(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)
According to the Toronto Star, only 2% of critics gave Gigli a positive review. So I should sew
up my contrarian credentials for years ahead here, because I liked the movie.
For sure, it isn’t an overall success, and there’s a pervasive sense of unease
about it. But it has a crazy, endearing ambition. And a willfully perverse
streak that I think deserves modest affection.
Martin Brest
As the world now
knows, this is the movie that brought Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez together,
playing two would-be assassins paired on a job, going from bickering to falling
in love – even though she claims to be a lesbian! The world only knows this, of
course, from the publicity overdrive; no one’s actually seen the film. It was a
huge flop – I went on the fourth day of release, and there were seven other
people in the theater. So much for the public’s supposed fascination with
Affleck and Lopez.
More interesting to
me was the film’s director Martin Brest. Brest’s last five films, in order, are
Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, Scent of
a Woman, Meet Joe Black and Gigli
– a striking journey from king of the mainstream to commercial wilderness. Scent of a Woman won the Oscar for Pacino,
but Brest’s clear artistic peak came with Midnight
Run. It’s clearly a chase picture, but possessing an almost spooky
composure and unity of vision. The De Niro-Charles Grodin partnership in that
movie is one of my all time favourites – a fascinating duel in competing
styles, that’s ultimately remarkably complex and even moving.
Gigli, which is the first film Brest wrote for himself since his debut Going in Style, seems like an attempt to
recreate the ambiance of Midnight Run
in a different genre. It’s a romantic comedy, blended with a fractured
meditation on the nature of sexual attraction. Affleck plays Gigli, a not
particularly proficient tough guy who’s hiding a mentally challenged kidnap
victim. Not trusting him to do the job, his boss puts another professional on
the case – enter Lopez. The majority of the film takes place in Affleck’s drab
apartment, which occasionally gives the movie the look of a cheaply shot stage
adaptation. A stream of one-scene cameos increases the theatricality – Christopher
Walken as a cop investigating the disappearance, Lainie Kazan as Affleck’s
mother, Missy Crider as Lopez’ distraught lesbian lover, Pacino as a crime
lord.
Gobble Gobble
The title, which
again is the surname of Affleck’s character, serves as a metaphor for the film
– it looks as though it should evoke Leslie Caron, is apparently meant to rhyme
with “really,” but generally gets mispronounced as the more earthy-sounding
“jiggly.” Which is one of the more minor examples of how Gigli meshes a romantic sensibility with a gratuitous coarseness.
By coarseness I don’t just mean familiar swearwords, but such barnyard oddities
as Affleck telling her early on that “I’m the bull, you’re the cow,” and Lopez
initiating sex with the matchless line: “It’s turkey time…gobble gobble.”
There’s a quality to this that seems to go beyond mere tastelessness, as though
the movie were grasping at something elemental. At the same time, of course, it
casts two beautiful people in the roles – and Lopez in particular is made to look
as lovely as I’ve ever seen her. The conflict between these two strands is at
the heart of the film’s “badness,” but I think it’s rather interesting if you
think about it as an aesthetic construct.
As the relationship
heats up, Affleck and Lopez have long monologues about the glories of the male
and female genitalia respectively. Again, there’s something wantonly naïve
about this, as though such subjects had never been discussed by anyone before.
Lopez’ apparent lesbianism (which many viewers would probably read as a lie to
keep Affleck at bay, until Crider suddenly turns up) is another source of
fundamental sexual confusion. The relative claustrophobia of the apartment
setting and the absence of a sense of the outside world (the cameos by Walken
et al suggest it’s merely insane out there) occasionally cause the movie to
resemble a weird behavioral laboratory.
Gigli’s most problematic element is the mentally challenged Brian, who
communicates a considerable amount of sexual frustration (mainly expressed
through an identification with Baywatch)
while suffering through much abrasiveness and name-calling. I think Brest was
trying to do the kind of thing the Farrelly brothers do with disabled actors –
ennoble them by refusing to spare them. In Gigli
it seems one-sided and plainly mean-spirited. And yet, the character is yet another
strand in the sexually neurotic web I mentioned, like a painful embodiment of
something from the other characters’ subconscious.
The ending, where
Brian finds his version of Baywatch
and (not really giving anything away here) Affleck and Lopez take off together is
only partly a conventional wrap-up – even by the standards of romantic
comedies, the permanence of the happy ending is highly in doubt. To me this
confirms the extreme uncertainty and sense of conditionality that pervades the
movie. So am I on to something here that others have missed, or is the above a
colossal exercise in pseudo-intellectualism? Probably somewhere in between.
Maybe I’m trying too hard to see merit in the film, but it’s hard to feel too
guilty about that, given how others clambered over themselves to heap scorn on
it.
Masked and Anonymous
Perhaps the
second-most reviled movie of the year is Masked
and Anonymous, a vastly confused, rambling odyssey which I take to be an
attempt to find a fictional expression for Bob Dylan’s by now vastly allusive,
complex persona. The movie (apparently co-written by Dylan under a pseudonym)
is certainly a vanity project, a full cataloguing of which would probably
demand intimate familiarity with the Dylan oeuvre – not something I can claim
(although I’m enough of a fan to own Slow
Train Coming, and even to listen to it once in a while).
Nevertheless, if I
hadn’t used up all the space on Gigli,
I could go on at some length about how the people in the movie (played by an
all-star cast including Jeff Bridges – much more interesting here than in Seabiscuit – John Goodman, Penelope
Cruz, Ed Harris (in blackface!), Jessica Lange, Mickey Rourke and the great
Bruce Dern) represent this and that and how the basic premise and structure
connote that or the other. Maybe it’d all be worth crap, I don’t know. But in
summary, the film seems to me pretty close to what a Bob Dylan movie would have
to be at this point, which is obviously vastly different from what that would
have meant in say 1965. That’s probably all the information you need on that
one. I will say though that Masked and
Anonymous, for all its points of interest, is no Gigli.
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