pakistan. The film follows a real boy on a real journey, and includes scenes of documentary reality; it helps underline the unreal storytelling of David.
Invisible Circus
(DIRECTED BY ADAM BROOKS; STARRING JORDANA BREWSTER, CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON; 2001)
Adam Brooks’s Invisible Circus finds the solution to searing personal questions through a tricky flashback structure. There are two stories here, involving an older sister’s disappearance and a younger sister’s quest, and either one would be better told as a straightforward narrative. When flashbacks tease us with bits of information, it has to be done well, or we feel toyed with. Here the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance.
Jordana Brewster stars as Phoebe, eighteen years old in 1976. In the summer of 1969, she tells us in her narration, her sister Faith went to Europe and never came back. The story was that Faith (Cameron Diaz) killed herself in Portugal. Phoebe doesn’t buy it. After a heart-to-heart with her mother (Blythe Danner), Phoebe sets off on a quest to solve the mystery, message, meaning, method, etc., of Faith’s disappearance.
The search begins with Wolf (Christopher Eccleston), Faith’s old boyfriend, now engaged and living in Paris. Since Wolf knows all the answers, and that’s pretty clear to us (if not to Phoebe), he is required to be oblique to a tiresome degree. And there is another problem. In any movie where a lithesome eighteen-year-old confronts her older sister’s lover, there is the inescapable possibility that she will sleep with him. This danger, which increases alarmingly when the character is named Wolf, is to be avoided, since the resulting sex scene will usually play as gratuitous, introducing problems the screenplay is not really interested in exploring. I cringe when a man and a woman pretend to be on a disinterested quest, and their unspoken sexual agenda makes everything they say sound coy.
Wolf and Faith, we learn, were involved in radical 1960s politics. Faith was driven by the death of her father, who died of leukemia caused by giant corporations (the science is a little murky here). Phoebe feels her dad always liked Faith more than herself. What was Dad’s reason? My theory: Filial tension is required to motivate the younger sister’s quest, so he was just helping out.
The movie follows Faith, sometimes with Wolf, sometimes without, as she joins the radical Red Army, becomes an anarchist, is allowed to help out on protest raids, fails one test, passes another, and grows guilt-ridden when one demonstration has an unexpected result. Phoebe traces Faith’s activities during an odyssey/travelogue through Paris, Berlin, and Portugal, until we arrive at the very parapet Faith jumped or fell from, and all is revealed.
I can understand the purpose of the film, and even sense the depth of feeling in the underlying story, based on a novel by Jennifer Egan. But the clunky flashback structure grinds along, doling out bits of information, and it doesn’t help that Wolf, as played by Eccleston, is less interested in truth than in Phoebe. He is a rat, which would be all right if he were a charming one.
There is a better movie about a young woman who drops out of sight of those who love her and commits to radical politics. That movie is Waking the Dead (2000). It has its problems, too, but at least it is unclouded by extraneous sex and doesn’t have a character who withholds information simply for the convenience of the screenplay. And its Jennifer Connelly is much more persuasive than Cameron Diaz as a young woman who becomes a radical; she enters a kind of solemn holy trance, unlike Diaz, who seems more like a political tourist.
Isn’t She Great
(DIRECTED BY ANDREW BERGMAN; STARRING BETTE MIDTER, NATHAN LANE; 2000)
Perhaps it’s appropriate that Jacqueline Susann’s biopic has been written by Paul Rudnick, whose alter ego, Libby Gelman-Waxner, waxes witty and bitchy in her Premiere magazine column every month. It was Truman Capote who said on a talk show that Jackie Susann “looks like a truck driver in drag,” but whenever that image swims into view, it somehow seems to have the Gelman-Waxner byline attached.
Susann became famous writing potboilers about the sex and drug lives of the stars. Identifying the real-life models for her thinly veiled characters grew into a parlor game, and her Valley of the Dolls became the best-selling novel of all time. She also became famous for revolutionizing book retailing; Susann and her agent husband, Irving Mansfield, turned the book tour into a whistle-stop of America, and there was scarcely a bookseller, interviewer, or indeed shipping dock worker who didn’t get the Susann treatment.
So tireless was her publicity that she even talked to me, at a time when I was twenty-three years old and had been on the Sun-Times for ten minutes. Jackie, Irving, and I had lunch at Eli’s the Place for Steak, although all I can recall of the conversation is that she said, “I’m like Will Rogers. I never met a dog I didn’t like.” Full disclosure: Three years later I wrote the screenplay for the parody Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and a few years after that, the Fox studio was sued by Mansfield on the grounds that the film diminished his wife’s literary reputation. (Had I been called to testify, I would have expressed quiet pride in whatever small part I had played in that process.)
Susann’s life would seem to be the perfect target for the Libby Gelman-Waxner sensibility; who better to write about the woman whose prose one reader described as “like overhearing a conversation in the ladies’ room.” My hopes soared when I learned that Andrew Bergman, who made the wacky comedies Honeymoon in Vegas and Soapdish, would be directing—and that John Cleese would play her publisher. I was hoping for satire, but they’ve made a flat and peculiar film that in its visual look and dramatic style might be described as the final movie of the 1950s.
Maybe that was the purpose. Maybe the whole look, feel, and sensibility of Isn’t She Great is part of the joke. It’s a movie that seems to possess the same color scheme and style sense as Valley of the Dolls, but, alas, without Jackie’s dirty mind. So devout is this story that when Irving (Nathan Lane) walks out on Jackie (Bette Midler), we don’t even find out why he really left. Jackie would have given us the scoopola.
And when they get back together again, is it with tearful recriminations and shocking accusations? Not at all. There is a tree in Central Park that they hold precious, because to them it represents God, and one day when Jackie visits the tree Irving is there already talking to God. To prove how much he loves her, on this and another occasion, he even wades into the Central Park lagoon. I think, although the movie isn’t clear, that Irving left her not because of another person, but because the diamond brooch he bought for Jackie at the height of her success was upstaged by the diamond necklace given by her publisher. As her agent, shouldn’t his gift be only 10 percent as expensive as her publisher’s?
Money brings up another point: their lifestyle. Once Jackie makes it big time, they have a lot of money. But even before then, they live in Mansfield’s lavishly expensive Manhattan apartment, reproduced on one of those spacious Hollywood sets where people make dramatic entrances and exits and the interior decorators have taste as vague as their budgets. Where did Mansfield get the money to live like this? When they first meet, he drops names like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, but it turns out he represents their distant relatives.