Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • Thelma and Louise

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (1991)

    Thelma (Geena Davis), a thirtyish Arkansas housewife, and Louise (Susan Sarandon), her fortyish fast-food waitress friend, drive out of town for a weekend in the mountains.  They stop off in a bar en route.  When a man they meet there tries to rape Thelma, Louise shoots him dead and the women have to change their travel plans – they head for a new life across the Mexican border.  This Ridley Scott film is dynamic and absorbing throughout but it gets progressively less enjoyable:  it’s not just the eponymous friends who are attempting to escape from the police and various male tyrannies.  The imaginative actresses playing Thelma and Louise are trying to free themselves from the clutches of the shrewdly despicable (Oscar-winning) script.  They fail, inevitably but heroically:  Susan Sarandon does well and Geena Davis is phenomenal but it’s the writer, Callie Khouri (also an executive co-producer of the film), who is in the driving seat all along.

    Thelma and Louise has been hailed as innovative in featuring a pair of female leads in extremis and taking the law into their own hands while the male characters are dimly, demeaningly stereotyped.  Callie Khouri’s achievement is rather in recognising that the road/buddy movie is pretty reliable at the box office – and that a ‘feminist’ version of the genre is likely to prove most commercial if (a) the men are presented as risibly incompetent and (b) the tough, funny, credible women remain underdogs, essentially and eventually victims of man’s inhumanity to woman.  (That Thelma and Louise are tough, funny and credible is thanks mainly to Davis and Sarandon although, to be fair to Khouri, she has supplied some sharp wisecracking dialogue.)  The heroines, in charge but under threat, hardly come into direct contact with the main institutional and individual exemplars of crass masculine society – respectively the police and Thelma’s petty tyrant of a husband (unfunnily played by Christopher McDonald).  But the treatment of the men with whom the two principals do interact exposes the film-makers’ intentions.  This is most striking in the case of the best male performance – from Brad Pitt, as JD, the amiable, insouciant cowboy thief with whom Thelma enjoys an exhilarating one-night stand.  It would be fine if this was as much as we got of JD but, since he’s an attractive man, he must, on the film’s terms, be up to no good.  Next morning he steals the life savings that Louise has (puzzlingly) entrusted to Thelma for safe keeping.   When JD reappears later in police custody, Brad Pitt’s naturalness has gone:  a charming but slender character is being milked dry in order to make a gender politics point.

    This doesn’t quite happen with the more ridiculous macho fools whose function is to illustrate the two women’s changing feelings but the scenes involving these men make you uncomfortable in a different way.  Thelma and Louise encounter a lone patrol cop (who is nothing to do with the main pack of pursuers).  He (Jason Beghe) is cool and sinister in black uniform and shades but the heroines reduce him to a terrified, humiliated cry baby.  They hijack a stupid, leering trucker (Marco St John) whom they’ve kept meeting on the road.  Once out of his driver’s cab, this man is played as such a gibbering idiot that you feel he’s hardly responsible for his sexually offensive behaviour or capable of outraging the women after they’ve seen what he’s really like.  Up to this point, they have been more or less forced to break the law.  The cretinous trucker isn’t worth the trouble of terrorising at gunpoint so you have to accept that Louise is now simply as trigger-happy as she claims to be (‘I’m getting to like this …’).  What’s especially unsettling is the film’s infallible knack of combining this kind of ‘character development’ with easy laughs – the more unfazed by lawbreaking the women become, the more easily is the viewer expected to sympathise with them.  By the last half-hour, Scott and Khouri are well into Butch-and-Sundance-ising Thelma and Louise.  (The details of the death-defying climax here are just about interchangeable with those in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – even if the literally over the top emotional uplift of Thelma and Louise’s final image is very different.)

    You expect a Ridley Scott movie to have visual éclat but less in the way of strong characters:  this one has both and the combination is often exhilarating, especially in the opening section, when Thelma and Louise are getting ready for their weekend trip.  (It’s too bad that it’s so briefly a trip before it turns into a political mission.)  Once the killing has happened, Scott’s direction never quite regains its initial friendly effervescence but the film is always interesting to look at.  Scott’s science-fiction background and British outsider’s viewpoint combine to help him present the scale and variety of the landscape as luminous and awesome:  wherever Thelma and Louise go seems impregnated with shimmering potential – it’s a vivid illustration of the physical and mental terra nova that they’re discovering.  (The cinematography is by Adrian Biddle.)  Hans Zimmer’s vibrant, slightly sinister score fits both the look of the film and the tone of the rock songs sounding out of the women’s car.

    But what makes Thelma and Louise a successful entertainment for so long are the two leads.  The contrasts between their characters correspond satisfyingly with the different styles of the actresses playing them, although there’s a connection between Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon too – they spark each other’s performance.  We soon see that, while Louise has a clenched determination to enjoy her weekend away, Thelma, as soon as she’s out of the house, is more exuberantly transported.   This difference is reinforced by the fact that Sarandon, although very likeable, is somewhat constricted compared with Davis.  This is particularly noticeable when Louise is experiencing moments of liberation:  in these, Sarandon’s hair may be windblown but her sense of abandon feels willed.  The crucial trauma in Louise’s past that’s eventually disclosed makes sense of Sarandon’s lack of freedom but that lack is still too persistent.  There’s a scene in which Louise wanders out into a hushed nightscape and Sarandon, with her beautifully exophthalmic eyes, looks into the sky with keen, hopeful apprehension.  The moment doesn’t quite work because Sarandon is working too hard to show that a new and surprising future is revealing itself in Louise’s surroundings.

    There’s nothing studied about Geena Davis’s acting:  long-limbed and radiantly zany, she goes beyond the eccentric, honest charm which won her an Oscar in The Accidental Tourist (1988).  There are so many highlights in what she does here:  the thrilled, resonant warmth and power of her laughter in the bar scenes; her convincing shock when Louise shoots Thelma’s attacker; her grinning, sauntering entry into breakfast at a motel after her night with the cowboy (it’s as if she’s simultaneously still experiencing sexual pleasure and laughing at the memory of it).  The love interlude with JD is obviously prepared for and you wonder how Davis will bring it off – it’s only twenty-four hours since the attempted rape.  But her look of anticipation – wary and avid – as Thelma opens her motel room door to JD is perfectly believable.  As they lie in bed together and he tells her about his stick-ups, her awed, tender curiosity about his inconceivable lifestyle (and body – which she also regards as beyond her wildest dreams) is magnetically humorous.

    Half-crying, half-laughing routines may be easy to make an impact with but Davis is amazing in a scene in which Thelma recollects how Louise killed the would-be rapist:  as she tries to be jokey, the horror of what happened keeps bursting through.  She repeatedly (as does Sarandon) redeems feeble gags through her taste and her timing.  Davis is credible even when, near the end of the film, Thelma tells Louise that she’s ‘crossed over’ (that is, she’s traversed a spiritual border – rather than the physical one into Mexico).   You believe from Geena Davis’s face that Thelma is transformed.  It’s great to watch and enjoy her relaxed, rangy movement and pure emotional expressiveness.  Perhaps what’s best of all about this wonderful performance is that, as you recollect it, it seems to transcend the major shortcomings of Thelma and Louise.

    Michael Madsen plays Jimmy, Louise’s moody, dissatisfied boyfriend.  Madsen seems a little unsure but this helps to make his characterisation less obvious than the ones from most of the other men in the cast – and Susan Sarandon is pleasantly, sadly relaxed and affecting in her scenes with him.  Harvey Keitel’s conscientious interpretation of a vaguely well-meaning police chief is so much wasted energy:  this dreary character makes little sense.  Timothy Carhart is nastily effective as the man who chats up Thelma before trying to assault her.

    [1990s]

  • The Untouchables

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Brian De Palma (1987)

    The long-running television series metamorphosed into a remarkably pared-down and well-paced two hours of cinema.  The writer, David Mamet, has squeezed the life out of sensational material before (The Postman Always Rings Twice):  perhaps he means to demonstrate here that Prohibition-era Chicago is no longer so much an historical time and place as a part of American film-going experience – that Al Capone and Eliot Ness have become pop culture artefacts rather than real people.  Reinterpretation of this kind isn’t much help to a film aimed at a mass audience but – after a tentative start in which the scenes lack momentum and don’t build cumulatively – Brian De Palma’s crowd-pleasing direction galvanises the screenplay; and the character types which Mamet has written are played with zest enough to individualise them.  Throughout the picture, De Palma shows more skill (and interest) in the bits of the story that present opportunities for bravura; happily for him and the audience, the second half of The Untouchables seems to consist almost entirely of these (the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence at the railway station is particularly exciting).

    The teamwork of the actors – most of them playing members of a team – gives the film heart.  Sean Connery memorably brings the aging, honourable Irish-American cop Jim Malone to life (and death).  Although the script presents Malone as just-an-ordinary-cop, Connery’s physical authority and broad, juicy characterisation turn him into an emotionally powerful figure.  The actor’s evident relish for the role and affection for Malone are infectious.  As the young Italian-American sharpshooter Joe Stone (real name Giuseppe Petri), Andy Garcia is well cast physically and has star magnetism.  (This is the film through which both Garcia and Kevin Costner broke into the big time.)  Garcia’s face and compact body are primed for action.  His dark eyes flash; he draws his gun equally quickly.  Garcia also suggests Stone’s private feelings behind his professional persona – he’s nervelessly efficient fighting crime but caught off guard by his growing attachment to the rest of Eliot Ness’s team and Malone especially.  (Even when the dialogue makes this explicit, Garcia is still touching.)

    At first, Costner’s Ness is a bit drab and too unsure of himself:  concentrating on making the hero a believable ordinary man, Costner makes him less than credible as a leader of other men.  He’s also unlucky in the domestic scenes in that Patricia Clarkson, as Ness’s perfectly supportive wife, is hardly a helpful acting partner.  Treating her husband with (bizarre) patient condescension, she’s one artificially gracious smile after another.  Once Ness has got Malone and Stone on his side, though, Costner’s less exciting presence provides a good balance to Connery’s and Garcia’s.  Costner is particularly effective in reacting quietly to the murder of the fourth member of the team, the timid, pasty-faced Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), an accountant who suddenly finds a gun instead of a ledger in his hand.  Robert De Niro’s Al Capone is a highly entertaining, expertly judged mixture of flamboyant hypocrite and psychopathic spoiled child.  This Capone knows everyone knows what he’s capable of and he keeps reminding them:  you sense this in the Chicago pressmen’s nervous laughter when Capone cracks a joke, in the anxiously acquiescent noises of a gathering of fellow hoods listening to his cant.  (Capone illustrates his moral philosophy here by clubbing the head of one of the hoods at the dinner table.)

    Ennio Morricone’s score is a beguiling if somewhat crazy mixture of themes.  When De Palma has familiar, inspirational, virtue-triumphant music playing during a gory gun battle, the purpose seems to be to reassure – as if subconsciously feeling that you’ve heard a scene before will make the violent visuals less troubling.  Perhaps De Palma deploys Mamet’s script in an analogous way – that is, he uses this anodyne as a sedative then administers his own dynamic medicine to wake you up and, in the end, get you high.  The cast also includes the excellent Jack Kehoe.

    [1990s]

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