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Three reviews of three Must-sees, and one of a Must-not

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on December 26, 2002 at 07:44:30

All from the Boston Globe.

'Fisher' a heartfelt voyage home

By Wesley Morris, Globe Correspondent, 12/25/2002

For his first outing as a director, Denzel Washington has chosen the life of Navy sailor Antwone Fisher as his subject. Fisher wrote the script, which means that Washington has to color inside the lines of Fisher's reality. But Washington does some excellent things with the tools at his disposal. Basically, he had me from the start.

''Antwone Fisher'' opens with a small boy standing in an expanse of wheat. He heads toward a big white barn, opens the door, and is greeted by what must be every black person ever to have walked the earth. The barn's interior looks like Noah's ark as imagined by Alex Haley - two of every face. And each one is elated that this child has come unto them. Someone hands the boy a plate of buttermilk pancakes the size of couch cushions, and the camera pores over a mile-long bounty of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

In a nanosecond, the pristine lyricism is shattered by the thunder of a gunshot and the lightning of a splash of blood across the screen. A body tumbles backward down a narrow staircase, and our hero snaps awake, terrorized by a strange nightmare. We know this young man, Antwone Fisher, is special - he dreams in Toni Morrison, for Pete's sake. His life, meanwhile, is strictly Maya Angelou: The caged bird will learn to sing.

Fisher (Derek Luke) is a serene, introverted young sailor. But he can be provoked into rage - usually by someone disturbing his physical or psychological peace. His latest outburst earns him a demotion to seaman and a visit to Dr. Jerome Davenport (Washington), a Navy shrink. His future in the military depends on the outcome of the sessions. Initially, Fisher resists attending. Then he refuses to open up. (''I came from under a rock'' is all he'll say about himself.) One day, though, there's a breakthrough: The patient confides, and the movie begins its painful, unsettling journey back to Fisher's Cleveland childhood.

His mother abandoned him. His father was shot dead. And his boyhood was spent as a victim of Ohio's foster care system, which placed him in the home of one vividly cruel woman named Mrs. Tate (Novella Nelson). Fisher's progress with Davenport is juxtaposed with his burgeoning relationship with Cheryl (Joy Bryant), a fellow sailor.

And with merciful finesse, the movie makes us understand one of the linchpins to Fisher's self-consciousness and fury. Davenport's advice to his charge is for him to go back to Ohio and find his family. So Fisher asks Cheryl to accompany him on his quest to make peace with the past.

To the welcome surprise of some, ''Antwone Fisher'' succeeds not as Washington's vanity project (he's very good as the shrink), but as a rich, solid, well-mounted feat of storytelling. (The gorgeous photography is by Philippe Rousselot and the score is courtesy of Mychael Danna.)

Fisher might have overextended himself with a parallel plot involving Davenport and his estranged wife (Salli Richardson) designed to bring Fisher's repression in alignment with his doctor's. That side of the film fails to satisfy as much as the rest does.

While there are difficult parts of Fisher's life, the point is that the life is worth celebrating. Washington probably gets an untold number of scripts about broken families and drug dealers and inmates every week, but it's only right that this one probably knocked him out. Not so much as an actor but as a black male. Antwone Fisher - as lit from within by Luke, who has a pure smile that has never before been seen on a black actor in the movies - is good kid who has had a rotten life.

For sure, ''Antwone Fisher'' is corny. But it's corny in a way that a Hollywood movie about a boy who just wants to go home ought to be corny. Plus when it's done with this much care, corny works for me.

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'Talk' is a complex comment on caring, coomunication [sic]

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff, 12/25/2002

There's an old song by the Smiths that goes, ''Girlfriend in a coma, I know, I know - it's really serious.'' You could skip the new Pedro Almodovar movie, ''Talk to Her,'' and just stay home and listen to the song - twice - but you'd miss the film's odd, moving, strained cinematic poetry.

This is a story about women in comas and the men who care for them; it's also about artifice, ritual, and the way people can confuse nurturing with mature love. The title comes from Benigno's admonition to Marco as the latter broods over his lover Lydia's unresponsive body. Benigno (Javier Camara), for his part, talks incessantly to Alicia (Leonor Watling); in fact, he talks to her more than he did when she was conscious and he was the shy mama's boy of a stalker who spied on her in ballet class from across the street.

Now that an auto accident has rendered Alicia comatose, Benigno is leveraging his nurse's license to provide her with around-the-clock hospital care. Distressingly, he's also using her as a blank screen for the projection of his romantic fantasies. ''We get along better than most couples,'' Benigno insists with the polite assurance of the deranged.

Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is a reporter, the quietly serious sort, who has just seen his bullfighter girlfriend (Rosario Flores) nearly gored to death. He watches as she is bathed and clothed by the hospital staff - in much the same way she was prepared for the bullring - but talk to her he cannot. Her presence, to his sorrow, turns out to have been strictly in the present, and Benigno represents a road Marco would like to take and yet, smart fellow, is terrified of.

Much has been made of the fact that this is the first Almodovar movie with leading men rather than women. That's an oversimplification: Benigno's the force of nature here, and he's as regal and flighty as Joan Crawford in ''Queen Bee.'' His friendship with Marco, too, acquires a certain passion as ''Talk to Her'' takes a turn for the compellingly strange. I won't spoil anything, other than to say that Alicia was a fan of silent films before her accident and that Almodovar hides a crucial plot development within the folds of a kinky, starkly beautiful reenactment of black and white flickers.

That faux silent is the stylistic high point of ''Talk to Her.'' On the surface, the film is as surreally sad as Almodovar's last postmodern melodrama, 1999's Oscar-winning ''All About My Mother.'' But it's also a formal echo of ''Mother,'' right down to the theatrical performances of ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' in the earlier film and the Pina Bausch dance troupe in ''Talk,'' and to the way Almodovar's characters shed tears at both. Tellingly, the new film ends with a resolution that feels awfully tidy next to the more organic mysteries of ''Mother.''

But then there are the pleasures of ''Talk to Her'' - the nerdy hothouse chill of Camara's performance and Geraldine Chaplin as a ballet mistress to whom ''nothing is simple''; the way a sheet clings to the curves of a comatose body and the weary lilt of a tune sung by the great Brazilian artist Caetano Veloso during a party scene; the beguiling, troubling message that women are unknowable. It would be interesting to hear from the other side, but in ''Talk to Her,'' the women are down for the count.

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Chilling 'Fence' visits grim Aussie past

By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff, 12/25/2002

For a while there it seemed as if Phillip Noyce had forsaken his Aussie sensibility. After all, how much of the down under can there be in a Hollywood number like ''Sliver'' or ''Clear and Present Danger''?

''Rabbit-Proof Fence,'' however, returns the director to his native continent for the first time since 1989's ''Dead Calm,'' and it's the most intimately chilling and vital his filmmaking has been since then. ''Fence'' revisits Australia's Stolen Generations period, during which its government took hundreds of Aborigine children from their families and locked them up in camps designed to prepare them for integration in white society, typically as servants. The idea was that in two or three generations, the Aboriginal people would have been successfully attenuated, and white culture, with utmost beneficence, would continue its dominance.

Set in 1931, the film laser-focuses on the plight of the Craig sisters - Molly, 14, Gracie, 10, and Daisy, 8 - who escape from a camp and trek home 1,200 uncertain miles across the outback, dodging a racial-purification bureaucrat (Kenneth Branagh) as they go. The story comes from Doris Pilkington Garimara's ''Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence,'' an account of this dark chapter in Australia's history.

All involved are reverent to the historical details, in awe of the girls' survivalist pluck, and resistant to turning the material into politics. Essentially, Noyce just wants to tell a good story, which he does. The film downplays the film's epic or propagandistic potential and plays to Noyce's strengths as a director of people living on instinct.

The film's most startling sequence is the sisters' seizure and subsequent internment. It's presented with handheld wildness (shot by Christopher Doyle, who photographed Noyce's upcoming ''The Quiet American'') and is aided by a wailing, metallic soundtrack composed by Peter Gabriel. Noyce scorches arid earth here, letting his action-flick wiles guide him through the moment's heartbreak.

Noyce usually excels at crafting the space between action - in a film like ''Dead Calm'' and even here, this is called suspense. The sisters' stint in the camp is quick and quiet, its brevity telegraphed by Everlyn Sampi's eyes. Sampi plays Molly, the eldest girl and the emotional keystone to Noyce's movie. You look to her for the signal to bust loose. Taciturn but fierce, she might speak 10 words in the whole film, but her face is a portrait of a hundred kinds of determination. Though she and her sisters have no idea what route to take, it's as if they pick up on their mother's homing signal and use it as a guide.

Branagh's character dispatches all kinds of men to track them down, but Noyce doesn't play the girl hunt as a thriller per se. He's after something more primal: Imagine the three sisters of ''King Lear'' traversing ''The Odyssey'' to get back to the womb.

As ambitious as this may be, however, the movie's objectives tax its energy even as the girls' plight tears at your heart. By the time the film becomes a minimalist chase/homecoming picture, you fear the worst: that Noyce is spent (he is) or that the movie will drift to its big, moving finish (it does). With appropriate righteousness, though, Noyce compels you to care all the same, which is profoundly more than you can say about anything he was able to pull off in ''The Saint.''

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FInally, the Must-not (this from the Boston Herald):

Film's `Catch': Spielberg tries to be so hip it hurts

by James Verniere
Wednesday, December 25, 2002

Falsely billed as ``the true story of a real fake,'' Steven Spielberg's ``Catch Me If You Can'' is to movies what Wallpaper is to magazines: stylish, bloated hooey.

Admittedly, it's often breezy fun, floating on buoyant ``Pink Panther''-ish opening credits and John Williams' Henry Mancini-like score. Its iconographic use of Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK airport, a masterpiece of modernism now standing sadly empty, is also smart and hip. In fact, production designer Jeannine Oppewall (``L.A. Confidential'') may be the true auteur of this effort. But the film is full of fabrications designed to heighten its commercialism, and its misogynistic roots keep showing.

Of course, this sunnier version of 1999's ``The Talented Mr. Ripley'' and fashionable, fashionably phony salute to the Swinging '60s is the stiff competition that forced Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein to blink. He moved the opening of Martin Scorsese's period film ``Gangs of New York'' off Christmas Day rather than face the prospect of Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays lead roles in both films, having a showdown with himself.

``Catch Me If You Can,'' which will remind many of the Robert Mulligan-directed, Henry Mancini-scored 1961 film ``The Great Impostor,'' a biography in which Tony Curtis plays real-life impostor Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., is loosely based on the autobiography of Frank W. Abagnale, a con man whose career began when as an adolescent he bilked thousands from his own father.

Of course, it doesn't happen that way in Spielberg's beautiful mind. In the film, adapted by Jeff Nathanson (``Rush Hour 2''), the divorce of Frank's parents, his ruined Rotarian dad (a fine Christopher Walken) and sexy, cheating French mother (the lovely Nathalie Baye), is the event that triggers his urge to con and forces anyone who reads features about the film to hear about the divorce of Spielberg's parents, again. I know art is a form of psychoanalysis, but this is ridiculous.

Frank (DiCaprio) tests the waters by posing as his class' substitute French teacher. (Spielberg takes the time to ridicule an old, bewildered woman in these scenes and does not have DiCaprio speak a word of French.) Soon, he has figured out how to impersonate a young Pan Am pilot, fly anywhere he wants by ``deadheading'' (flying in uniform as a passenger in other airlines' planes) and pass phony checks across the country.

``Come Fly With Me,'' indeed. At the same time, he charms the pants off a pretty stewardess and charms the cash out of any number of young, flirty, unsuspecting bank tellers. That many of the latter would get into hot water or that Frank's forte is taking advantage of the weak, kindhearted and trusting presumably is to be left on the cutting room floor of our minds.

Spielberg does not want us to think of the people Frank hurts in his career as a thief. We're supposed to enjoy the spectacle of an incredibly cocky, good-looking teen who gets to live like a king as long as he's willing to risk exposure as a fraud. Yes, on some level, we're all frauds, especially filmmakers (a teenage Spielberg once bluffed his way onto the Universal lot). But part of that universal condition is the shame it brings us.

But Spielberg isn't interested in existential angst. He wants us instead to focus on the chic retro-styles and surrogate father-son relationship that blossoms between Frank and the fictional FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks speaking in the voice of Elmer Fudd). What is this? ``The Road to Extortion.''

In very dubious taste is a scene in which Frank, wearing a suit modeled after the one Sean Connery wears in ``Goldfinger,'' seduces a famous model (Jennifer Garner) who turns out to be a fraud herself (she's also a hooker, ha-ha).

The film is framed by a ``Zelig''-like appearance by Frank on the vintage television game show ``What's My Line?'' But in another, heavy-handed touch, Frank and Carl establish a tradition of speaking to one another over the phone on Christmas Eve. Eventually, Frank adds doctor and lawyer to his resume and proposes to a love-struck candy striper (Amy Adams) whose humiliation is not exactly a side-splitting prospect.

In another unfunny scene, Frank convinces half a dozen ``shallow'' college coeds they have won the chance to be Pan Am stewardesses in training. (The film has a lighthearted fetish for the Pop Art-influenced uniforms of '60s-era flight crews.)

Compounding these problems is the running time. At a breezy length, ``Catch Me'' might have passed muster as eye candy. But at an ego-stroking 140 minutes, it's a real pain in the butt.

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