Mike Nichols (1994)
A man gets bitten by a wolf and starts turning into one. He bites another man. The second, younger man, who has recently usurped the first man in a publishing firm, is also having an affair with his wife. The first man has developed a lupine keenness of smell – it draws him to the second man’s apartment where he discovers his wife en deshabille. This sounds like the premise of a comedy of manners; with Mike Nichols at the helm and Jack Nicholson as the lycanthropic cuckold, your anticipation of a jaunty social satire is increased. The high-powered cast – which also includes Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, Christopher Plummer, Kate Nelligan, David Hyde Pierce, Richard Jenkins, Eileen Atkins, Om Puri and Prunella Scales – evinces a faintly self-satisfied air of participating in something deeply witty but, for a good part of its two hours, Wolf is just an unimaginative and uninvolving horror movie. You don’t associate Mike Nichols with that genre. He may have wanted to confound expectations by focusing more on this aspect of the screenplay (by Jim Harrison, Wesley Strick and an uncredited Elaine May) than on its comedic side. But Nichols’s heart isn’t in the horror and, by soft-pedalling the comedy, he succeeds only in making what is, in my experience, his worst movie.
The only thing that’s vaguely funny about Wolf is having Jack Nicholson exhibit – through special effects – a wolf’s speed and athleticism. Nicholson has often used his wall-eyed look and trademark leer to suggest animality but he gives a lazy, underpowered performance. When, near the end of the film, he tells Michelle Pfeiffer – as the daughter of the tycoon (Plummer) who owns the publishing house – how much he loves her and that when he looks at her ‘I know what God intended’ – it seems we’re meant to think he’s being sincere but Nicholson’s tone is merely, mildly sarcastic. More crucially, you don’t get a strong sense of what his character was like before the wolf bit him so the transformation (which, not unexpectedly, comes and goes as the plot requires) hasn’t much impact. James Spader, as his rival at work and in bed, is considerably worse. Bitten by Nicholson, he too turns into a wolf: Spader is so laboriously creepy from the start that he needs every bit of the hairy-face-and-yellow-eyes make-up for us to notice any change. It’s striking that one of the few scenes in which the werewolf theme is more or less ignored is just about the best in the film – a tetchy exchange between Nicholson and Pfeiffer, as they drink milk and crunch toast. Pfeiffer is mostly wasted, though – as is Richard Jenkins, even if he does manage to bring a bit of eccentric individuality to the role of a police detective. The music is by Ennio Morricone and the cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno, two more talents who were wasting their time on this picture.
16 March 2012
