Now Showing: Drowning Mona • The Ninth Gate

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Candid Reviews of Movies
Just Hitting the Big Screen

by Cole Smithey

Drowning Mona
Who Didn’t It — Black-Comedy Murder Mystery Surrounded By Yugos

The filmmakers of Drowning Mona have performed a remarkable feat by putting together probably the last four or five Yugos in the world that still run to set the tone for their honey-rich American satire. The Yugo was an early ’80s phenomenon in America because it directly addressed low-budget consumer demand for a dirt cheap automobile in spite of the fact that the brittle little cars were so economically manufactured that even rolling them off the car lot was asking for trouble. Drowning Mona is ostensibly set in the small town of Verplanck, New York where Yugos were purportedly first test-marketed. Screenwriter Peter Steinfeld’s townsfolk are every bit as apt to breaking down as their car of choice as accented by their choices in customized license plates like “UGOMONA” and “OH RONE.” When a suspicious auto accident sends the town’s most detestable matron Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) to a watery grave, almost everyone in town becomes a prime suspect for Police Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito).

American irony has given cinematic punches to the genre of black comedy repeatedly enough over the last few years to establish satire itself as a reasonably dependable entertainment framework for American movie fodder. Drowning Mona eschews the sexy spin of, say, director John McNaughton’s Wild Things or the moral gravity of Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan in favor of layering social caricature over an old-fashioned template taken from Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries. Each character is given a balance of faults and colorful habits with the lion’s share of genuine villainy falling on the shoulders of the recently deceased victim Mona. Mona’s assisted death whirls the cluster of personalities into an orbit of comic reveries before binding them together in an increasing twist of misdeeds leading Wyatt to solve the favorable mystery.

However it’s Drowning Mona’s flawless ensemble casting that turns the surprising unity of working class opposites into a spectacle of comic woolgathering. Jamie Lee Curtis (A Fish Called Wanda) is a perfect shady diner waitress/adulteress/rock star wanna-be for Mona’s disaffected husband Phil (William Fichtner - Go) to meet for motel romps involving a “Wheel of Fortune” board game. Ben Affleck’s real-life little brother Casey Affleck (Good Will Hunting) is truly the anti-Ben. All fly-away blond hair and a hopelessly high and wispy voice, Casey Affleck is thoroughly disarming as the story’s protagonist Bobby Calzone; a kid with small town aspirations of marrying the police chief’s daughter Ellen Rash (Neve Campbell - Wild Things) and supporting their family with his landscaping business. Affleck’s boy/man Bobby is all Salinas, California but with a cryptic glint sparking off of his all-too-white teeth.

Bette Midler (Isn’t She Great) has a personality that audiences either love or loathe. Her grating visage, attitude, and voice probably still give Ethyl Merman cause to roll around in her grave for all of the unwanted comparisons. Drowning Mona affords Midler an opportunity to cash in on her less desirable traits in spades. As a hen-pecking wife to Phil and belligerent mother to her maimed landscaper son Jeff (Marcus Thomas - Hearts and Bones) Mona is a picture of unglamorous, unbridled animosity. The fact that someone ended her life by cutting the brake lines on her yellow Yugo gives Police Deputy Feege (Peter Dobson - Last Exit to Brooklyn) cause to quote from The Wizard of Oz, “The witch is dead.” Playing the villain is a thankless task that Midler rises to in briskly relinquishing all vanity and ego in imbuing her character with a comically abysmal personality.

Danny DeVito (Ruthless People, Get Shorty) has a Midas touch in Hollywood. His production company Jersey Films was the foundation under such unlikely movies as Gattaca, Out of Sight, and Feeling Minnesota. You can unmistakably sense DeVito’s guiding influence around Drowning Mona’s young director Nick Gomez. Gomez won acclaim with his independent debut feature Laws of Gravity in 1995 but backslid with his hokey and depressingly bad follow-up film Illtown 1996. Gomez, like other up-and-coming New York directors, has lately been biding his time directing episodes of television shows (including “Oz,” and “The Sopranos”). He is a competent moving-picture director and shows promise by capturing the striking parody of Drowning Mona with a flourish.

The Ninth Gate
Roman Polanski Delivers The Precious Horror

The Ninth Gate is an extremely well crafted and entertaining horror film. While director Roman Polanski chooses to lilt over the horrific trajectory that tugs mercenary book dealer Dean Corso (Johnny Depp – Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas) toward the gates of Hell rather than embrace his protagonist’s terror as he did with such shockers as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or The Tenant (1976), he stakes out his own ground rules and adheres to them flawlessly. From the movie’s textbook opening scene in which Polanski’s subjective camera discerningly divulges aspects of a millionaire’s library in which imminent death approaches, to the thorough European pacing over which the devilish story unfolds, The Ninth Gate takes the audience on a joyfully evil descent into perplex other-worldly shadows.

The Ninth Gate, based on Arturo Perez-Reverte’s best-selling novel El Club Dumas, is a modern gothic horror story woven from the proposed power of satanic literature to conjure up the Devil himself. Dean Corso is an unscrupulous book broker hired by Satan scholar Boris Balkan (Frank Langella, “Lolita”) to travel from New York to Toledo, Portugal, and Paris to compare Balkin’s recently acquired 1666 edition of a rare hand-bound manual of satanic invocation, supposedly written by Satan himself, against the only two other copies in existence to verify the tome’s authenticity.

Balkan tells the amoral Corso: “There’s nothing more reliable than a man who can be bought.”

Corso’s cynical character trait of temptation is written in the sanguine fluid of money from the film’s beginning. Corso wears death on his sleeve like a war zone journalist hot for action. Depp’s fastidious performance is shown in subtle configuration as a narrative explanation of its own. Johnny Depp uses a vocal texture that rumbles from the screen in a dark pitch that catches you off guard. His economic but heavy timbre establishes a hollowness in his character dying to be filled with some unknown organic passion. At times Depp seems to recede into the film’s creaking metal and dry tinder-in-a-box settings. He suggests a precise mortal puppet being manipulated by collaborating evil forces to trace steps he cannot help but follow.

Polanski and his two collaborating screenwriters, John Brownjohn (Tess - 1979) and Enrique Urbizu, orchestrate their Faustian script in a cinematic shorthand that magnifies tiny details like subtle differences in the nine diabolical engravings which comprise the murderous puzzle that Corso attempts to unravel amidst the three volumes. Polanski drops in sudden repulsive images that give terse nods to such horror films as Hitchcock’s Frenzy, and Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. He allows scenes to play without the ersatz aid of musical accompaniment, resulting in a delightfully intimate game of call and response for the audience to conceive while the action unfolds. There are so many highly polished cinematic elements in every frame of the movie to enjoy that repeated viewing beckons.

Pauline Kael said that ‘great movies are rarely perfect movies,’ and her sense of truth certainly applies to The Ninth Gate. Actress Emmanuelle Seigner’s (Frantic) sub-plot as Dean Corso’s mysterious dark guardian angel slips through the film as a sexy and enigmatic mascot that Corso accepts too easily. There are plenty of silly bumps and loopy twists that don’t sufficiently fulfill a dynamic dramatic arc for the film’s slightly long running time, and this is not a movie that ever gives you a jolting scare. However, there is plenty to enjoy in Director of Photography Darius Khondji’s (Se7en, Delicatessen) hand-in-glove association with the masterful vision of a director who believes that content is more important than form. In the end, Dean Corso could readily be an alter-ego fugitive that Polanski recognizes in the mirror of the camera lens. It’s an image you can almost imagine.