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