The Christmas countdown begins. With approximately 30 more
movies to open before the annual Dec. 31 deadline for Oscar consideration-at
least a dozen of which are scheduled to simultaneously start rolling on
projectors Dec. 22-holiday traffic at the movies is rapidly approaching
gridlock. I’m spreading the news the only way possible-as fast as I can see
them, I’ll pass the word on to you. The final vote is yours, so conserve your
energy, consider the candidates on your holiday menu carefully and watch those
hanging chads.
High on the recommended list there is the enchanting Chocolat , an unusual and magical film by
the distinguished director Lasse Hallström-his first since last year’s The Cider House Rules , and a real
charmer that turns out to be as delectable as its title. Chocolat is a modern-day fable (read: fairy tale) about the
restorative power of food that raises the photogenic splendors of hot fudge to
a level of art worthy of an exhibition at the Guggenheim. The setting is a
picturesque but stodgy and old-fashioned village in a remote region of France:
resistant to change, suspicious of outsiders and firmly ensconced in the
centuries-old didactic religious and social traditions that have kept its
citizens moribund. On a blustery winter day while everyone is at Mass, a cold
wind strong enough to blow out the altar candles sweeps into town a drifter
named Vianne (Juliette Binoche), a cheerful but scandalously unmarried single
mother, and her beautiful young daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol), both
dressed like Little Red Riding Hood.
Vianne moves into an empty apartment above a shuttered store
front and has the audacity to open a chocolate shop in the middle of Lent!
While the dour, sullen mayor (Alfred Molina, as the most frustrated villain in
years) does everything he can to poison the minds of the villagers against
Vianne and drive her out of business, he is powerless against the mouthwatering
aromas and welcoming confections that pour out of Vianne’s kitchen, lure
curious customers into her shop and transform the dreary atmosphere of the grim
town. One bite of her sumptuously sinful chocolate seashells and the town’s
unsmiling and long-suffering widow (Leslie Caron) sheds the black mourning
shrouds she’s been wearing since World War I and finds romance. Vianne’s crabby
old landlady (Judi Dench) takes one sip of her hot cocoa with ground chili
peppers and turns positively jolly and ribald. The rose creams with Cointreau
empower an abused housewife (Lena Olin) with a new personality and the
self-confidence to leave her violent, brutish husband.
Estranged families reunite, loveless marriages rekindle and
children discover the joys of repressed adolescence as Vianne’s secret
ingredients unlock hidden longings and unleash unfulfilled destinies. Even
Vianne herself finds love and a sense of belonging with an unwelcome riverboat
vagabond (Johnny Depp). But as her exotic truffles awaken a newly discovered
taste for pleasure and freedom, the self-righteous mayor denounces the profound
effect on his villagers as an erosion of morality. Something must be done to
stop the fun, so the old goat declares war on chocolate and a near tragedy
ensues. But this is an uplifting feel-good film, and even a rigid, bigoted,
pious control freak like the mayor meets his Waterloo when it comes to
desserts.
The film is gorgeously photographed, with all the splendid
postcard views you might find in an illustrated edition of Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird , and the tongue-in-cheek
performers are exhilaratingly secure in their grasp of the whimsical material.
Ms. Binoche has never been less prosaic (read: vacuous) or more beautiful, but
even she is sometimes upstaged by the chocolate. There is one delightful
sequence in which she and her newly liberated friends prepare a lavish dinner
for her landlord’s 70th birthday that is the most sensual exploration of food
on film since Babette’s Feast . Mr.
Hallström temporarily abandons his fine cast to lovingly zoom in on the whisks
and spoons and ladles that whip vats of addictive chocolate into decadent
macaroons, mocha kisses, marble cakes, mousses, tortes, Florentines and russes
of indescribably rich rapture. My own easily tempted sweet tooth was so turned
on by Chocolat that I headed for the
nearest drug store and bought a Hershey bar. (Opens Dec. 15.)
Meg Ryan’s Own Rambo
If Proof of Life
is remembered for anything, it will be this: Russell Crowe met Meg Ryan here,
knocked her right out of her Manolo Blahniks, and another Hollywood marriage
became a statistic. I’m no therapist, and what the future holds for Ms. Ryan
and her estranged husband, Dennis Quaid, has nothing do with movie criticism
anyway, but from the seat in which I suffered through Proof of Life , I’d say it’s not a movie worth leaving home for.
That goes for you, too.
When an American engineer (David Morse) is kidnapped by
rebel guerrillas while constructing a dam in some fictitious South American
country in the Andes and held for a ridiculously inflated $3 million ransom,
his distraught wife (Meg Ryan) turns to a professional “K. and R.” expert
(Russell Crowe) to find and save him. “K. and R.” means “Kidnap and Ransom,”
and because of the growing number of executives and tourists being abducted
weekly in God-forsaken banana republics you won’t find on maps, it’s become a
cottage industry involving spies, assassins, counter-revolutionaries,
state-of-the-art weapons, armored cars, helicopters and all kinds of James Bond
huggermugger you read about in magazines. (The movie is based on an article in
the May 1998 issue of Vanity Fair .)
Mr. Crowe is a terrific hostage negotiator, but after Ms.
Ryan is abandoned by her husband’s employer, her insurance company and the U.S.
Embassy, he sticks around for no logical reason except that he’s falling in
love, despite a lack of chemistry between them that is positively mystifying.
When negotiations break down, there’s one option left: The fearless,
two-fisted, monosyllabic one-man machine gun heads for the jungle on foot to
bring the hostage back alive, while Ms. Ryan waits by her cell phone with
perfectly frosted hair, biting her perfectly manicured nails.
Director Taylor Hackford invests more enthusiasm in the
jungle-ambush sequences and in the climbing shots in the Andes than he shows in
the slow, talky exposition scenes, and the script by Tony Gilroy is filled with
too much personal reflection. Ms. Ryan frets about the miscarriage she had in
Africa, Mr. Crowe worries about his son’s soccer game in London, Mr. Morse
worries about gangrene. And we worry about how long it will take to cut to the
chase. When they do, the bullets fly. But there are too many confusing subplot
snafus about the military, the guerrillas who must fend them off to protect
their cocaine factory and an oil pipeline that is going straight through the
hostage camp. The trajectory shakily totters between action and distraction.
Mr. Crowe is still pumped and buffed from Gladiator , but he never speaks above an
annoying mutter. As a grief-stricken wife verging on the brink of insanity, the
radiant Ms. Ryan is probably the most glamorous damsel in crisis since Garbo
wafted through a cholera epidemic in China-in gowns by Adrian-in The Painted Veil . Considering that the
two leads are creating well-publicized sparks on and off the screen, it’s
pretty odd that David Morse gives the best performance and literally steals the
picture. Transporting all that personnel and equipment to England, Poland and
Ecuador seems like a lot of unnecessary expense for a movie that amounts to
practically nothing at all. It’s the kind of thing Robert Mitchum and Jane
Russell used to turn out in their sleep, and they never left the backlot at
RKO. (Opens Dec. 8.)
Before There Was a
Bridget Jones …
The House of Mirth ,
painstakingly directed by Britain’s Terence Davies, is a thoughtful, considered
rendering of the great Edith Wharton novel about social hypocrisy in 1905. For
some bewildering reason, Wharton is always being compared to Jane Austen.
Stylistically and thematically, she is more akin to her male literary
counterpart, Theodore Dreiser; and Lily Bart, her most hauntingly tragic
character, is reminiscent of George Eastman (played so memorably by Montgomery
Clift in George Stevens’ 1951 masterpiece A
Place in the Sun ) and George Hurstwood (expertly played by Laurence Olivier
in William Wyler’s sensational 1952 film Carrie )-two
characters who tested the social fabric of their time, with disastrously fatal
results. For men and women who changed classes at the turn of the century-in
either upwardly mobile moves or a downward spiral-the puritanical morals of the
time dictated a fate of loss, guilt and self-torment. As a girl with no money
who wants to climb the social ladder, Lily Bart is not so much a victim of
ambition as she is of her own lack of skill in being a ruthless player.
A girl without a dime who wanted to elevate her position in
1905 didn’t have the luxury of beating society at its own game and remaining
honest and virtuous at the same time. Lily (Gillian Anderson) wants cashmere,
security and amusement, but she also wants romance. Half a century later, she
could take classes from Lorelei Lee. The men who clamor for her affections all
have one missing ingredient, and Lily holds out so long for the brass ring that
her reputation is ruined. Wrongly accused of having an affair with a married
man by a mean and scheming rival (played by Laura Linney, excellent as always,
but in the wrong role), deserted by her fair-weather society friends, up to her
pretty ears in debt for the money she lost at bridge and disinherited by her
aunt, Lily meets with one misfortune after another. She refuses to settle for
either living in sin or languishing conventionally in compromise, and ends up
pathetically disintegrating while her life crashes and burns.
It’s a somber, depressing literary classic, and for the most
part Mr. Davies captures Wharton’s laser dissection of New York’s vicious,
superficial social poseurs while remaining faithful to her strong ability to
develop character. But there are times when the lace curtains, parasols,
ostrich plumes, ascots and silk bustles make more noise than the people
themselves, who speak carefully manicured sentences in veiled undertones while
we wait impatiently for them to get to the point. The boredom factor is
positively treacherous.
But the film is elegantly photographed and ravishingly
appointed in the best Merchant Ivory tradition, and Ms. Anderson and Ms.
Linney, along with Elizabeth McGovern, Eric Stoltz, Anthony LaPaglia, Dan
Aykroyd and Terry Kinney (unrecognizable from his role on the gritty cable-TV
series Oz ), do their best to convey
the pretensions and manners of calculating women and the prissy-mouthed men as
easily manipulated by them as sluggish moths. Ms. Anderson has come a long way
from The X-Files , but sometimes she
mistakes flaring nostrils and heaving bosoms for insight and introspection.
(Opens Dec. 22.)
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