Pleasantville
Bulworth and
Analyze This
I have a theory (and it is mine!) The reason that so many of the more recent Hollywood comedies have not worked is that the writers have been seduced by the dark side of the farce.
Too many scripts (or the director's gloss on them) are derived from lessons supposedly learned on television situation comedies, where the plot has to be established and resolved each week within a 24 minutes confine. The trouble with the lesson of such shows is that the resolutions used are usually crass, bathetic or involve a deus ex machina.
The latest batch of three high-concept comedies from the USofA demonstrates the downside of the absorption of this lesson. They are what I have dubbed "semi-comedies". The writers have set-up the situations well and carried the audience into the unfolding plot, often with very sympathetic and involving characters. Just when you feel that, at last, here is a movie that will chart its way through to an ending worthy of the beginning, bang, boom, crash.
The writer finds him/herself painted into a corner and resolves the situation with almost Leacockian simplicity.(Stephen Leacock - Canadian humorist introduced to me by my father - who satirised the western with a story which ended a chapter with the hero helplessly bound and tied. The next chapter commenced "With one bound, he was free ...".)
Good writers (and better directors) can overcome this problem as both The Truman Show and Out of Sight demonstrate. But most seem to find the easy way out more accessible than working at a satisfying ending.
Exhibit one ...
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For those who have missed it, Pleasantville, sends two modern teens from a divorce-hit home into the characters of the teen children of a 50s' Hollywood sitcom. You know the sort: perfect Mom and Dad (who works at some unspecified but highly lucrative job which brings in the endless money necessary to maintain the seamless bourgeois lifestyle of the family). The two modern kids bring with them the end of Pleasantville's innocence through the girl's sexuality and the boy's far more subversive knowledge of the world outside Pleasantville. Thus a Pandora's Box full of temptations is opened to the formerly blinkered vistas of the townspeople. The trope used to show the transformation from innocence to experience is the change of the characters and their surrounding from monochrome to colour. This is particularly effective in the case of Mom's self-awakening and Sis' discovery of a world outside her own sexuality; and to a lesser extent in the druggist's immersion in a full palette of artistic possibilities.
But, in other cases, the transformation is too easy or unconvincing, and the last half-hour of the movie is crass, becoming sententious and preachy. This is a shame as David Ross' previous scripts, Big and Dave, had demonstrated an ability to end a story.
Joan Allen and Reese Witherspoon are very good indeed and Jeff Daniels shows again that the nebbish is his ideal part. But the movie doesn't quite work and, unlike The Truman Show, doesn't really say much about real people's reaction to strange situations, seeing as in most cases it's about the addition of a third dimension to previously flat characters.
And, in any case, the movie is even more dangerous, in a truly frightening and subtle way. What most viewers don't realise is that they are subjected to a two-hour brainwashing on behalf of the proponents of "colorisation", trying hard to convince an antithetical audience that the conversion of film noir masterpieces into bland colorised versions is acceptable and even an improvement. We have to resist these attempts to so fool us into accepting inferior successors' retrospective reinvention of a superior auteur's creative masterpieces.
I have a strange (almost quirky) liking for Warren Beatty's oeuvre. Reds, particularly, is a fine film. And I really appreciate the effort made by those tilling the often barren soil of political satire. From The Great McGinty on, it has been the occasional basis for great film-making. So I was quite happy half way through Bulworth as Beatty's mad eponymous senator gaily sent up all the tenets of partisan political correctness, to the horror of, inter alia, his chief spin doctor, played by the frequently annoying Oliver Platt.
But the movie soon teetered towards the untenable. Beatty couldn't quite get a handle on the performance side of the equation. If ever a movie demonstrated the need for actors not to direct themselves, Bulworth is it. There, within the increasingly cogent political satire inherent in Bulworth's truth-telling, Beatty's performance becomes both more mannered and more repellent. It wasn't just that I had difficulty in maintaining any empathy with the character, it was that Beatty, instead of portraying the sort of endearing madness needed to pull off the role, had lapsed into deranged imbecility.
And the Halle Berry character - leaving aside the problems arising from the usual Hollywood mismatch between the senescent male and his ingenue love interest - just didn't jell at all. There was no development in the movie that led to her declaration that J Billington Bulworth was "her nigger". Nor any logical reason from the character why Don Cheadle's gang leader would act as he did. Finally the sudden emergence of the lobbyist-killer is the most banal deus ex machina conceived to allow for an ending that is not a conclusion.
In essence, in better directorial hands, or alternately with a more patterned actor in the lead, Bulworth could have provided the political commentary on the subservience of the legislature to sectional interests. Instead it showed a descent into madness that was too stark for the sort of satire being attempted. Having written himself into a corner, Beatty did not have the craft logically to resolve the plot.
Robert De Niro who should do more comedy, is cast well. Midnight Run remains about the best of his work although he is deadly effective in the Scorsese gangster films he has done. Billy Crystal, on the other hand, does the Oscar night very well but rarely lights up the screen when given the opportunity as a lead. He is best in a minor, or cameo, role like Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, but still has an engaging presence here. Lisa Kudrow is the best of Friends and the only one who will make it big in movies. She was very good in The Opposite of Sex and even in Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. Joe Viterelli is one of the modern band of strong character actors and has just the right face and body to make him the perfect stooge gangster, when he sets his mind to satirising the boss's right hand man. Other reliable character actors like Bill Macy (My Favourite Year etc) and Chazz Palminteri (The Usual Suspects, Bullets over Broadway et al) are also cast. Harold Ramis directed one of my favourite films of the nineties, Groundhog Day, and is a fairly reliable director. He helmed Analyze This.
Why, then, with all this ammunition, is the film pretty much a blank?
Partly it is that the script gives all the good lines to De Niro and (to a lesser extent) Viterelli. Crystal and Kudrow are kinda left out on the side with not enough to do nor many good lines. This is particularly the case with the Kudrow part which is badly underwritten. Crystal's shrink has possibilities but the subplot with his father (Macy) is too trite for words. Still De Niro, Viterelli and Crystal (at times) provide enough spark for the film to roll along well for quite a while.
But Palminteri seems to be in a different movie. Perhaps no-one told him it was a comedy and a lighter touch was needed. He has the ability under the right director as Woody Allen demonstrated but misses badly here. Similarly the mob meeting scene is all over the place. Crystal is supposed to be doing his shrink's version of the Don Corleone accent. Instead he lapses more then somewhat into Miracle-Max-meets-Damon-Runyon. And the scriptwriters, having written themselves into a corner from which they can find no escape, fall back on the cliched shoot-out in order to resolve their difficulties. And just to demonstrate how subverted by sitcom techniques they are, they even add an anti-climax that plays very much like a television episode's bathetic last minute.
The movie which was brought to mind and with which I would adversely compare Analyze This is The Freshman, in which Brando sent-up his mafia don personality. De Niro's pastiche is as good as Brando's but the script is not as tight nor the denouement as well conceived, and the under-rated Matthew Broderick did much better in the 'straight' role than Crystal.
Conclusion
Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard showed in Shakespeare in Love, and Andrew Nicol in The Truman Show, that good scripts can lead to solid endings and do not require bathos or illogical appearances so to do. Lesser talents are giving us semi-comedies, where a strong first half is let down by television sitcom techniques.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]