Seberg was never especially talented, but there was something in her placid, defenseless gaze — in the unlikelihood of her stardom and her failure to sustain it — that remains intriguing. That’s the argument that film maker Mark Rappaport makes in “From the Jour nals of Jean Seberg,” an eerie, fictionalized memoir that opens today at the Castro Theater.
Instead of offering a standard biopic with talking heads mourning a subject’s tragic demise, Rappaport mounts a bizarre deconstruction of fact and ephemera — he calls it a “fictional autobiography” — in which Seberg appears, played by actress Mary Beth Hurt, as a ghost who faces the camera and narrates her story from the other side of her grave.
“I was too short, too girlish to play Joan of Arc,” Seberg/Hurt says in a jaded, just-the-facts voice that suggests a woman who in death has found the self-awareness she lacked in life.
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It’s a spooky effect particularly because Hurt was raised in Marshalltown, Iowa — just like Seberg.
Rappaport mines a treasure of film clips and filters the facts of Seberg’s life through a complex prism of memory, conjecture and scandal-sheet inflation.
Instead of growing wiser, more resilient with age, Seberg only weakens. She falls in love and is dumped by Clint Eastwood on the set of “Paint Your Wagon”; she marries author Romain Gary, who gives her a son and abuses her; she turns Black Panther sympathizer and is branded a “sex pervert” by the FBI, which plants a gossip-column lie that she’s carrying a black man’s child — a trauma that causes her to miscarry.
It’s more than Seberg’s bio that fascinates Rappaport.
It’s the myth of innocent American girlhood that she personified; the power of film images to instill attitudes and perceptions; and the ways in which Seberg was brutalized by a culture that elevates, exploits and then discards its celebrities — particularly women.
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Wise-cracking Emperor Kuzco (David Spade) is a busy man. Besides maintaining his groove and firing his sorceress sidekick Yzma (Eartha Kitt), he’s planning to destroy one of his villages to build a new themepark to save his birthday - equitable for himself. Yzma wants revenge for her notice, but when her preferable-leg up man Kronk (Patrick Warbuton) botches the assassination job, Kuzco is transformed into a llama and expelled from his field. He becomes the chattels of lowly llama herder Pacha (John Goodman) - whose home was set to become Kuzco’s playground - and the two must resolve their differences and get back to the sovereignty before Yzma can usurp Kuzco’s throne.
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TINY ROCK ? Richard Jenkins is equal of those actors whose coat you know but probably can't domicile. You characterize as possibly you went to school with him or encountered him in some professional capacity. He is a rangy, balding male with a supportive of smile and spruce gloomy eyes that confer him a hawkish feature, but his suggestion falls squarely in the conventional range. He looks like what he is: a 60-year-old white gink. Accoutre him in a coat and tie and he could be a barrister, disconcert him in a write up jacket and boots and he'll pass as a construction foreman.
This familiar ordinariness serves him well in his career - Jenkins has become one of themost sought-after character actors in the industry. He plays Charlize Theron's father in North Country, the ghostly patriarch in the HBO series Six Feet Under and a gay FBI agent in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster. He works a lot.
"He works so much for a reason," Tom McCarthy, the actor turned filmmaker whose latest movie, The Visitor (opening today in Little Rock), rests squarely on Jenkins' shoulders. "And the only reason he hasn't had this kind of elite role before is timing and opportunity. Everything to him is just what it is, it's very real and it's very simple, and that's what makes him heartbreaking and hilarious. Richard is a guy you can just believe."McCarthy says he wrote The Visitor with Jenkins in mind.
He says that Jenkins' character, a depressive college economics professor named Walter Vale, had been kicking around in his head for some time. And after the modest success of McCarthy's first film, The Station Agent (2003), he realized he had "some Hollywood capital" to spend.
"I wasn't in a rush to go direct a large movie," McCarthy says.
"I wanted to keep it personal. I was very affected by some of the research, by some of the characters I had in mind for the story.
I wrote the script independent of any studio or financing. And when it was time I showed it to my producer and I told my agent, who is also Richard's agent, to give it to him and see if he wanted to do it. He very quickly got back to me. We had this very funny lunch where I asked him, 'Well, do you want to do it?' and he said, 'Yeah.' And that was the end of the discussion."Jenkins says even he was surprised that McCarthy thought he could get the financing for the film without a bigger star in the lead role. But he had been impressed with The Station Agent and loved the new script.
"I don't know if I could have done this when I was younger," Jenkins says. "It's taken me quite a few years to get to trust myself - to understand that if something is going on, that can be interesting. You don't have to explain it, you just have to do it.
"Walter is a guy who really watches. This is a guy who does not communicate verbally very much. He reacts to things around him, and it kind of awakens him when he sees a life that he didn't know was out there. So Tom was willing to put the camera on me and let this thing develop." The Visitor is a film of accumulated moments. It doesn't rely on typical devices of exposition, narration or flashback.
"When you read scripts, you typically see a line that goes something like: 'You're my brother,'" Jenkins says. "Well, he knows you're his brother.
You're not reading that for the other character, you're reading that for the audience. This kind of exposition - 'You're my wife and we've been married 25 years' - Tom just doesn't do that.
Anything that comes up like that, he takes it out. This film is a real character study where the camera is like a window peeper.
And it's not used that way anymore, not very often. Tom likes to watch."McCarthy says the script, like most of his writing, started with the characters. In addition to Walter, he had an idea for a creative and free-spirited Arab musician - based on the sort of people he encountered during a trip to Beirut.
"I wondered why I never saw these people depicted on screen.
That's where Tarek came from," McCarthy says. "Then I had to think about how these two characters might meet." In The Visitor, they more collide than meet - when Walter comes back to a New York apartment he has owned for 25 years, he finds Tarek and his Sudanese girlfriend ensconced in the space. Eventually this meeting leads Walter to a passion for African drums, into the Kafkaesque bureaucracies of the U.S. immigration and Homeland Security agencies and into an unexpected, remarkably tender relationship with the young musician's mother, Mouna, played by formidable Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass.
"He falls in love, really," Jenkins says. "He's this guy who just pretends. He doesn't do anything. He's stopped living.
Everything is about his book - 'I'm working on my book' - what's that? He doesn't teach, he's only got one class. It's the same old crap." Jenkins refers to a scene late in the movie when Tarek's mother asks him in passing about his work in progress, and he snaps at her: "I can't really talk about it with someone who's not a writer." "When I watched it later I went, 'Oh my God,'" Jenkins says. "I couldn't believe how much anger there was in that, and how much self-loathing is in that kind of anger. And I don't even really apologize. There's such deep self-loathing. And it's not specific. He's just stopped." Mouna barely reacts to his explosion.
"She's always just sort of laughing at him," Jenkins says.
"She's bemused by him." When the cast was rehearsing, "There's a line at the end where Hiam calls me 'hebebe' which means 'beloved,'" Jenkins says. "And she said to me, 'I don't know. You don't call just anybody hebebe.' So I looked at her, and I said, 'So you're going to make me earn it? ' And she said, 'Richard, if I can't say it, I can't say it.'" In The Visitor, the ordinary looking Jenkins delivers an extraordinary, convincing performance. When the time comes, Mouna has no trouble delivering her line.
E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
This article was published May 23, 2008 at 3:58 a.m.
MovieStyle, Pages 41, 43 on 05/23/2008
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Two of the lucky — and identifiable — ones
In the documentary A Jihad for Love , a South African Muslim named Muhsin Hendricks is shown being profiled on a radio show, coming clean to listeners about his unorthodox views and radical lifestyle. Listeners respond by phoning in vitriol: “We should definitely bring back the death sentence for this guy,” says one. “It’s unacceptable. He’s bringing down the name of Islam.”
You might imagine Hendricks is a terrorist, or at least a sympathizer. Nope: He’s gay.
Before he came out, Hendricks was a Cape Town imam raised in a strict Islamic home. When he was a teenager, he knew that the Koran seemed to forbid homosexuality; the book’s teachings about Sodom and Gomorrah called for such people to be stoned to death.
So Hendricks prayed for his temptations to be taken away. He married and had kids. But when a separation from a close male friend left him grieving, Hendricks revealed his true feelings to his wife and set out to change the thinking that one cannot be both gay and a devout Muslim.
Writer-director Parvez Sharma’s debut feature documentary is a needed introduction to an issue that’s quietly disrupted the Muslim community while more internationally relevant problems of suicide bombers and profiling have been bullhorned.
Besides Hendricks, several gay and lesbians are profiled, capturing Muslims from Cairo to Paris to Turkey. Most have reached the point where they’re self-accepting; others, such as a Moroccan Arab woman named Maryam, still believe that their sexuality is a sin. Nearly all talk of begging Allah to make them “normal.” Maha, Maryam’s girlfriend, recalls praying to either “get rid of this or die.”
Though some of Sharma’s subjects live in countries that do not punish homosexual acts, many still refuse to be fully identified onscreen for fear of retribution from their families or exile from their mosque. That caution is understandable, but it doesn’t exactly make for compelling viewing: Sharma mainly blurs faces, though he’ll also film people from behind or let us see one eye.
Mazen, an Egyptian man who was arrested at a gay club and imprisoned in 2001, tells the bulk of his story while we look at the back of his head. Three years later he’s in Paris, watching footage of the man responsible for the raid. “Today I’m ready to reveal my face,” Mazen says and slowly turns for Sharma to capture his profile. It should be a dramatic moment, but it just feels unnecessarily staged.
The documentary’s bigger failing is its repetitiveness. The Koran addresses homosexuality only in a passage about Sodom and Gomorrah, and that’s the teaching every person portrayed here—and there are approximately a dozen of them—is butting his or her head against. Hendricks brings the most insight to the subject, and it’s heartening when another scholar agrees to meet with him to discuss the issue.
But while Hendricks lays out a solid argument that the punishment called for in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was in response to rape and brutality, not same-sex attraction, the scholar has a quick answer: “You are just playing with words,” he says. “No person can make an interpretation to suit his desires, or her desires, when you have clear-cut verses.”
With each familiar story, you wish Sharma dug a little deeper into the issue. Still, his message conveys. You ache for the outcasts and semi-closeted and cheer for couples such as Ferda and Kiymet, who openly show affection even while in front of a mosque. Especially touching is one man’s trip to Canada, where he seeks asylum. “Today is my new birthday,” he says upon his arrival.
Ultimately, too, this documentary’s message is one that is all too universal, relating to many people whose religion pronounces their lifestyle a sin. Hendricks may parse the Koran’s specifics, but a lesbian named Sana argues the case for acceptance best: “My loving a woman caused no harm.”
The face of a terrorist? Well, like they say, it’s complicated.
The word “jihad,” which means “struggle,” may have been correctly applied in Sharma’s documentary. But Traitor uses the connotation that the world is unfortunately more familiar with: “Jihad” still refers to a struggle but one fueled by extremism and violence.
This political thriller fleshes out a story by Steve Martin—yes, the wild ’n’ crazy one—about the pursuit of a former U.S. Special Operations officer and lifelong Muslim who has gone to the dark side, selling explosives to terrorists and committing violent acts himself. Samir (Don Cheadle) lived in Sudan until he witnessed his father killed in a car bombing.
He and his mother moved to Chicago when Samir was 12, but stints in the military took him all over the world, eventually leading him to where we meet him as an adult: Yemen, negotiating a detonator sale when FBI agents Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), Max Archer (Neal McDonough), and what seems like a small militia open fire. Samir and one of the clients, Omar (Said Taghmaoui), are imprisoned.
In prison, Samir proves to be both sinner and saint. He literally feeds the hungry, standing up to the jailyard kingpin who’d rather let another convict starve. But he’s a tight-lipped smartass to Clayton and Archer, not seeming to care that his chances of freedom will be slim without their help.
Omar initially doesn’t trust Samir but gradually accepts that he’s a “brother” and wants to help the Islamic fight against America. “I only wish to serve [Allah’s] will,” Samir tells him, even if it means killing innocents.
Wait, this is Don Cheadle?
Given the violence and trauma he experienced as a child, it’s easy to imagine the devout Samir following a vengeful path. But for the first half of Traitor , Cheadle’s character seems more akin to Clayton’s initial impression: “opportunistic, perhaps, but not a fanatic.”
When Samir and Omar escape prison and begin plotting attacks, though, Samir switches from instructor to participant, first helping to kill eight people by planting bombs at the American consulate in Nice. He balks when he thinks a suicide bomber is too young and experienced, insisting each “mission” be carried out correctly.
However, “it’s complicated,” as Samir tells a former girlfriend during a brief stop in Chicago. (With characters blowing up stuff in one country and walking the streets of another two shakes later, Traitor feels like a heavily armored Amazing Race .) All the complications added by screenwriter-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff make this 114-minute chase a bit of a slog.
But even viewers burned out on talk about politics and war will be queasily engrossed by conversations inside Samir’s cell, especially when one of the leaders explains that “[People] should accept that each American is responsible for its government’s crimes.” The tendrils and intricate planning of such an organization give a fresh perspective of the FBI’s job, suggesting that hunting down those intent on murder and destruction isn’t so a simple task. And just when you start to get bored, a giant d’oh!-worthy plot turn makes things exciting again.
As always, Cheadle’s performance is a fine one: His character’s ambivalence about his actions is readable on his face only when it’s necessary to clue viewers in to the layers of the story. Pearce, playing another by-the-book good-guy but with a Southern-boy lilt, is just as effective but less irritating here than he was in, say, L.A. Confidential . (Wasted, however, is Jeff Daniels, in a crucial-but-tiny role that would have been better served by a no-name.)
Nachmanoff’s worst sins are an abundance of chess metaphors, an unsteady camera that’s not quite Bourne–like but still somewhat nauseating, and tiresome talk of Samir’s religiousness, which culminates in a truly ridiculous parting shot. It may be more appropriate to the Cheadle we’re used to, but dirtying him up didn’t necessarily require later polishing him to a holy gleam.
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Wally Norman (Kevin Harrington) is the foreman at the local meatworks, a in character Aussie genealogy bloke in a bush town. He’s dragged into statesmanship when warhorse would-be senator Willy Norman (Alan Cassell), in a white lightning-induced divulge, puts Wally’s name instead of his own on the nomination form as a prospect for Federal Parliament, against the disdainful F. Ken Oates (Shaun Micallef). Willy’s sidekick Myles (Nathaniel Davison) convinces Wally to run, and Wally’s family are licence behind him, but his tendency to muffled when making a speech is just one of the hurdles Wally has to overcome if he is to go to Canberra and be a bring up for the people. The other is the crooked deal between his political contender and the crafty Willy.
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Scarcely everyone has at some decimal point had the funny feeling of waking up from a nightmare and not being entirely unswerving whether you were dreaming or whether it actually happened. The terrified, disoriented concern can be overwhelming. Now, imagine yourself in that status quo, except that it can happen to you while you’re in mid-conversation with someone. You’ll drink a pretty good idea of what was prevailing on with Susanna Kaysen, a young woman who ended up being committed to a mental institution pro close to a year, diagnosed with the vague “borderline personality disorder.”
As the film makes clear, and is emphasized in the commentary, there’s no dark clandestinely to be uncovered and no easy answers; this cloud descended upon her and later lifted and no one is really sure why. This provides for a complex and interesting drama that doesn’t utter us a approval solution. Rather, we submit to a journey of inquiry that takes us into some unexpected places.
Winona Ryder turns in an prodigious completion as Kaysen, a perplexed youthful daily in the late 60’s who is having a multiplicity of mental problems for no plain reason. While she starts idle as a spoiled child with serious chain-smoking habit (a sad crutch that Ryder uses far too often as a character trait), during her confinement she develops an emotional warmth and power that is compelling. Angelina Jolie won a well-deserved Academy Award for the benefit of Superlative Supporting Actress as the sociopathic Lisa, who befriends Kaysen and at times seems to be in restrain of the hospital; she certainly knows which strings to pull and buttons to make on everyone far her. Jolie can be alternately charming and absolutely paralysing in this situation; a childlike female Jack Nicholson is the closest approximation that comes to mind.
Whoopi Goldberg and Jeffrey Tambor also donate excellent performances as institution staff who are taxing to help but are often at the unceasingly of their unflappability with the riotous prepubescent inmates.
The film adaptation of Kaysen’s autobiographical libretto takes a few liberties with the actual facts of Kaysen’s tall tale, but does so in a vogue consistent with the themes and values of the log, so there is spot to quibble about on that nicety. One area that the film does cheat in is minimizing the hallucinations that Susanna suffered; while some of these were shot, they were draw (and can be rest in the deleted scenes section). We get a quotation to Susanna’s belief that for a in good time dawdle the bones in her hand vanished, but in the deleted scenes we in reality spot the hallucination, with a greater impact. The end result is to off with Kaysen seem more like a dupe of a trumped-up diagnosis, a la Frances, than someone actually suffering from a mental disease. The deleted scenes impute it far more clear that there really was something wrong with Kaysen, whatever it might bear been, and that she wasn’t just having mood swings.
The direction of the skin is stellar, as we are transported via flashback to numerous episodes of Susanna’s incipient madness with seamless transitions. The sound design helps a loyal deal in making these transitions. We truly feel as if we are coming unstuck in time with Kaysen (the director in his commentary acknowledges the debt to Slaughterhouse-Five on this point, but I have in mind it’s accomplished more fluidly here).
Overall, an terrific cast gives first-rate performances in a gripping, if somewhat torturous drama. The finale is a masterpiece of emotional concentration, and can be a bit fussy to watch; this isn’t because of butchery or the love, but because the actresses really recoil back the derma of their characters and let us picture what is in their innermost hearts.
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The Marx Brothers first film made in Hollywood. Their third film was also the first to be written for the silver screen (The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers had been plays). It’s directed by the dependable Norman Z. McLeod, who lost control of the manic, energetic foursome as they ad-libbed their way through the film (much to the dismay of writer S.J. Perelman).
They are four stowaways hiding in kippered herring barrels for the last two days on a luxury ocean liner bound for New York. They spend their time on the cruise trying various ways to avoid the captain and the crew. While causing mayhem they get mixed up with rival gangsters Alky Briggs (Groucho and Zeppo are given guns to act as his enforcers) and Joe Helton (Chico and Harpo are hired as his bodyguards). Upstart Alky wants to eliminate retired millionaire racketeer Helton and take control of the mob. The Brothers disperse aboard the liner trying to avoid the dullish first mate. While on the run Groucho tries to make love with Alky’s sexy but bored wife Lucille (Thelma Todd), Zeppo goes for romantic strolls with Helton’s sweet daughter Mary, Chico becomes a barber, and Harpo joins a “Punch and Judy” puppet show.
Once they’ve arrived in New York, the Marx Brothers all try to pass customs as Maurice Chevalier (each trying to do an impersonation as proof). They then head to Helton’s Long Island mansion to crash his society party. When Helton’s daughter is kidnapped and placed in a nearby barn by Alky’s gang, the boys come to the rescue and save the day.
The Brothers offer lunacy, anarchy, and unbound nonsense for their Depression audience as they mock the foolish ways the rich behave aboard the luxury liner. It’s filled with absurd one-liners, insulting quips, and puns. It’s not their top stuff, that comes later with Duck Soup, but it’s a good indication of what’s in store for their future films.
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Since it's not, though, we have to take it for what it is: a shooter that lets you use terrain to shape the battlefield. Somewhat unique, sure, but that won't shake the fact it's also about a team of American soldiers fighting a war in a country full of sand, which is less unique.
Send an email to the author of this post at plunkett@kotaku.com.
Fritz the Cat is a feline white-bread poseur, a pseudo-intellectual attending New York University, where he chases chicks, smokes pot and strives to be “with it” even when he’s not steadfast what “it” is. His reckless sense of adventure leads him into bathtub orgies, the turf riots, throw over wastelands, radical public affairs, and a dormitory fire of his own creation. Swell-headed and self-centered, he considers himself a profound philosopher and poet, while he invests more effort in personal pleasure than in following his brood over.
Underground comix inscription Robert Morsel created Fritz as an modify-ego of sorts, sketching his Disney-esque initial adventures for years before the nineteen-sixties gave Fritz a wider and more hip platform in publications like Lead Comix. Fritz is a furry Everyman, a gray tabby who exemplifies the first-class and worst qualities of the sophomoric adult male—his annoy at the Establishment is incoherent, ineffectual, and a little bit disingenuous, while his personal relationships tend to begin and end with his own fulfilment. The near the start Fritz the Cat stories were loose and funny—Fritz bedding and devouring a cute junior bird (literally), or working as a Bible salesman in the Midwest. During the nineteen-sixties, Crumb used Fritz to voice his own uncertainties about the counterculture, lampooning diverse movements with a jaundiced cartoonist’s discrimination. Fritz rides the wave of rebelliousness and fancies himself a revolutionary when it’s convenient, but he’s not immune to its occasional hypocrisies or the consequences of his own actions. The iconography of Crumb’s urban “furry animal” domain is self-evident and borderline offensive, populated by porcine policemen and disastrous crows, but his doff on the changing times remains complex and pointedly spoofing.
Scrap was reportedly thwarted in the animated Fritz the Cat film, adapted and directed by Ralph Bakshi. Both artists came revealed of the New York commercial art world—Crumb toiled as an artist for American Greetings Corporation, while Bakshi worked at Terrytoons during the hushed-end invigoration house’s final years. There’s no doubt that Bakshi took some liberties with Crumb’s characters and material—the film contains more visible violence than the strips constantly did, presaging some of the director’s predilections in his later work, and some characters are merged and modified to serve the story needs of a feature-length film. Bakshi’s screenplay also added sundry less verbose animated gag sequences, including scenes in a synagogue where kibbitzing rabbis swallow one’s words and joke as a fugitive Fritz attempts to elude two policemen.
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But Bakshi’s cloud and Crumb’s comix are more alike than they are different. Several key sequences are lifted instantly from the archetypal Fritz strips, with rap session, personality designs and layouts closely matching Crumb’s underived work. Fearless, darkly delightful backgrounds confer the movie “underground” credibility, as do references to the Fillmore East and Peter Max. And the spirit of Fritz, self-anointed philosopher, observer and world-class lover, comes through blaring and unburden in enthusiastic rules. Bakshi’s uniquely urban approach to animation finds its foundation securely in this, his debut feature effort, and Crumb’s feline anti-star survives the translation better than, it is possible that, his designer realized. The film isn’t perfect—its episodic structure meanders from one set chessman to another, and the animation and bring up execute are occasionally a bit sloppy. The 1974 sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, went much additionally afield; this time around, it’s even now recognizably R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat—not “Li’l Fritz,” or “Fritz the Cat and the Ghost Mashers,” or “Fritz and Not make sense Sanctuary.”
It should be noted here that, while Fritz the Cat gained considerable notoriousness as the first animated film to do an “X” rating, it’s hardly pornographic. Yes, there is exhaustive-frontal nudity, and yes, there is animated sexual sexual connection. But the sex isn’t explicit, and there are no animated “money shots” or salacious “fan service” moments. The shafting is portrayed merely as in the main of the fabric of the times, along with the drugs, distort, ethnological tensions and pinko movements that give the film its raw texture. Most Hollywood productions of the era ignored the counterculture or misunderstood it, focusing on hairdos, pop music and other fads with a thinly-veiled “those crazy kids” posture. By that beau ideal, Fritz the Cat presents a remarkably clear-eyed view of America in the sixties—the animated ridicule melts away, and we’re left with a portray of a society in turmoil and transition. The film isn’t perfect, and Bakshi’s later American Pop does it better—but few animated films even attempt this level of honesty.
Despite some profanely humorous dialogue and three strong lead performances, “Faithful” fails to proceed from tolife as a film. Director Paul Mazursky and screenwriter-famed Chazz Palminteri have made on the contrary superficial efforts to “open up” the latter’s well-received play relating to a depressed productive woman and the touch man hired by her conceal to kill her. As a result, this determinedly far-out comedy-theatrics too often seems talky and static. Pic may post unimportunate numbers in urban markets, but suitable won’t find its largest audience until it reaches video and refund TV venues.
In her first movie role since 1990’s “Mermaids,” Cher manages the difficult feat of appearing at once haggard and beautiful. She is well-cast as Margaret O’Donnel, the neglected wife of a New York trucking-company owner (Ryan O’Neal) who’s having an affair with his much younger secretary. When Jack takes a business trip on the day of their 20th anniversary, Margaret turns suicidal. Before she can take an overdose of pills, however, she’s interrupted by Tony (Palminteri), who immediately ties her to a living room chair.
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At first, it appears that Tony intends to talk Margaret to death. But it turns out that he is delaying only until he gets a call from Margaret’s husband. Once Jack is far enough away to establish an alibi, he will dial his home number, let the phone ring twice, then hang up. That will be Tony’s signal to murder Margaret, so Jack can collect $ 5 million in insurance.
This leads to an hour or so of edgy give-and-take. Margaret and Tony converse on a variety of topics, covering everything from adultery (he insists that fellatio doesn’t count as marital infidelity) to the relative merits of smooth and creamy peanut butter.
Most of the time, Tony is antagonistic and sarcastic, repeatedly berating Margaret for putting up with Jack for so long. But Tony, too, has his deep-rooted problems: He inadvertently caused the death of his sister during a mob-ordered hit. Occasionally, Tony interrupts his verbal sparring with Margaret for a phone consultation with his psychiatrist, broadly played by Mazursky. But the shrink is of little help — the best he can do is recommend that Tony read “The Road Less Travelled.”
It isn’t terribly surprising that an erotic attraction eventually develops between Margaret and Tony. Indeed, this development willcome as even less of a surprise to viewers who already have seen two films with strikingly similar plots: “Diary of a Hit Man” (1992) and last year’s “Bulletproof Heart” (aka “Killer”). What is surprising is that right after Margaret and Tony get horizontal, “Faithful” abruptly shifts gears.
When Jack returns home and tries hard to disguise his surprise at finding Margaret still alive, Mazursky seems to time-warp back to the 1970s. All at once , his new pic has the intensity and emotional tone of his “Blume in Love” (1973) and “An Unmarried Woman” (1978). Jack and Margaret pick over the carcass of their dead marriage in an extended dialogue packed with two decades of bitter resentments and broken promises. The writing, acting and direction are so splendid during this section of the pic, it’s a little disappointing when the hit man reappears to wrap up the plot.
Here and elsewhere in “Faithful,” O’Neal serves notice that he has evolved into a first-rate character actor during his seven-year absence from movies. (His last major film was 1989’s “Chances Are”).
Cher has a trickier role and has a more difficult time maneuvering through some much wider mood swings. She is never less than credible, but there are times when the effort is obvious.
Palminteri behaves with all the confidence and brio of a man who knows he has written some hilarious lines — most of them unprintable — and a nifty role for himself. Even more than Cher, however, he is hard-pressed at times to make theatrically stylized dialogue sound like realistically casual conversation.
Cinematographer Fred Murphy and production designer Jeffrey Townsend do standout work in conveying the luxury of the O’Donnel mansion. The soundtrack contains some apt standards; Dinah Washington’s rendition of “What a Difference a Day Makes” is used to especially amusing effect. Other tech credits are fine.
Mazursky reportedly clashed with the pic’s producers over the final cut, to the point of briefly threatening to remove his name from the credits. Presumably , since Mazursky continues to be billed as director (and co-star), he got his way, and “Faithful” is exactly the picture he intended to make. For better or worse.
