So, as I say, I like Cameron Diaz. I like everyone in this movie (I must not neglect the invaluable Parker Posey, as a terrified bride). I like their energy. I like their willingness. I like the opening shot when Diaz comes sashaying up a San Francisco hill like a dancer from In Living Color who thinks she’s still on the air. I like her mobile, comic face—she’s smart in the way she plays dumb. But the movie I cannot like, because the movie doesn’t know how to be liked. It doesn’t even know how to be a movie.
Sweet November
(DIRECTED BY PAT O’CONNOR; STARRING KEANU REEVES, CHARLIZE THERON; 2001)
Sweet November passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It’s about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love. I don’t know who I disliked more intensely—Nelson, the abrupt, insulting ad man played by Keanu Reeves, or Sara, Charlize Theron’s narcissistic martyr. Reeves at least has the grace to look intensely uncomfortable during several scenes, including one involving a bag full of goodies, which we will get to later.
The movie is a remake of a 1968 film starring Sandy Dennis and Anthony Newley and, if memory serves, the same bed in a San Francisco bay window. Both films have the same conceit, which only a movie producer could believe: A beautiful girl takes men to her bed for one month at a time, to try to help and improve them. “You live in a box, and I can lift the lid,” she explains. Why a month? “It’s long enough to be meaningful and short enough to stay out of trouble,” Sara says—wrong on both counts.
Read no further if you do not already know that she has another reason for term limits. She’s dying. In the original movie the disease was described as “quite rare, but incurable.” Here we get another clue, when Nelson opens Sara’s medicine cabinet and finds, oh, I dunno, at a rough guess, 598 bottles of pills. The girl is obviously overmedicating. Give her a high colonic, send her to detox, and the movie is over.
Nelson is one of those insulting, conceited, impatient, coffee-drinking, cell phone-using, Jaguar-driving advertising executives that you find in only two places: the movies and real life. His motto is speed up and smell the coffee. Sara, on the other hand, acts like she has all the time in the world, even though (sob!) she does not. She sits on the hood of Nelson’s car and commits other crimes against the male libido that a woman absolutely cannot get away with unless she looks exactly like Charlize Theron and insists on sleeping with you, and even then she’s pushing it.
Nelson gradually learns to accept the gift of herself that she is offering. Actually, he accepts it quickly, the pig, but only gradually appreciates it. So warm, cheerful, perky, plucky, and seductive is Sara that Nelson, and the movie, completely forget for well over an hour that he has an apartment of his own and another girlfriend. By then the inexorable march of the rare but incurable disease is taking its toll, Sara has to go into the hospital, and Nelson finds out the Truth.
Will there be a scene where Sara, with a drip line plugged into every orifice, begs Nelson, “Get me out of here! Take me home!” Do bears eat gooseberries? Will there be a scene where Sara says, “Go away! I don’t want you to see me like this!” Do iguanas like papayas? Will there be a scene where Sara’s faithful gay friend (Jason Isaacs) bathes and comforts her? Yes, because it is a convention of movies like this that all sexy women have gay friends who materialize on demand to perform nursing and hygiene chores. (Advice to gay friend in next remake: Insist, “Unless I get two good scenes of my own, I’ve emptied my last bedpan.”)
I almost forgot the scene involving the bag full of goodies. Keanu Reeves must have been phoning his agent between every take. The script requires him to climb in through Sara’s window with a large bag that contains all of the presents he would ever want to give her, based on all the needs and desires she has ever expressed. I could get cheap laughs by listing the entire inventory of the bag, but that would be unfair. I will mention only one, the dishwashing machine. Logic may lead you to ask, “How can an automatic dishwasher fit inside a bag that Keanu Reeves can sling over his shoulder as he climbs through the window?” I would explain, but I hate it when movie reviews give everything away.
Swept Away
(DIRECTED BY GUY RITCHIE; STARRING MADONNA, ADRIANO GIANNINI; 2002)
Swept Away is a deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one.
The movie is a relatively faithful remake of an incomparably superior 1976 movie with the lovely title, Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August. It knows the words but not the music. It strands two unattractive characters, one bitchy, one moronic, on an island where neither they, nor we, have anyone else to look at or listen to. It’s harder for them than it is for us, because they have to go through the motions of an erotic attraction that seems to have become an impossibility the moment the roles were cast.
Madonna stars as Amber, the spoiled rich wife of a patient and long-suffering millionaire. They join two other couples in a cruise on a private yacht from Greece to Italy. The other five passengers recede into unwritten, even unthought-about roles, while Amber picks on Giuseppe (Adriano Giannini), the bearded deckhand. She has decided he is stupid and rude, and insults him mercilessly. So it was in the earlier film, but in this version Amber carries her behavior beyond all reason, until even the rudest and bitchiest rich woman imaginable would have called it a day.
Amber orders Giuseppe to take her out in the dinghy. He demurs: It looks like a storm. She insists. They run out of gas and begin to drift. She insults him some more, and when he succeeds after great effort in catching a fish for them to eat, she throws it overboard. Later she succeeds in putting a hole in the dinghy during a struggle for the flare gun. They drift at sea until they wash up on a deserted island, where the tables are turned and now it is Giuseppe who has the upper hand. Her husband’s wealth is now no longer a factor, but his survival skills are priceless.
All of this is similar to the 1976 movie, even the business of the fish thrown overboard. What is utterly missing is any juice or life in the characters. Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato became stars on the basis of the original Swept Away, which was written and directed by Lina Wertmuller, one of the most successful Italian directors of the 1970s. She was a leftist but not a feminist, and aroused some controversy with a story where it turned out the rich woman liked being ordered around and slapped a little—liked it so much she encouraged the sailor to experiment with practices he could not even pronounce.
This new Swept Away is more sentimental, I’m afraid, and the two castaways fall into a more conventional form of love. I didn’t believe it for a moment. They have nothing in common, but worse still, neither one has any conversation. They don’t say a single interesting thing. That they have sex because they are stranded on the island I can believe. That they are not sleeping in separate caves by the time they are rescued I do not.
The problem with the Madonna character is that she starts out so hateful that she can never really turn it around. We dislike her intensely and thoroughly, and when she gets to the island we don’t believe she has learned a lesson or turned nice—we believe she is behaving with this man as she does with all men, in the way best designed to get her what she wants. As for the sailor, does he really love her, as he says in that demeaning and pitiful speech toward the end of the film? What is there to love? They shared some interesting times together, but their minds never met.