Reviews

Okay, we've got the cad, we've got the babe...er, babes...and a good deal of summary regarding each character's various skills and hang-ups, socially and in bed...

But we have an ersatz Woody with really bad timing and no funny gestures, and no wide-eyed chick who just wants to LEARN Woody Allen esthetics!

Woody Allen's movies have been suffering for quite a while from a sort of emotional inertia, moving always in the same direction, but getting more and more frantic and overstated. Lately I've seen no reason to pay attention -- but I have anyway. Why? Because Woody Allen, himself, is FUNNY.

He is, in fact, the best thing left in his movies; and now he's not there at all. What does that tell you?

The message is just part of the medium: and I'm very glad Stoppard realized that when he morphed his play into a movie. Wit and literary playfulness are enough to make a stage play entertianing, but a movie carries greater visual expectations and Stoppard obliged.

Horse rides through bleak countryside, flashbacks to shards of half-written memories, and a startlingly witty and ironic depiction of bare-bones stage props make this movie a real movie, and not just a big-screen play production.

There's a lot of impressive wit in Rosencrantz that depends ENTIRELY upon an intimacy with Shakespeare's Hamlet (scenes which augment Shakespeare's by presenting the back-stage drama which R&G occupy make for at least half of the biggest guffaws), so this movie is not going to wow everyone despite it's playfulness.

There are many movies with sympathetic villains, lots of character studies that show us the desires of the perverted or the hearts of the bigoted; this movie is like none of them.

And yet both of its main characters are homophobes. Both "& I" and Withnail, charming, playful, and disarmingly articulate, are in denial about Withnail's homosexuality.

Withnail & I is a story of unrequited love between two down-and-out actors at the tail end of the free-love era. The denial of Withnail's sexuality is a running joke; but it runs UNDER the story. The pair accidentally trap themselves in a rustic cabin and thier growing anxiety mirrors and merges with the impending , seemingly inevitable confession of Whithnail's feelings for &I. When this is compounded by the sneaky arrival of Whithnail's flaming and lecherous uncle, the situation grows funnier and more tortuous.

Laughter mounts until the sad and deeply ironic ending wherein Withnail is left alone in the rain reciting Hamlet's soliloquy. The final attempt to hand us the theme: Withnail deftly adds back the line which follows, "Man delights not me," usually excluded from recitations: "No, nor woman neither."

Hal Hartley is just too smart for most movie-goers. He's got a lot to say--and he actually makes his characters say ALL of it; in tiny, impotent little phrases that never astound so much as when you find yourself understanding something large about them.

And Henry Fool is a fount of these emerging insights: one test is not enough to know the heart of a would-be hero, one giant failure is not enough to know the soul of a would-be romantic, love isn't always as deep as it is strong, poetry comes and goes, art is in the understanding...

Despite dispensing so many ideas, Henry Fool has amazing comic timing, some high drama, a little sex, death, and even a romantic ending. Not enough comedy, drama, sex, death, and romance for a big box-office turnout; but just enough to make the Hartley fans want more.

Dysfunctionality is an over-rated dramatic tool. And Solondz seems to rely on it exclusively. Too much of his material is deliberately, solely, and obsessively mean.

Be that as it may, Happiness scores high with me because two, out of six, of its main characters transcend the ooey-gooier-than-thou schtick and emerge as really powerful, and simultaneously amusing, studies. I've never seen a more scientifically balanced scene than the one in which a father is quizzed by his wounded son about his perversions; it manages to be scary and sad and laugh-out-loud funny all at once.

Timothy "Speed" Levitch is more than just a New York crank, he's a spokesman for the genX drop out philosophy; find the space you are happy in, forget the rest. Forget the conventions, forget the rules. He's cruising because he's in love with everything that is creative and destructive in himself. That's what a romantic does. And he is the quintessential modern romantic.

The Cruise has been criticized as for being a purely sympathetic portrait of Levitch-- but that's what makes it so exhilarating; we are brought to Levitch's way of seeing; we don't come to judge, but to cruise.

When I try to think of flaws in this movie, I come up with virtues: that we don't get enough, that Levitch's secrets are not revealed, that we are left wondering about the reactions of those pastel-visored tourists... these mysteries actually augement the movie's charm.

I should have given it a nine.