(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in June 2000)
It was director
Nicholas Ray who reportedly said, “If it were all in the script, why make the
movie?” Not many movies nowadays provide any particular reason to think back to
that remark (today’s directors are mostly showmen, if they’re anything at all),
but Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine is an
unwelcome exception. Here’s a film that provides not one solitary moment of
visual imagination, not one memorable flare of the director’s craft. The
picture is not an ounce better than its script, and given that the writing
appears little more inspired than that of the average corporate training video,
that doesn’t give us much. And it’s three hours long. Sad to say, this monumental
mediocrity is a Canadian co-production, nominated for several hundred Genie
awards.
Sunshine
The film follows
three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, through the First and Second
World Wars and the subsequent upheavals. Ralph Fiennes plays the most prominent
male members of each generation. The family passes through various stages of
upheaval and suffering, losing sight of its inherent strength and tradition
before finally finding peace with its own history.
The story winds
through some of the key events of our century (a family member dies in a
concentration camp; another is a leading protestor against the Russian
occupancy in 1956 Budapest), but makes little attempt to convey either an
emotional or an intellectual sense of those events. There are a few
flatly-staged crowd scenes, but the action consists mainly of conversations in
rooms, with archival newsreel footage liberally interspersed. I can’t tell you
how irritated I got at the film’s continual use of Fiennes’ voice-over to tell
us what happened between one scene and the next (especially as the events he
describes almost invariably sound more interesting than the stuff actually put
on screen). This could theoretically have been an interesting artistic
strategy, perhaps exploring the impotence of individual gestures against the
crushing power of political and institutional change, but it certainly doesn’t
function here as such. It’s more as if they set out to film a vast, sweeping
novel, but with a shoestring budget that meant most of the good stuff had to be
cannibalized or glossed over.
Lost investment
Unfortunately, I
understand it’s not a low-budget film at all. A couple of months ago I cited
Giuseppe Tornatore’s Legend of 1900 –
the saga of a piano player who lives his whole life on an ocean liner – as the
epitome of a certain kind of lavish, commercially doomed art film. Tornatore’s
film, whatever its faults, seemed to me to follow its own muse. But Sunshine is as off-puttingly calculating
as a Bond movie. It means to make us glow with its humanity, to make us gasp at
its scope. It has the requisite amount of Euro-style nudity, scattered
carefully through the film. It has the speeches, the recriminations, the tragic
ironies. Surely the subject matter must have meant something to Hungarian director Szabo (best-known for his
Oscar-winning Mephisto), but on this
evidence he’s artistically decrepit, phoning it in.
Of course, it’s not
as if one salvages nothing from the experience. The last third of the film is
moderately successful in tracing the moral decay of the Communist takeover (an
appearance by William Hurt, more nuanced than the rest of the cast put
together, helps). The death of one of the Fiennes characters is chilling, as is
the depiction of the family sitting around the radio, pouncing on every shard
of hope, as the Jewish exclusionary laws are announced. But ultimately, there’s
no compelling reason for the film to exist. It doesn’t have the artistic
aspirations of, say, The Unbearable
Lightness of Being (which came to my mind not least because the recreation
of Prague ’68 in that film is so vastly superior to the equivalent set-pieces
in this work); it has no commitment to revealing character, being entirely
lacking in spontaneity; it’s not really interested in illustrating politics or
social change (I often found myself, during the plodding exposition of
escalating anti-Semitism, longing for Oliver Stone). And the poor shareholders
of Alliance Atlantis won’t even have the consolation of knowing they squandered
their money for the greater Canadian good – on a three-hour bio of Rene
Levesque for instance, or of Peter Gzowski, or even Mike Duffy.
The Cider House Rules
By comparison, Lasse
Hallstrom’s The Cider House Rules is
a film of studiously limited ambition, yet nothing in Sunshine sends as much of a transgressive shiver down the spine, as
Cider House’s unflinching embrace of
what’s pejoratively termed “abortion on demand.” In this adaptation of John
Irving’s book, Michael Caine (excellent) plays an overseer of a remote New England
orphanage, fervently devoted both to his poignantly-portrayed changes (“Princes
of Maine, Kings of New England”) and to his secondary abortion practice. Tobey
Maguire (sweet, but a bit bland) is the orphanage-raised protégé who rejects
the path Caine’s designated for him, and goes off to see the world.
The film is
generally much like an afternoon siesta in a Maine meadow – pleasant enough as
long as you don’t have too much else on your to do list. As it goes on, the
intended theme seems to be about self-discovery through gentle myth-making,
about tearing up the rules – but this is all rather less than persuasive from a
film that takes so few chances itself. The oddly restrained climax certainly
doesn’t hit home. But The Cider House
Rules stands apart from mere travelogue if only because of its treatment of
abortion, in which respect the filmmakers must consider themselves very lucky
not to be attracting more adverse publicity than they are. Maybe, given its
box-office failure, the habitual protestors have finally learned that disdain
is the best weapon.
Talking as I was of
Oliver Stone, I also saw his new film Any
Given Sunday, a pro-football epic that Stone puts across like a sequel to JFK; any given scene groans under the
director’s hunger for complexity and expansiveness. But even if his
subject-matter were as compelling as that of the earlier movie, his instincts
certainly aren’t – the kinetic style often seems borderline ludicrous here, and
works against any sort of dramatic differentiation. The main plotline, contrasting
the weathered coach (Al Pacino, with a couple of good locker-room speeches) and
the young hotshot, sputters along to a climax so unconvincing that you could
accuse the film’s last twenty minutes of dissing the grander ambitions of its
first two hours. A case perhaps for a conspiracy theorist, once he’s finished
investigating how Sunshine got made.
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