(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2004)
New movies in the same weekend by Kevin Smith and the Coen
Brothers – this should have been the best news for comedy since Pauly Shore
stopped making movies (sorry - just thought I’d try that one out). Well, it
didn’t quite turn out that way.
Jersey Girl
So if you take Smith, the deceptively low-brow seeming auteur of
Clerks and Dogma, and
subtract the flamboyant obscenity, the comic books and the frantic invention,
we now know that you get something close to Edward Burns. Burns is the guy who
had a brief run as a chronicler of blue-collar New Jersey (The Brothers McMullen
won big at Sundance) before his luck ran out (as a director that is – he
continues to do pretty well at scoring acting gigs). Smith’s new film Jersey Girl doesn’t
have Jay and Silent Bob, and has not one use of the f-word, and that’s even
with George Carlin in the cast. In some scenes you can viscerally feel Smith
straining to write his way around his normal vocabulary. He just about
made it – but what was the point?
Apparently rooted in some way in Smith’s new contentment as a
husband and father, Jersey
Girl stars Ben Affleck as a career-loving Manhattan publicity consultant.
He marries a book editor played by Jennifer Lopez (although it seems that we’ve
been reading the Bennifer stories forever, the two actually met on the set of
this film), and when she gets pregnant he grudgingly accepts the prospect of an
adjustment in his work-life balance. But Lopez dies in childbirth, and he’s
left with his agony and with a daughter he can’t comprehend. When a frustrated
outburst costs him his job, he moves back to New Jersey with his father
(Carlin), and eventually goes to work with the old man in the sanitation
department. The years go by, the kid grows up to be seven, and Affleck adores
her, but never stops thinking of getting back to Manhattan and into the game
again...
As if in partial compensation for his self-imposed f-word
embargo, Smith contrives a bizarre meeting between Affleck and Liv Tyler in
which she, a video store clerk, harasses him about his renting a porno tape.
This is just the most egregious of the movie’s many off moments. Sometimes – as
in the weird choice of a scene from Sweeney Todd for
the kid’s act at the school play – you think it might amount to something, but
it never lasts. In the end, Will Smith, playing himself, turns up as the voice
of wisdom, musing on the magic of fatherhood and on the wretched compromises
that take you away from your kids. I’m only guessing here, but I think the
parenting support system available to Will Smith might be a bit plusher than
the norm – plush enough, maybe, that a director of serious intent could have
looked elsewhere. As it is, Smith’s appearance seems quasi-ethereal and rather
demeaning, like his role in The Legend of Bagger
Vance.
(Kevin) Smith’s earlier movies were defiant in asserting his
tastes and sensibilities – they had a swaggering take it or leave it quality
about them. But on the basis of Jersey Girl, you
can only assume he agrees with all those cracks about his own arrested
development. His idea of an adult movie is to make himself into someone else.
As if tired of the recurring jibes about his films’ undistinguished visual
style, he hired Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters;
McCabe and Mrs. Miller) – but the film’s resulting gloss only serves to
emphasize its lack of personality. At the end of it, you feel that Smith’s in a
similar spot to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories,
agonizing over being superficial and about the meaning of it all, whereas God
only wants him to concentrate on making funnier movies. Sadly, by the time
Allen really took that advice on board, his skills had eroded. Smith’s skills
were never at that level to begin with, which I’d say makes his next move
rather critical.
The
Ladykillers
The Coen brothers’ latest film The Ladykillers
is another case of auteurs scoring below par. It’s a film of inventive, quirky
bits and pieces (much better than any of the bits and pieces in Jersey Girl) that
fail to coalesce into a whole. The film’s opening ten minutes hit you like
random cuttings from a studio floor – a credit sequence built around garbage
barges; a long stilted conversation in a sheriff’s office; Tom Hanks doing a
weird accent; Marlon Wayans in a scene that could fit in a hundred other
movies; an indescribable interlude involving a dog in a gas mask, and so it
goes on.
These early scenes set up a motley bunch of criminals, and the
old lady whose basement they intend to use as a base for digging into a nearby
vault. The film is a remake of a 1950’s British classic, and it’s hard to know
why the Coens bothered. The movie never stops feeling fragmented – it doesn’t
flow with anything close to the fluency of their best movies. Of course, their
narratives have always been crammed and digressive – movies like Fargo and O! Brother
Where Art Thou meld a corkscrew sensibility with an approach to character
that’s somehow both clinical and tolerant. When it works, it’s a dazzling act.
But their second-tier movies tend to seem like creations where you instantly
get half the joke and love it, but somehow can’t summon the energy to figure
out the other half.
Greendale
Talking of auteurs, but no longer of comedy, Neil Young picks up
his sporadic film- directing sideline with Greendale, a
muddled story of small town mishaps set to a nine-track song suite. The film is
grainy and haphazard, taking potshots at some identifiable targets like John
Ashcroft, and conveying no end of suspicion about the modern media, before
ending up on an expansive be-one-with-nature note. The film is dully
literal-minded – the images generally merely illustrate what’s plain from the
lyrics, although there’s the odd bit of surrealism in there too. But compared
to the two films reviewed above, Young’s is at least intimately faithful to his
muse.
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