Film review

  • Parents

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bob Balaban (1989)

    This horror story, set in suburban Massachusetts in the 1950s, derives essentially from the familiar but nonetheless powerful idea that children, as they begin to think about their world, wonder what parents get up to when the kids aren’t around to see.  The theme is made clear in an eavesdropping conversation between only child Michael Laemle and Sheila, his sole friend and he daughter of his father’s boss.  Their families have just had dinner together and the two sets of parents are now playing cards, with a good deal of meaningful eye contact and body language.  ‘What are they doing?’ asks Michael.   ‘They’re changing,’ replies Sheila.  ‘They change when we’re not here.’  Bob Balaban’s film bears her out:  when Michael has gone to bed, his parents not only have sex – they gorge themselves on human flesh in order to get turned on.  The script (by Christopher Hawthorne) and direction aren’t shaped imaginatively.  Parents would be more compelling if it developed from a description of Michael’s troubled feelings about Mom and Dad’s nocturnal world – a world mysterious to the child but naturally assumed to be normal by a grown-up audience – towards revelation of the horrific particular secret of the Laemle parents, a secret which justifies Michael’s worst fears.  If the story were handled in this way, we might at first see Michael as neurotic then be startled out of our complacency.  Bob Balaban makes too much too sinister from the start – the wallpaper in the family’s dining room, the lighting there and in Michael’s bedroom and, especially, Randy Quaid, as Michael’s father, Nick.  Although she looks as immaculate as her kitchen, even Nick’s wife Lily seems not quite right.  She is played by Mary Beth Hurt, an actress who was too android for comfort even when cast as reasonably normal human beings in Interiors and The World According to Garp.  Some of the images associate sex and gastronomy but Balaban doesn’t exploit the subversive potential of the material – to present cannibalism as a ghastly extension of copulation.  When Michael discovers Mom and Dad having sex, the scene is plainly a red herring (although lit dazzling white:  the only red is the blood staining Nick and Lily Laemle’s mouths).

    Still, Parents quickly hooks you and holds your attention.   Although it’s inevitably nasty, it’s fairly disciplined in its diet of shocking highlights; and if the cannibalisation of Michael’s educational psychologist is hard to stomach (because Sandy Dennis makes of this character a really likeable eccentric), the film’s ending is well judged, illustrating the undying trauma of Michael’s real-life nightmare without trying to cap it and leave you suffocated by horror running rampant.  In the daylight sequences, the unreal brightness of the colours vivifies wittily and ominously the emphatic but innocuous palette of domestic movies and commercials of fifties America.   (The cinematography is by Ernest Day.)  Bryan Madorsky is remarkable and worrying as Michael.  Looking like a profoundly glum sibling of the little boy in Mary Poppins, Madorsky both contributes to the audience’s unease and invites our sympathy.  Sheila tells him she’s from the moon (and will return there once she’s completed her education) but it’s Michael whose look is so wan and alienated that he might be an extraterrestrial.  It’s as if his parents’ unusual habits have begun to dehumanise their child physically yet Michael retains a capacity for emotional suffering:  this is an odd, engaging combination.  And Mary Beth Hurt’s mannered, artificial quality gets to be increasingly right in her role here:  her deep throaty giggle, which offsets a tinny voice and neat, tight gestures, amusingly and eerily suggests Michael’s mother’s guilty secret.  The physical and sensual contrasts supplied by Hurt, Juno Mills-Cockell (Sheila) and Deborah Rush (Sheila’s mother) give a peculiar, surprising edge to the Oedipal aspect of Parents:  the young girl is the most maternal presence while Hurt’s pristine, almost zombified girlishness often makes her seem more like a sister to Michael than a mother.  Even in his clean white shirts, Randy Quaid’s paterfamilias looks bestial and to belong to a different species from either his wife or his child.   Mary Beth Hurt’s physical kinship with her son has the effect of making Mom’s corruption by Dad all the more horrifying to Michael – and poignant to the audience.

    [1990s]

  • Mr & Mrs Bridge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Ivory (1990)

    James Ivory’s portrait of a middle-aged, middle-class, mid-American couple in the middle years of the twentieth century makes its (few) points in the first fifteen minutes then keeps restating them for close on two uneventful hours.  We soon perceive the discreet tyranny of the outwardly impeccable Walter Bridge (Paul Newman), a respected Kansas lawyer, and that his desperately ingratiating wife India (Joanne Woodward) is either too witlessly naïve to recognise, or too scared to admit, the fact.  The script, an adaptation by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from novels by Evan S Connell, indicates but doesn’t develop the personal and sexual tensions at work in the lives of the Bridge parents and their three children.  The patronising legends on the screen at the end of the film (which tell us what happened to the characters subsequently) underline with satisfaction the family’s stagnant conservatism.  It’s not surprising, within this undramatic scheme, that the few colourful bits of Mr & Mrs Bridge seem melodramatic.  In a satirical demonstration of Walter’s imperviousness to external pressures for change and India’s worried, dogged deference to her husband, the Bridges resolutely refuse to be deflected from their dinner in the country club as a tornado rages and all the other diners flee.  The sudden symbolism of the scene is not only obvious but incredible:  you feel the Bridges are too socially correct to make a spectacle of themselves in this way.  Mrs Bridge’s unconventional friend Grace is driven round the twist by the suffocating, complacent formality of the world she inhabits and its demeaning expectations of the wives of successful men but, as Blythe Danner plays her, Grace is so incongruously eccentric from the start that you can’t understand how she was ever acceptable to the group of which she’s a distracted, frustrated fragment.  Nor is it clear why, if Mr Bridge is typical of his time and place and class, all the other town bigwigs so easily accept the lustfully life-affirming company of the local psychiatrist (Simon Callow with a cartoon Teutonic accent) and allow their wives to go to him for analysis.

    The two stars are defeated by the mean-spiritedness of the material.  Paul Newman scrupulously avoids condescension but the actor’s sense of fair play contradicts the script’s definite, smug contempt for Mr Bridge; although he gets a hold on the role eventually, Newman expresses, more than anything else, uncertainty.  (Besides, pomposity, however quiet, doesn’t come easily to him.)  Joanne Woodward gives a surprisingly busy (Oscar-nominated) performance.  Combining some odd, old-lady movements with an alarming perkiness, she trots round like a geriatric on speed and  works up an exhausting repertoire of doe-eyed simpers.  Woodward’s characterisation epitomises the film:  she has defined Mrs Bridge by the time the opening titles are over.  What’s irritating about India fuses with what’s tiresome about Woodward’s playing of her.  This is an example of a performer being overpraised because her style is so different from usual:  you can’t miss the fact that Joanne Woodward, whose trademark is a sane, unforced realism, is acting her socks off here.  The whole picture and the praise it received from plenty of critics are an illustration of a tendency to mistake lack of action for psychological penetration.  Margaret Welsh, Kyra Sedgwick and Robert Sean Leonard are the three Bridge children.  (The last-named seems to have cornered the current market in being parentally oppressed:  he was also the suicide in Dead Poets Society.)  Austin Pendleton has a good, unpredictable bit as India’s former art teacher, fallen on hard times and trying to sell subscriptions to ‘Doberman’ magazine.  The cinematography is by Tony Pierce-Roberts.

    [1990s]

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