Movies take viewers on varied journeys throughout 1994

Movies take viewers on varied journeys throughout 1994

What was it like at the movies in 1994? A free-ranging discussion
of the better mainstream films shown this year at theaters around
town follows.

JAKARTA (JP): What a year! The movies whisked us off to a 17th
century France where the Frenchmen speak American accented
English (The Three Musketeers); to a Wild West where the cowboys
are women (Bad Girls) and where young Maverick needs a hand from
his dad (Maverick from TV) and shares a smoke and chat with his
Indian mates; to a Stone Age where people are cute rather than
crude (The Flintstones).

Then we were dropped back into contemporary America to watch a
publishing editor change from pussy-cat to wolf in sheep's
clothing and all libidinous Id, with who else but Jack Nicholson
as Wolf. And then we visited suburbia where the nanny is daddy
and actually a man in woman's clothing (Robin Williams as Mrs
Doubtfire). What a year for gender bending and role reversals.
What is happening to the movies? If we cannot turn to the movies
for our stereotypes, just where can we look?

As for action! Well, we got stuck in an elevator-well with a
bomb about to explode beneath us and when offered the chance to
escape, we found it was equally a chance of being sliced in half
as it was of scrambling free. As though this escapade wasn't
enough, we clambered onto a bus only to find it had a bomb on
board and you had to drive like hell to stay alive -- the Speed
only let up when, aboard a swaying and driverless train, we
crashed through to a final and exhausted full stop. Elsewhere and
On Deadly Ground, we were in danger of being Blown Away. In the
short-lived season of True Lies (from Terminator collaborators
James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger) we had two weeks to
thrill at gunmen on skis and an assassin on a motorbike, riding
across rooftops into a swimming pool.

If you don't like Schwarzenegger, you were probably still
laughing along with him in clumsy pursuit on horseback, or
inexpertly piloting a Harrier jet, as he set his considerable jaw
and narrowed his eyes, going through the expected motions in a
self-conscious, self-deprecatory way. Not an anti-hero -- because
anti-heroes don't do anything, they are just angst-ridden -- but
the post-modern protagonist.

The year brought along a number of "talking head" courtroom
dramas, movies never renowned for roller-coaster suspense but
which give a different sort of pleasure. We sat in court in The
Pelican Brief to consider Denzel Washington's advocacy on behalf
of Julia Roberts, and we observed the same Washington moderate
his homophobic attitudes towards his client Tom Hanks and other
gays in the distinguished Philadelphia. Then we saw Susan
Sarandon as attorney crusade for the rights of single mothers and
tearaway kids in the John Grisham adaptation, The Client. The
latter two films were at least as compelling as anything in the
action genre, while Philadelphia was among the best films shown
in Jakarta this year.

Investigative dramas like this don't seem to do well in
Jakarta. Not because of content, but because of genre, being
short on action and long on psychology. Philadelphia, is an
investigation of the processes of social ostracism undergone by
the typical AIDS victim, in this case a nice guy, Tom Hanks as
Andy Beckett, lawyer. Having already passed the awful moment of
discovery before the film begins, Andy has reached a measure of
acceptance of his condition by the time the film starts.

So, from the start, it's a case of over to you. The onus is
now on others, his family, his employers, his colleagues, and us,
his audience, to accept it too. For a film that
characteristically goes for the big emotional moment and the big
sentimental reconciliation by way of conclusion, this movie
directed by Jonathan Demme has quiet restrained power. The most
remarkable sequence is when Andy acts out a kind of theater to a
Maria Callas aria, a tragic figure tied to his intravenous drip
stand, youth manacled, in the most cruel certain sense, to
imminent death. It could have been an embarrassing mistake in an
otherwise reserved and intelligent film, but it is brought off by
the movie's sense of commitment to its cause.

Political

Other fine films of the year were set in two of the world's
political hot spots: The House of the Spirits and In the Name of
the Father. Both were family dramas located within the broad
context of a country's political turmoil. Chile and Northern
Ireland were the places in question.

The House is a serious and high minded film with some of the
best performers in films today: Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, and
Glenn Close. It should have pleased Isabel Allende, the niece of
the assassinated President Allende and the woman who wrote the
book and was reportedly keen to avoid its Hollywood glitz
treatment on
film.

Director Bille August and the performers themselves did a
great job of portraying the flawed patriarch in the Irons
character, and the unmarried sister in the Close character, but I
found the Streep character with her sense of the paranormal, just
a bit insubstantial.

The House of the Spirits is a chronicle over the generations,
with a present spooked by ghosts of the past. Magical and real.

In the Name of the Father is given an entirely different
treatment. Gritty and real. The agony of the conditions in
Northern Ireland is explored through this adaptation of the true
story of the Guildford Four, a group of Irish people, including a
father and son, who were wrongfully arrested for the bombing of a
busy London pub in 1974. Daniel Day-Lewis would lend substance to
any role, and as the central character in this film, Gerry
Conlon, he invests the true-life character, pretty much a
layabout and petty criminal, with some real depth.

The best

For me, the best among films screened at the multiplexes in
Jakarta 1994 was The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese's turn of
the century romance set in high society New York. If you think
about it, "turn of the century" signifies fundamental change and
it is often a timely moment in which to set a story.

From Martin Scorsese this is yet another essay on morality.
It's no surprise that the young Scorsese once joined a seminary,
to become a priest -- but he soon tossed it in for film studies
at the university. From the director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull,
Mean Street and Goodfellas, in itself, The Age of Innocence,
prompts a query.

Is it a phrase to which Martin Scorsese is adding an invisible
question mark?

Gratification and/or loss appear to be what Scorsese is musing
about in The Age of Innocence. Over the years, he has created
protagonists who yearn and long for something to fill the void.
In the world of Scorsese's films, excess and repression are the
face and tail of the same coin. One cannot stand without the
other being called into question.

In the year that brought us Sliver, Intersection, and Malice,
The Age of Innocence proclaims its difference. It represents a
world where you can hear the furniture creak, the grandfather
clock tick-tock, or where the swish of skirts might be exciting,
where the slightest cough, or flick of an eyebrow, is
significant. Long intoxicating takes hold the camera eye steady
over the opulent mise-en-scene of wealthy New York drawing rooms.

This is vintage Scorsese, governing his period genre film with
the flourish of a sure hand. Direction is matched with sensitive
performances from the lead actors. Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle
Pfeiffer glow with pleasure at his caress of her naked hand -- a
moment like Harvey Keitel's arousal in seeing Holly Hunter's bare
leg through a small hole in her stocking in The Piano, that other
beautiful period romance of 1994. But I must quickly add we see
no one naked, as we do in The Piano. This is The Age of
Innocence.

Carlito's Way could have been the film from Martin Scorsese in
1994, but it is directed by Brian de Palma, with Al Pacino, not
Robert de Niro, in the lead as the gangster unable to find
redemption. If you enjoy the ritual of the mobster movie on
occasion, then this was for you in. And it was far from routine,
with a brilliantly staged and edited shoot out on the steps in
New York Grand Central Station. You can watch it without feeling
quite as appalled as you do watching that last sequence in
Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

The Jack Nicholson screen persona has been bent on shocking
audiences since it first popped up in some excellent small-budget
features of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His performances have
usually been memorable when his character has wrestled with the
devil in his soul or with animal priapism. More of the same from
Jack in Wolf. He gets a shot of wolf's spittle in his blood and
in a flash he sprouts fur, grows pointy teeth and there is a
dangerous yellow flicker in his eye. So what's new? Jack is just
doing what Jack does best. Wolf was just another vehicle for the
Nicholson juggernaut.

Little Buddha is a bit more difficult to take a stand on.
However, pedagogy and fiction don't mix in a film.

All in all, not a bad year, but the best were far too thin on
the ground. Why didn't we get Short Cuts; Four Weddings and a
Funeral; Farewell My Concubine; Grumpy Old Men; The Piano; Pulp
Fiction; Reality Bites; Schindler's List; Love and Human Remains;
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; To Live;
Kafka; La Crise or Tom and Viv? and Three Colours: Red/White and
Blue.

--Jane Scott