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Candid Reviews of Movies
Just Hitting the Big Screen

by Cole Smithey

Hanging Up
Feminist Theory — Diane Keaton Directs A Pastry of Social Satire

If people really hung up on each other as much as the characters in screenwriters Nora and Delia Ephron’s Hanging Up nobody would be talking to anyone anymore. But because the telephone is treated as a character unto itself, linking the twisted lives of three sisters and their sick but flamboyant father, every convention seems plausible. Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally, Heartburn) and sister Delia (co-writer on You’ve Got Mail) adapted the script from Delia’s 1995 novel — with the film’s winning cast of Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, Lisa Kudrow, and Walter Matthau seemingly pre-determined. Matthau (The Fortune Cookie) reigns as a force of nature — and providing the movie’s funniest bits of humor — as Lou Mozell a divorced and kooky father to three self-possessed women. Matthau proves that he’s still a master of comedic timing and turn of phrase delivery in what is nearly his 70th feature film. Although Lou is a tragic character, Matthau exemplifies the ways humor and attitude make aging bearable.

The story pivots on middle sister Eve (Meg Ryan - Addicted To Love) who accepts the responsibility of the sisters’ duties to their sick father. Eve is a flying example of a modern alienated woman caught in Sisyphus mode between her sisters, marriage, son, father, and her job as a party planner. Eve’s type-A personality sister Georgia (Diane Keaton) is the Editor-In-Chief for a self-titled woman’s magazine and their younger sister, Maddy (Lisa Kudrow - The Opposite of Sex), is a fairly flaky soap opera actress aching for attention. A web of telephone-spun dialogue weaves among the family members who employ the appliance to order, torture, demand, comfort, and connect with one another.

Hanging Up serves as a brief social document attesting to the current backlash from the ‘American Dream’ and some of its symptomatic problems wrought upon modern womanhood. Multi-tasking is shown in all of its foolish glory with the sisters grappling with cars, houses, work associates, mates, children, dogs, and each other over their father’s worsening illness. There’s no mistaking a generational longing that the confused daughters and their complex father radiate in the ways they reference their mutual past. Eve’s flashbacks are blurry visions of a ’50s era bliss reflected in old photos and pool-side swimming sequences that underscore a time of less activity and social demands.

There are two solidifying moments that bookend Eve’s relationship with her parents. The first comes when Eve drives to visit her mother Pat (Cloris Leachman – Young Frankenstein) to appeal to her to return home to Lou. Pat says, “Mothering doesn’t turn out to be a reason. It didn’t take.” The mother’s non sequitur makes an uncomfortable statement against motherhood and wifely existence that forever disenfranchises Eve while containing seeds from popular feminist theory. The second moment comes in flashback from a Halloween party for Eve’s son when Lou bursts into her house drunk and levies a final insult by telling Eve that when she was born her mother said, “Send that one back.” The parents’ cruelty is what is at issue here — that, and the ways in which the women have chosen to defend themselves from it with their too-busy lifestyles.

Diane Keaton directs with a detailed and sassy cleverness distinctly rooted in her early beginnings with Woody Allen — from Play It Again Sam to Manhattan Murder Mystery. The fact that Eve’s character doesn’t wear bras, for example, pitches a glow of ’70s-era women’s liberation. Keaton brilliantly exploits Meg Ryan’s natural physicality with the assistance of Director of Photography Howard Atherton (Lolita, Fatal Attraction). Keaton directs and redirects the audience’s attention within the frame constantly to reveal distinctive layers of plot and character. Hanging Up is a smart, high-wire act, bridging comedy and tragedy by the canny performances of its well-rounded cast. There’s a rollicking chemistry to every moment with a cinematic energy and momentum that pulls the audience across the threshold of its satire with a slap and a tickle.

Reindeer Games
Past Due — Even Christmas Wouldn’t Have Helped

There’s a scene in director John Frankenheimer’s Reindeer Games where nefarious small-time gang leader Gabriel (Gary Sinise - Forrest Gump) literally throws darts at his ex-convict hostage Rudy Duncan (Ben Affleck - Good Will Hunting). After flinging a slew of near-misses past Rudy’s face Gabriel nails a couple of darts right into his chest. The scene is a telling example of the backward suspense Frankenheimer sets up against screenwriter Ehren Kruger’s (Arlington Road) tawdry script. If the scene had opened with Affleck’s character getting punctured by the darts then the following darts that missed would have been that much more threatening and suspenseful for the audience. It certainly isn’t an opportunity that a director like Brian DePalma or William Friedkin would have missed.

Gratuitous violence can be great fun in a meticulous action film like Reny Harlin’s 1996 The Long Kiss Goodnight but in Reindeer Games the fury merely serves to mock the audience in its disjointed and mispronounced use. Everything has a kitchen sink feel to it. Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate 1962, Ronin 1998) stoops to an all too obvious corruption of musical devices, such as a repeated dissonant musical motif taken directly from the shower sequence in Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s utterly disorienting to hear the signature Norman Bates theme shrieking rrraaam - rrraaam - rrraaam in an action thriller where the timing on every double-cross comes a couple of scenes too late and the voice-over narration makes you feel like the filmmakers were to lazy to show what they decided to literally tell you.

Reindeer Games was initially due for release in December 1999 and that stands out like Rudolph’s nose. The soundtrack consists almost entirely of Christmas tunes like “Jingle Bells,” “Silver Bells,” and “Little Drummer Boy.” Ehren Kruger pigeonholes the movie so wrongheadedly around Christmas that it seems nonsensical to screen it on the threshold of Spring. Although Kruger won great acclaim for his tersely written script for Arlington Road (directed by Mark Pellington) he seems to have taken advantage of that renown to become a genre hack scriptwriter shooting wide of the mark as with his script for Scream 3. Every plotline and bit of dialogue in Reindeer Games feels derivative of every other action film you’ve ever seen but without even any joy behind it. It could be that Kruger is biding his time working on studio scripts while honing ‘real’ scripts on his own time. If that’s the case he would do better to dedicate his efforts to screenplays as substantial as Arlington Road.

Suppose for a moment that Ben Affleck was as devastatingly handsome and talented as he and evidently a handful of producers think he is. Suppose that he had never had the good fortune to be paired with Matt Damon on co-writing and acting in Good Will Hunting. He would probably then be working in movies as a male equivalent to his Chasing Amy co-star Joey Lauren Adams (Big Daddy). Affleck started out appropriately as schlock director Kevin Smith’s leading man in Chasing Amy and it’s a miscarriage of entertainment justice that the tow-headed actor has not remained permanently relegated to Smith’s charge.

In Reindeer Games Affleck flashes his contemptible collection of real biceps tattoos in character as Rudy an imprisoned convict days away from being paroled. But never for a second is there any suspension of disbelief afforded by Affleck’s posing performance that would make you believe this guy could actually be a jailbird. Where an actor like Robert Mitchum could send shivers down an audience’s spine in The Night of the Hunter by the sheer force of his inflection, the only shivers Affleck sends seem to be in the nether regions of his female fan club. With talented young actors like Edward Norton, Christian Bale, Jude Law, and Adrien Brody, it’s difficult to watch Affleck without thinking how much better any one of those actors could have done the same role. Affleck actually brings down the quality of the acting work of Gary Sinise and Charlie Theron. And that in itself speaks volumes because Sinise and Theron are actors who do their homework and bring something substantial with them to every role they play.