by Hadley Hury
he very
idea of Billy Crystal and Robin Williams topping one another for two hours
may make moviegoers who like a little subtlety with their mirth want to
head for cover. Increasingly over the past several years, Crystal -- a comic,
who even at his most inventive, has never shied from the over-explicit --
seems to have been modeling his performances after some old trouper playing
to the back row of a matinee house at a pre-WWI vaudeville theatre.
He usually seems to be having a ball -- a performance quality
that proves infectious for his diehard fans -- but the obvious impenetrability
of ego his successful career affords can be a little off-putting to others.
(As anyone who actually made it through Crystal's hosting of this
year's Oscar ceremonies, the most abysmally unentertaining in history, might
attest. His big production number that evening was laboriously unfunny,
something only a mother could love, yet when it met with a cool reception,
as did many of his scripted and ad lib remarks throughout the evening, Crystal
simply laughed more himself and adopted an almost remonstrative attitude
toward the audience.)
Williams -- even though he is one of the most manic comic performers of his generation -- has always exhibited a lighter touch and a surer, more gracious sense of his audience. Much of his character-channeling concert work has been brilliant; he's a harder fit for movie roles, but a few have worked. In weaker screenplays or when insufficiently directed, his intelligent zaniness can lose its shape. It never becomes as "in-your-face-you're-gonna-love-this-or-else" as Crystal's work, but it can run amok, outstrip its gossamer tonalities and transitions, and grow taxing.
In the new Fathers' Day, the veteran comic screenwriting team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (Splash, City Slickers, Parenthood) and director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Animal House) have created a vehicle that affords both of these funnymen stars an opportunity to avoid their worst habits. Crystal, especially, is enabled almost to disappear for once into a real character. Playing what is a bit more the straight-man role of the two leads, he skirts both the rock of his usual overemphasis and the hard place of his (sometimes arrogant) deadpan. What comes through is a deftness of understatement and timing that is welcome and refreshing. And though his role is contrived and underdeveloped, Williams, too, has at least some of the security of character that seems to serve him best in film, a structure from which his particular quicksilvered talents may sally forth and then return before exhaustion.
Jack Lawrence, a slick, successful attorney (Crystal), and Dale Putley (Williams), a hapless but sweet teacher and struggling writer, are brought together in a search for a teenage boy. A woman both men had affairs with 17 years previously (Nastassja Kinski), contacts each of them to say that she isn't sure which of them is the missing boy's father, but that that can be sorted out after they find him. None of this is as improbable as the sub-plot about the bad company with whom the boy (Charlie Hofheimer) has surrounded himself.
The big problem with Fathers' Day is that having allowed these comic actors a premise in which to do a little screen persona retooling, it quickly leaves them on unamusingly barren ground while it lumbers away in an ill-conceived effort to cover the demographics map. The movie is so eager to reach its baby-boomer adult audience that it mistakes its fatuous, sentimental story about a son gone astray for real emotion; it defeats its early promise and ends up giving Williams very arbitrary solo-turns and Crystal a few crumbs of good reaction scenes. By aiming vaguely down the middle of audience expectations, the writers produce a scattershot effort that is never genuinely moving and only intermittently funny.
IN
FRENCH DIRECTOR LUC Bresson's would-be sly, sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth
Element, Bruce Willis plays a cabdriver in a befouled metropolis of
the future who is marshaled into service to save the planet from Evil. If
that weren't enough, the film relegates Willis to doing only what he does
worst, smarming and smirking without cease. The plot does not bear mentioning.
The hardware, special effects, and otherworldly creatures are derivative
of a half-dozen far superior movies. The inside-jokeyness of the script's
tired humor is spiritless, unamusing, and tedious in the extreme. The movie
thinks it is smart, hip, clever, and coolly postmodern. It is none of those
things, only stupid and loud and ugly.
The Fifth Element is an obscene waste of time, effort, and money -- even in a pre-audience, industrial, and cosmic sense. A sense of thingness. A reason for being. Factoring in the waste of audience time, interest, and dollars makes it something more than an obscene waste. Something -- for those whose theologies accommodate such concepts -- closer, perhaps, to sin.
Even if we let go of the utilitarian, even moralistic, suspicion that $90 million should, in an era of slashed education, arts and human services budgets, actually be used to buy something -- accepting the notion of art for art's sake, or movie for movie's sake, or even escapism for escapism's sake -- we are still likely to walk away from The Fifth Element with something close to existential, or at least cultural, despair.
Why?
Why is there this punishingly tacky, unsuspenseful, fatigued and fatiguing, derivative, witless, imagination-bereft, sub-cartoon, boring piece of junk? The Fifth Element is not a bad movie; it is anti-movie. It is not pop, or even low, culture; it is anti-culture.
History offers the only encouragement. Periods of decadent art (and the latter of those two words must be stretched almost unrecognizably to accommodate this cinematic non-event) are often followed by periods of great renaissance in the arts and humanities, science, and philosophy.
The Fifth Element strongly suggests that we may not have long to wait.