Film

Lively 'Dead,' Waterlogged 'Island'

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

The following is a brief review of those films which opened in Los Angeles at the end of the year, during which time the paper was out of publication:

"Balto," the new animated adventure from Steven Spielberg's Amblimation turns out to be a rather straightforward, predictable, yet surprisingly lively feature with handsome hand-painted cells in a year that saw the overwhelming impact of computer technology on the cartoon industry. Taking its story from an actual case, "Balto" tells the rousing story of a half-breed wolf/dog who helped to bring much-needed remedies to a diphtheria-stricken Alaskan village in the early part of the century.
Kevin Bacon brings Balto's voice to life; he makes Balto's relationship with a female companion--voiced by Bridget Fonda--especially sweet. Younger kids seem most likely to enjoy this brief, thinly plotted tale, but the endearingly eccentric characters (especially the Russian goose) help to keep adults entertained. "Balto" features little of the Broadway-caliber music or rapid-fire humor that have distinguished such recent Disney films as "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin," but taken as a throwback to the old-fashioned style, "Balto" succeeds as one of the better non-Disney animated features.
"The City of Lost Children," the second feature from "Delicatessen" directing duo Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, is the year's most stunning visual trip, bursting at the seams with some of the most bizarre and imaginative sets, costumes, and make-up ever realized on screen. As with their previous feature, story is secondary here, yet the narrative is still quite riveting and haunting in its depiction of a bitter old man who does not possess the ability to dream and who performs sinister experiments on young children in an attempt to solve his dilemma.
Ron Perlman, who made a name for himself as the beast in TV's "Beauty and the Beast," shows surprising viability as a leading actor as the imposing, but soft-spoken One, who helps a renegade band of youths rescue one of their own from the hands of the evil scientist. Jeunet and Caro's vision owes bits and pieces to Maurice Sendak, F. W. Murnau, and their avowed mentor Terry Gilliam (director of "Brazil" and "12 Monkeys"), but the ultimate realization is uniquely theirs.
Complete with a darkly fanciful closing song performed by Marianne Faithful, "The City of Lost Children" is an increasingly rare thing in contemporary films: a genuine fantasy that creates an entirely original world and populates it beautifully with deliriously offbeat characters and indelible images that capitalize on our most primal fears of shadowy creatures that lurk in the dark corners of the blackest night.
Director Darrel James Roodt waited until apartheid had ended before starting production on his new film version of "Cry, the Beloved Country" and the decision seems most fitting. The ebbing tide of racial tensions in that most historically divided of countries has created a fitting forum for a reinterpretation of this classic story and its portrayal of a tenuous bond between two people who have every reason to hate each other, yet find that they can not.
The casting of James Earl Jones and Richard Harris in the lead roles seems inspired and, though the film trudges too dutifully through its early moments, "Cry, the Beloved Country" takes impassioned flight upon the first scene with Jones and Harris. To observe Jones carefully as the country minister who must travel to Johannesburg when his son is accused of murder is to realize that Jones is essentially playing himself, accentuating that legendary voice and reserved manner that comprise his persona and serving the part just fine.
Harris, on the other hand, is impressively inward and restrained -- as he has been in his entire career -- as the father of the murdered boy. In all of their shared scenes, Jones and Harris speak dialogue, but it is what remains unspoken that is most crucial to the situation. Roodt's direction is equally superb, making good use of montage and slow-motion techniques, and far superior to his earlier helming of "Sarafina!" and the Patrick Swayze vehicle, "Father Hood."
Late in the film, another minister remarks that he hopes that someday, when blacks and whites have attained equal status, that the oppressed will not become the oppressors. It is a line that resonates with contemporary relevance and which encompasses the entire weight of "Cry, the Beloved Country" as a thoughtful and delicately measured call for tolerance.
"Cutthroat Island," which comes heralded as not only the year's second most expensive movie, but one of the most expensive movies ever made, turns out to be far more entertaining and light on its feet than "Waterworld," its soggy, seafaring predecessor from earlier in the year.
Still, like "Waterworld," "Cutthroat Island" too often seems awash in a sea of unrealized good intentions with a dull, well-trodden plot about a legendary buried treasure. The story mistakenly labors over a duplication of the freewheeling spirit of those old Saturday morning serials instead of finding a raucous spirit of its own.
Geena Davis is quite wonderful as the adventurous pirate Morgan Adams, proving to be at least as viable as any of Hollywood's more conventional male action heroes, but the flimsy screenplay rarely matches her enthusiasm. Matthew Modine is also amusing, far more comfortable in this large-scale action picture than he seemed earlier in 1995 in the miserable "Bye Bye Love."
He and Davis have a natural chemistry and easy charm that makes their quiet moments together delightful. They show just how much life can be pumped into a tired formula by casting the appropriate actors, and it's nice to see Frank Langella back in films as the villainous Dawg Morgan. As director, Davis' husband Renny Harlin has fashioned several genuinely spectacular stunt sequences and, for a while, "Cutthroat Island" is a lot of fun.
The whole thing goes on for far too long, though, ultimately collapsing under the weight of all its expensive trappings. The estimated $85 million budget (roughly half of "Waterworld"'s estimated cost) is at least evident on the screen this time, but both "Cutthroat Island" and "Waterworld" are perhaps most useful as studies in the bloated egos and boundless excesses of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking.
Tim Robbins' "Dead Man Walking" is a remarkably honest and daring American film in its bold depiction of our nation's justice system and the ways in which the families of murder victims cope with the loss of a loved one. Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn turn in two of the year's finest performances as two of the year's most three-dimensional characters, a death-row inmate and the nun who volunteers to be his spiritual counsel.
Though Robbins' direction seems occasionally overdone, the overall impact of "Dead Man Walking" is quite devastating, as it asks difficult questions about controversial subjects that ultimately have no concrete answers. At times, our sympathies lie with all of the film's characters, though we find it difficult to argue with the story's final resolution.
One wishes that Robbins had spent even more time depicting the lives of the victims' families, as that is when "Dead Man Walking" is at its toughest, most pointed, and most uncompromising. Still, Robbins proves himself to be a fine director of actors and challenges viewers to engage in the various debates presented by the film, to take their own opinions into consideration, and to emerge somehow more enlightened about the impenetrably gray areas that encapsulate the value of human life.
Sadly, Mel Brooks' "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" serves only as further evidence that the once-great comedy director seems to have entirely lost his sense of comic timing. Though this new film benefits from the casting of fresh, young talents like Lysette Anthony ("Husbands and Wives") and Steven Weber (TV's "Wings" and the film "Jeffrey"), they're given little good material to work with in this surprisingly serious retelling of Bram Stoker's classic yarn about the Transylvanian count with the deadly seductive charm.
Spoof-veteran Leslie Nielsen adjusts nicely to Brooks' relaxed pace in the title role, and he gets most of the film's funny scenes, while Peter MacNicol steals the show as the Count's unwitting servant Renfield. It's a shame that these good comedic actors aren't put to use by a better vehicle with a more able director.
Most of the jokes fall tragically flat when their punchlines are finally delivered, while Brooks takes those few genuinely comedic premises he can muster and repeats them well beyond their respective saturation points throughout the rest of the film. In the age of Quentin Tarantino and the Zucker brothers, one can only wonder if the breakneck humor of the 1990's offers any hope for the comic legend whose "2,000 Year-Old Man" routine remains a comedy classic.
Ulu Grosbard's "Georgia" tells us that the music business serves as a large, extended family for those who are a part of it and that sometimes the interpersonal wounds run just as deep. "Georgia" is about both kinds of relationships -- familial and professional -- and it concentrates on one that is both, between two sisters played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham.
Leigh plays Sadie, who has spent a lifetime living in the shadow of her more successful older sister Georgia (Winningham). They're both singers, but Sadie plays the biker bars and other assorted dingy clubs; she's a heroin addict and she looks like it, but her whole life is one constant trip through the wringer. Georgia is a popular folk singer who sells out large stadium audiences and "Georgia" is about the mutual attempt by both sisters to reconcile their deep-rooted differences.
This is more than some movie-of-the-week family drama, though, as none of the tensions that pain Sadie and Georgia are so easily resolved within two hours. Precisely that refusal to tie all storylines up into a neat package at the end of the picture is one of the things that makes "Georgia" so refreshing and memorable. Beyond that, director Grosbard and screenwriter Barbara Turner (Leigh's real-life mom) understand that the film is really about Georgia, as her insistence on a trouble-free, picture-postcard lies at the root of Sadie's life-long detachment from her family.
Winningham does an exceptional job of subtly conveying her character's inherent complexity, while Leigh continues to impress as one of her generation's finest and most passionate screen performers, showing increased range in a character turn of raw emotional power. Like few films anymore, "Georgia" seems like a movie from the `70s (when Grosbard was doing some of his best work) in its refusal to conform to Hollywood's increasing demand for the generic and easily digestible.