Harald Zwart’s One
Night at McCool’s , from a screenplay by the late Stan Seidel (1952-2000),
is the kind of movie that, as I was watching it, I was preparing to dismiss as
a broad, cartoonish sex farce, straining for
as many cheap laughs as it could get this side of Three Stooges–like
smuttiness. That is, until its wow ending, with one of the funniest and most
imaginative sight gags I have seen since the golden age of the great silent
clowns. Obviously, I can’t and won’t tell you what it is, or even hint at it,
because that would eliminate the elements of shock and surprise that make it so
hilarious. So don’t read the reviews and gossip columns, and stay away from the
Internet know-it-alls who love to spoil everyone else’s fun.
See the movie first, even though you may find, as I did, Liv
Tyler’s second-string siren, Jewel, too literal and derivative as the
lace-edged lure for three oversexed and dim-witted knights in tarnished armor
named Randy (Matt Dillon), Carl (Paul Reiser) and Detective Dehling (John
Goodman). Randy starts off the foolishness by searching for a hitman named Mr.
Burmeister (Michael Douglas) in a St. Louis bingo parlor. When Randy finds
Burmeister, they play bingo together while Randy explains why he is paying
Burmeister $10,000 to kill Jewel. Flash back to McCool’s, where Randy works as
a big-hit college-town bartender who serves drinks with a toilet plunger. This
low-rent parody of Tom Cruise’s bartending dexterity in Cocktail (1988) lasts no longer than the time it takes to cut to
closing time. Indeed, McCool’s disappears as a setting after this first and
last night of Randy’s career as a bartender.
Randy’s cousin Carl drunkenly urges Randy to join him in
some after-hours amusements, since Carl’s wife and child are away visiting her
mother. Randy declines and is instead thrust
into a situation where he rescues Jewel from an apparent rape attack. We learn
later that Jewel is in cahoots with her alleged “rapist” in a convoluted scheme
by which the two prey on chivalrous saps like Randy. The killing starts right
after the sex, with Jewel shooting her confederate just as he is about to shoot
Randy. We gradually realize that Jewel is consumer-crazy and has fallen in love
with the ramshackle house that Randy has inherited from his late mother, along
with two snow globes reminiscent of the maternal emblems in Citizen Kane (1941).
As Randy continues his flashback narrative to an attentive
Burmeister, Carl and Detective Dehling become enmeshed in the silken web woven
by Jewel. They begin telling their
stories, Carl to a sexy psychiatrist played by Reba McEntire with the leggy
suggestiveness with which we have become familiar in The Sopranos . Carl, however, is too besotted with the leather and
whips provided by Jewel in her dominatrix phase to make a play for the provocative lady shrink. For his part, Detective
Dehling is easily seduced by Jewel while he is investigating two of her
murders. He confides in his brother, a priest known as Father Jimmy (Richard
Jenkins), who is horny as all get out as he presses his brother for all the
lascivious details, wrenching his collar loose in the process. This lecherous
priest received more than his share of cheap laughs. Too easy, I kept saying to
myself, too easy-but then I was swept away by the aforementioned ending, and I
began to wonder if I had missed something in the movie in my haste to dismiss
it.
Could it be that the slick direction of Mr. Zwart, and the
wildly satiric script by Seidel, to whom the film is dedicated, had more grace,
wit and substance than I had imagined? A merely brilliant ending can do that to
you; an explosively funny ending is rarer still. Still, I don’t care. Ms. Tyler
lacks the magic this slight exercise in style requires to transcend its
built-in limitations. It is not that she fails to project a physical
desirability in her person, nor that she is incapable of expressing a womanly
cunning without an excess of fatuous narcissism. It is simply that she cannot intuit
a forceful consistency in her characterizations to bind together the many
guises she is asked to assume.
The other characters are left adrift in a sea of gratuitous
gunfire that leaves One Night at McCool’s
somewhere between the cinema of Robert Rodriguez and the cinema of the Farrelly
brothers, with its tongue ever so distractingly deep in its cheek. Much of the
credit or blame should go to what appears to be a long-range artistic strategy
of co-producers Michael Douglas and Allison Lyon Segan, based on their readings
of popular taste. Right or wrong, they at least seem to have a plan in the
midst of the almost hopeless chaos that passes nowadays as mainstream
movie-making.
A Murky Nabokov
Adaptation
Marleen Gorris’ The
Luzhin Defence , from the screenplay by Peter Berry, based on the novel by
Vladimir Nabokov, brings some warmth and consolation to the cold Nabokovian
world of obsessive existence, but at perhaps too high a price in lost
believability. After all, what is the point of adapting Nabokov at all if one
cannot swallow his most bitter pills of perception? Yet one can understand why
John Turturro and Emily Watson were attracted to the roles of troubled chess
genius Alexander Luzhin and Natalia, the beautiful daughter of Russian émigré
parents, who falls in love with Luzhin despite the objections of her mother,
Vera, and despite Luzhin’s seemingly insurmountable social maladroitness. In
movie terms, it’s not exactly a case of Beauty and the Beast, but at least
Beauty and the Hyper-Nerd.
What is more clear in the novel than in the film is how
deeply Nabokov identifies with Luzhin’s obsession with chess. In this respect,
Nabokov is much harder on Natalia than Ms. Gorris and Mr. Berry are in the
movie. Indeed, Nabokov’s Natalia is shown to be a bit foolish in thinking that
Luzhin can eventually turn his chess genius to other aspects of life, and thus
be a huge success in anything he undertakes. On the printed page, Natalia never
appreciates how much chess has drained away from Luzhin’s ability to cope with
the simplest tasks of normal life. He has no friends, no conversation, not even
much awareness of his own appearance in public. He is a social misfit and a
mental cripple. Yet, Natalia sees something in his gleaming eyes at the chess
table that she thinks she can harness for her own happiness. As it turns out,
she is fatally mistaken.
In the film, Ms. Watson endows Natalia with a beautiful,
nurturing quality that makes us want her to connect with Mr. Turturro’s gawky
Luzhin. This rise in emotional temperature is something movies often do to
books-not in the way of conscious betrayal, but in the natural order of things
in the transition from a comparatively cerebral medium to an inescapably
visceral one. Hence, the potential union of Luzhin and Natalia is of less
import in the novel than it is in the film. Some critics complained that the
movie did not do justice to the chess being played. I do not know how that
could have been done with any precision in normal movie time. Ms. Gorris
performs some striking visual gymnastics on the chess board to suggest how
chess masters think many moves ahead. Yet, though Nabokov himself knew a great
deal about chess, he did not end his book-as the movie does-with a posthumous
vindication of Luzhin and his defense by dragging Natalia to the chess board.
The movie also fails to
record one of the interesting subtexts of the novel, and that is the grotesque
impression made by colonies of Russian exiles abroad, who speak Russian and
thus contribute to Luzhin’s feverish feeling of dislocation. This is something
the eternally traumatized Nabokov understood firsthand and never entirely
eliminated from his exquisite prose. Finally, Luzhin’s madness reminds me of no
one so much as Bobby Fischer, whose chess genius did not leave him much room to
be a human being. Still, The Luzhin
Defence is well worth seeing for Mr. Turturro and Ms. Watson.
Great Cinema: Greek
and Italian
Anthology Film Archives is presenting, from May 4-10, a
program of 17 recent Greek films which I-and maybe you-should see for both
ethnic and artistic reasons. There is reportedly nothing quaint or folksy about
these works, of which I have seen only one, Tonia Marketaki’s The Price of Love (1984), playing May 8,
which I recommend to Greek and non-Greek viewers alike. The Price of Love presents the dark side of the dowry system
celebrated joyously in John Ford’s The
Quiet Man (1952). The setting is the island of Corfu at the turn of the
century, when Greece was nominally independent under a constitutional monarchy,
but economically dominated by a consortium of the Great Powers. Greek cabinets
rise and fall with chaotic regularity. A young couple see their love wither
away because of endless squabbles over the girl’s dowry. There are no easy
villains, only ancient anxieties that recall stories my father and mother told
me about life in the provinces.
The other films are Day Off , Desire , The Love of Ulysses ,
Jaguar , Edge of Night , Life on Sale ,
The Red Daisy , Love Wanders in the Night , A
Drop in the Ocean , Eastern Territory ,
The Very Poor , Inc. , The Canary Yellow
Bicycle , Cheap Smokes , I Like Hearts Like Mine and 2000+1 Shots . (Call 505-5181 for show
dates and show times.)
I would also like to call belated attention to the
Guggenheim’s magnificent program entitled
Conversations Between Shadows and Light , featuring some of the great
Italian cinematographers known around the world, such as Vittorio Storaro and
Giuseppe Rotunno. The series began on April 4 and runs through July 28. (Call
423-3500 for dates and show times.)
