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Candid Reviews of Movies
Just Hitting the Big Screen

by Cole Smithey

Down To You

What to do with beautiful, young, romantic actors when they’ve aged too much to play ardent teens? — throw them into a feature vehicle as college kids graduating onto slightly more advanced levels of lust and love (in this case spelled L U V). First-time writer/director Kris Isacsson toys around with his own half-baked formula of romantic comedy to the arrant distraction of his actors and audience alike. Handsome Al Connelly (Freddie Prinze Jr. – She’s All That) and his cute-as-a-button girlfriend Imogen (Julia Stiles – Ten Things I Hate About You) grapple beyond the "tingly" phase of their relationship with lots of mutual voice-over narration about the ups and downs of their experience while attending a non-existent Manhattan college. There should be a law against lovers lip-syncing soul songs to each other in movies.

Prinze and Stiles are great to look with their perfect smiles and remote emotions, but can’t compensate for Isacsson’s artificial atmosphere and dialogue. Imogen is an artist who "summers in France" while Al’s passion is fish, a symptom of influence from his celebrity chef father Chef Ray (Henry Winkler). Al’s best friend Monk (Zac Orth) becomes an instantly successful filmmaker after his porno debut in a straight-to-video movie called "Ben Huge." Monk lectures on the university circuit about his cinematic process with an affected Orson Welles accent and Oscar Wilde attire while taking time out to advise Al in platitudes about the illusion of love. There’s goth-chic Cyrus (Selma Blair), an M.I.T Chemistry Major drop-out turned predatory porn actress who has the hots for Al and any other guy in her field of vision. Al’s perpetual identity-crisis friend Eddie Hicks (Shawn Hatosy) is equally licentious when he’s not busy getting bad haircuts, his nipples pierced, or lifting weights.

Down to You is a fairly one-sided affair, leaning heavily to the male faction. Al gets unduly mad at Imogen for opening her eyes while they’re kissing and really gets to blow his lid when she informs him that she slept with a scrub who calls himself Jim Morrison. Imogen finds a false alarm pregnancy by Al as grounds to, well, sleep with another guy. If this soapy hurlyburly isn’t enough, Al at one point chooses to drink Imogen’s shampoo in the hopes of purging her forever from his system. It’s as if Isacsson has spliced together every juvenile male conjecture about sex, love, and childish success in a big city environment into a script structure (using the term loosely). It’s a wobbly recipe for even television entertainment and proves disastrous on the big screen. Isacsson’s message is this: young Americans are too beautiful, spoiled, and dumb to achieve love by anything other than default. Perhaps he believes a similar oversight will drive audiences to see his film instead of other currently running movies.

It has become agonizingly evident that American production companies are desperate for content. Even swallowing up the independent market of upstart filmmakers has proven insufficient for filling Hollywood’s void for cinema worthy ideas. Kris Isacsson was picked up by Open City Film after a mild success at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 when he won Best Short Film for his film Man About Town. Movies like Down to You serve to block out screen space that would be better served by an increasingly ignored foreign film market or simply by better American filmmakers. For as much whining as goes on about the promising throng of fresh film school graduates with maxed-out credit cards and great movies sitting on shelves, production companies tend to overlook talent more than reward it. Last year’s sleeper dark comedy, Six Ways to Sunday, by Adam Bernstein was pushed out of filled theaters by rival film companies with enough clout to replace the screens with movies equivalent to the Miramax distributed Down to You. Romantic comedy is the most problematic film genre at best. For every ten great dramas there is probably only one decent romantic comedy to be had. Unfortunately the same ratio holds true for first-time directors.

A Map of the World

A Map of the World is a viscerally complex movie that drains you. The film generates a detailed orbit of life-force and uncompromising momentum all its own. You can’t help leaving the cinema emotionally, intellectually, and physically weary. But it’s a kind of weariness that confirms your life and the humble precarious place that each of us fills in society. Director Scott Elliott’s debut is a layer by layer revelation of character and relationship traits that, when dissected out of context as they are in the story, display society’s ability to paint a person’s integrity in the harshest of brush strokes even to their closest family.

Alice Goodwin’s (Sigourney Weaver - The Ice Storm) fall from societal and familial grace is due in part to an accident that takes the life of her friend and neighbor Theresa Collins’ (Julianne Moore - Magnolia) two-year-old daughter Lizzie, and in part to her own misjudgment of her surroundings. Alice and her husband Howard (David Straithairn - Limbo) are educated city types who have taken over a dairy farm in Wisconsin on which to raise their two daughters. Alice works part-time as a nurse at a large elementary school and takes full responsibility for the girls and housekeeping while Howard blithely busies himself milking cows and tinkering around the farm. Alice has irreverently made an enemy of Carole Mackessy (Chloe Sevigny) the mother of a boy Alice must repeatedly treat for various illnesses at school. Lizzie’s death under Alice’s supervision in turn inspires Carole to falsely press charges against Alice for child molestation of her son Robbie.

Alice’s subsequent arrest blindsides her and her family at a time when she is trying to have a nervous breakdown — but no one will give her the peace to have it — from the guilt she feels over Lizzie’s death. Instead, Alice snaps out of her depression and takes a caffeinated approach to jail confinement as a ‘desert island’ kind of opportunity. She ironically asks Howard to bring her a copy of Dostoyevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" and hunkers down like a fish to water for the time it will take free her. If William S. Borroughs’ premise is that the truest test of a person’s intelligence is their ability to adapt, then Alice is a genius. But Alice has unknowingly let her guard down once too often at school and the local community consumes itself in a witch-hunt far more vicious than Alice realizes. Alice’s dilettantish habit of not properly editing herself to strangers and selfishly presupposing situations haunts her every movement.

Sigourney Weaver commits a virtuoso performance in A Map of the World beyond even her credible range of past triumphs ranging from the super tough sci-fi heroine of the Alien films to the appealing diplomatic attaché of Peter Wier’s The Year of Living Dangerously. For all of the attention being brought to Hilary Swank for her fine performance in Boys Don’t Cry, even that achievement pales by comparison to Weaver’s fearless and self-deprecating approach to the largely unsympathetic Alice Goodwin. Audience sympathy is drawn as much for Alice from her husband’s ill handling of his responsibilities toward Alice as from her own state of indignation. In a scene where Howard cruelly snubs Alice’s earnest plea for affection in bed, her necessity to be emotionally well-defended becomes clearly defined.

Adapted from the Jane Hamilton novel, A Map of the World is charged with meticulous fibers of American familial, sexual, communal, legal, and societal contradictions that are currently prevalent in movies like American Beauty, Magnolia, and Being John Malkovich. Scott Elliott addresses getting cinematically inside Alice’s head and at the root of her contradictions by subtle use of subjective camera work and brief memory inflected flashbacks that serve to identify buried truths. Elliott has already developed a state-of-the-art facility for story telling that seamlessly exposes undercurrents of history, emotion and reason in every second of screen time. There is nothing wasted in the gratifying efforts of this ensemble production which includes impressive work by Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry), and Arliss Howard (Full Metal Jacket) as Alice’s agenda driven attorney.