For example, A Thousand Acres is a retooled King Lear; in it Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, and Jason Robards take turns wearing long faces. The Myth of Fingerprints also boasts a first-rate cast -- including Julianne Moore, Blythe Danner, and Hope Davis -- but sets them to nattering and moaning. It's like Etch A Sketch Eugene O'Neill.
Then there's The Ice Storm, in which suburban swingers from the Seventies get it in the neck. It's payback time for all those crum-bum parents who, neglecting their children, mate-swapped their way to purgatory. The Ice Storm is one chilly movie, but things couldn't have been so freeze-dried back then. If they were then nobody would have had any fun, and there would be no need for such puritanical cinematic purges.
At least one new movie, Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers, features an extended family that actually resembles a real one. You couldn't ask for a more headache-inducing matriarch than Anne Meara's Rita, and, as her daughters Jo and Eliza, respectively, Parker Posey and Hope Davis have just the right battle-fatigued look. The family members in The Daytrippers are a familiar horror, but Mottola is such an observant writer-director that they stop being horrible after a while. We can't stand apart from them because we are them. The togetherness in this movie is earned because it hasn't been tenderized for us.
The most unexpected of family-themed movies turned out to be Paul Thomas Anderson's porno-world epic Boogie Nights, in which the family that screws together stays together. In the way it thumps for family values, Boogie Nights is probably the most conservative film of the year. Of course the togetherness on view in this film is just as rigged as the otherness on view in a film like The Ice Storm. If Anderson had really gotten inside the hot-wired circuitry of the porn business, his "family" of skin-flick luminaries (played by, among others, Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, and Don Cheadle) might not seem so cozy. But Anderson wants us to know that family is where you find it, and redemption is at hand. Hallelujah!
Maybe if Boogie Nights had done better at the box office it could have been turned into a real daisy chain of a franchise. There actually was talk for a blink of a Boogie Nights TV series -- I would like to have seen the sponsors for that one.
Working-Class Hero: In Good Will Hunting, the touchy-feely hit of the year, Matt Damon's Will is advised by his friend, played by Ben Affleck, to leave South Boston if he wants to avoid living out a dreary, working-class life -- as if the only Southies who remain are doomed to an existence of beer-swilling and mindless construction work. So much for this film's highly touted enlightened class-consciousness.
Is There a Doc in the House? In Michael Uys and Lexy Lovell's Riding the Rails, former road kids of the Depression, now in their seventies and eighties, recount their train-hopping days. It's a beautiful act of documentary remembrance -- the kind of work Studs Terkel might have come up with if he were to make a film.
Apocalypse Whenever: Titanic is the great apocalyptic movie of the year because it has the good sense to take place in 1912. None of this millennium stuff, like we get in Kevin Costner's The Postman, a futuristic ode to the postal service that is one of the most flabbergastingly silly films ever made. Return to sender.
Stop Making Sense: The art of narrative has been in decline for so long in Hollywood that a plausible, well-told story is now a bona fide anomaly. It may seem perverse for me to cite for opprobrium certain films and spare others, so please regard these hits as a random sample.
In The Game we're put through a lot of paranoiac paces only to face a finale so insultingly implausible you expect to see the screen shimmy in that wavy way that lets you know it's all a dream. A bad dream.
The premise of the overtouted In the Company of Men -- a sub-David Mamet-ish horror show for people who want to believe the worst of human male apes -- rests on the fact that its two guy protagonists have been close friends for years. But if that's so, why is it such a revelation for one of them to discover that the other, who has been acting throughout like a king-size backstabbing scumball is, in fact, a king-size backstabbing scumball?
The character played by Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets is a Scrooge redeemed. But what exactly is the source of his Scroogeness? Well, he's an obsessive-compulsive, so much so that he never washes with the same bar of soap twice. But then, just for good measure, he's also shown to be a racist and a homophobe. And he still manages to make a great living writing romance novels. These puzzle pieces don't fit: Being obsessive-compulsive doesn't make you a racist (though it may make you a romance novelist -- how else could anybody write those things?). Perhaps writer-director James L. Brooks had Tourette's syndrome in mind? Or maybe he just wanted to load the deck with as many jokers as possible. The joke is on him. (Or is it on us?)
My top ten films of 1997:
1.Hamsun
2.L.A. Confidential
3.A Self-Made Hero
4.La Promesse
5.Grosse Point Blank
6.Wag the Dog
7.Riding the Rails
8.The Daytrippers
9.Conspiracy Theory
10.Mimic
