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by Leonard Heldreth

 

Award-winners under the microscope
This month’s films were nominated for or won Academy Awards last year.

 

Venus
Peter O’Toole’s performance in Venus probably should have been rewarded with an Oscar.
Granted, the part of Maurice may not have been his greatest role, but it’s certainly up there with the best of the year, and Liz Taylor’s Oscar-rewarded performance in Butterfield 8 certainly was not her best role either, and many other examples could be listed of Oscars actually given for roles other than those for which they were designated. Forest Whittaker is fine as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, but he had a few more years to win the big one, while O’Toole’s career is virtually over.
Nonetheless, Venus is a charming, often daring, frequently funny film about what it’s like to grow old, what the young and old can learn from each other, and how being true to oneself often can mean being extremely unfair to everyone else.
If Venus has a large flaw, it’s that the plot is too thin and a bit too cobbled together. British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi said he started with the idea of a man recovering from a prostrate operation and remembering his sexual conquests, but realized that film should be in the present and reworked the idea into another plot.
The film’s plot has the prostrate operation about halfway through, and it doesn’t have much significance except symbolically. The final story involves three aging actors, Maurice (O’Toole), Ian (Leslie Phillips) and Donald (Richard Griffiths) who meet daily for tea and gossip at a local restaurant.
Ian has arranged for his grand-niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) to come to London to live with him and help care for him, but she is more than he can handle, and after one day she is driving him crazy. Maurice, on the other hand, finds her youth and beauty fascinating, even though he acknowledges that his sexual interest can be only theoretical. But he takes her to lunch, buys her jewelry, and takes her on the set with him in return for her allowing him to touch her hands, sniff her neck, and kiss her shoulder.
During the rest of this meandering film, complications separate the two (her boyfriend, for example), but she gradually learns to care for Maurice, and he acknowledges the necessary limits of their relationship.
Anyone can anticipate the ending, but despite the thin plot and obvious conclusion, this still is a journey quite worth taking.
O’Toole is one of the few actors who can convey, at his age, charm and appreciative lust in the same smile, and he nicely balances his obvious interest in Jessie with what he can offer—he does not have sufficient financial resources to be a “sugar daddy.” All of the older actors are seasoned professionals who are a pleasure to watch, and Vanessa Redgrave is a marvel as Maurice’s wife, whom he abandoned years ago with three small children. Fortunately, Whittaker as Jessie is able to keep up with these people and learn from them, so the entire film acquires the quality of an acting tour de force.
The film is daring in its open depiction of sexual desire and frustration in old men. Nabokov’s Lolita explored how older men can lust after underage girls, and the phrase “dirty old man” has become a cliche for every post-sixty citizen who has admired a shapely female form, underage or not. But, as any worker in a nursing home can tell you, sexual desire does not go away in age, although the means of satisfying it may (despite the runaway success of viagra and its competitors).
Venus acknowledges and does not apologize for the desire Maurice has for Jessie’s young flesh, but it also acknowledges that Maurice, with his appreciation for women, knows how to treat the opposite sex and compliment it sincerely. He feels the female form is the most beautiful thing a man will ever see.
Venus, in some ways, is an exploration of what sort of relationship an old man can have with a young girl that satisfies some of both their needs without degrading either. The same writer and director explored the female side of aging sexuality in their previous film, The Mother.
The film also examines the price of being true to oneself. Maurice proclaims he always has pursued pleasure, and he always has tried to give pleasure. While we initially admire his honesty and constancy to himself, we later see the results of that self-devotion as we see the effect it has had on his wife and on his alienated children. His pursuit of pleasure has left him financially strapped and reduced to playing corpses on television.
One of the advantages of using well-known older actors to play the characters of well-known older actors is the character and the actor inevitably share qualities, as Gloria Swanson and Norma Desmond merged in Sunset Blvd. In Venus, a long newspaper story about Maurice has a publicity picture of a young O’Toole, and a waitress, who has known him only in old age, exclaims, “He was gorgeous.”
In a later scene, Maurice and Ian stroll through St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden and read the names of their departed friends, real actors from the English stage and screen, and we know the names of the actors we are watching will appear there in the future.
While Venus may be short on plot and fairly predictable, it’s also a pleasure to watch as acting legends bring their skills to bear on parts that are unusual in today’s youth-oriented cinema. O’Toole was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Major Role. Top

 

Little Children
Todd Field’s first film, In the Bedroom, was a powerful exploration of suburban revenge in which a father deliberately kills a young man who accidentally killed his son (for an alternate exploration of the same situation, see the Italian film, The Son). Field’s Little Children is equally powerful but in a more subdued fashion with less calculated violence, more seething undercurrents, more explicit sexuality and a more complicated plot.
If Venus barely has enough plot to carry a movie, Little Children, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta and co-adapted by Field and Perrotta, has almost too much plot to integrate into a single story–scenes that would have been elaborated in other films are rapidly (and rightly) passed over in this film, the director assuming the audience has enough intelligence to keep up.
The main plot concerns Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), who is married to Richard Pierce (Gregg Edelman) and her affair with Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), who is married to Kathy Adamson (Jennifer Connelly).
Sarah and Richard’s marriage has turned nonsexual because of Richard’s infatuation with internet sex sites, and Brad also finds little physical satisfaction in his marriage to Kathy, a television documentarian who lets their son share their bed, possibly as a way of fending off Brad. When Brad and Sarah meet regularly at the playgrounds and pools where they take their children, it seems inevitable that they will end up in bed some afternoon. Sarah attends a book club where the women are reading and discussing Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and the parallels are obvious.
A second plot involves Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley) and his mother May (Phyllis Somerville). Ronnie has been in prison for exposing himself to children and has been released in his mother’s custody. The neighborhood parents are uneasy about Ronnie’s presence, and Larry Hedges (Noah Emmerich), an ex-policeman, develops an obsession about Ronnie’s presence and harasses the man and his mother.
Each of these characters is developed in detail with extensive background information; each of them, even the child-molester, has positive and negative characteristics, qualities the audience will like or dislike. Winslet’s Sarah has two degrees in literature and considers herself better than the housewives with whom she associates, but her situation is so confining that, like Emma Bovary, the audience sympathizes with her. Wilson’s Brad is a beautiful but unaware child (the film’s title has multiple meanings), whom the local housewives refer to as the “prom king.” His muscled body and symmetrically handsome face (he was the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera) make the audience suspicious when he says beauty is overrated. As the unidentified voice-over narrator observes, only someone secure in his beauty could make such a statement.
Haley is excellent as the child-molester, never denying what he is but managing to make the audience realize the box he, like all the characters, is trapped in and the loathing he feels for his urges. Somerville is totally believable as his protective mother, who loves her son no matter what he has done. Perhaps the most difficult balancing act is Noah Emmerich’s creation of the character of Larry; he is bigoted, obsessive and violent, but as his past and actions reveal his character near the end, he appears in a different light. Whether his contradictions are totally believable is another question.
The affluent Massachusetts suburban setting, although filmed in New York, provides just the right realm for these people, who live better than ninety-five percent of the world’s population, and the director knows exactly what details to select to portray them.
Perhaps the most curious aspect of the film is the occasional intrusion of a voice-over narrator who, as one reviewer said, sounds like an advertisement for a luxury-car commercial. At the beginning and a few times through the film, he announces what a character is thinking or feeling or comments on the action; it seems like an extremely awkward carry-over from the novel, but that is unlikely in an otherwise very sophisticated film.
Little Children is worth seeing for its strong plot and sometimes edgy subject matter, and carefully developed characters. With In the Bedroom and this film, Todd Field has identified himself as a major new talent in American cinema. Oscar nominations include Haley for Best Supporting Actor, Winslet for Best Actress in a Major Role and the movie for Best Adapted Screenplay. Top

 

Little Miss Sunshine
Codirectors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris had made only music videos before Little Miss Sunshine, and the screenplay, written by Michael Arndt, also was his first.
The film uses many tried and true elements but manages to combine them in an audience-pleasing fashion that earned it a number of awards as well as a record price for distribution rights ($10 million) at Sundance.
The film combines two staples of “indie” comedy, the dysfunctional family and the road trip. The Hoover family is introduced early in the film at a scene around the dinner table. Mother Sheryl (Toni Collette) supports the family and tries to keep it together; father Richard (Greg Kinnear) wants to be a motivational speaker and has developed his nine-step system, but no one is interested in buying it; son Dwayne (Paul Dano) reads Nietzsche and has taken a vow of silence until he reaches his goal of being a jet pilot; and daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) has just placed into the finals of the Little Miss Sunshine beauty contest in California. Next is Grandpa (Alan Arkin), who has been expelled from a retirement home for sexual escapades and snorting cocaine.
The last family member is Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), Sheryl’s brother, who has just been released into her custody after trying to commit suicide; Frank is the top Proust scholar in the country, but his graduate student boyfriend has just run off with the No. 2 Proust scholar, and Frank slashed his wrists. This motley crew has to navigate its aging yellow VW bus from Albuquerque to California in about two days in order for Olive to try to win a scholarship in the beauty contest.
As they travel, each character’s eccentricity contributes to the obstacles in the road trip. At times the big question seems to be whether the writer and directors will come up with enough eccentricities, one-liners and humorous situations to fill the two hours of required movie time and get them to California, but they try hard, and the successes generally outnumber the failures.
The film, however, for all of its awards, is quite predictable as, of course, the bus breaks down, etc. The most original part of the film, as well as the most satirical, is Olive’s routine, which her grandfather helped her develop.
The acting ranges from adequate to excellent (Arkin steals all of the scenes he’s in), and while some of the scenes are slower than they could be, everyone is trying. Even an ineffective scene involving a policeman and some porno magazines, while unbelievable, is vaguely amusing.
The film was unusually successful, despite its “R” rating, because it offered a family situation comedy and a moderately upbeat ending. Most viewers will find it enjoyable, but it’s not a film you will need to watch a second time. Arkin won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; Breslin was nominated for Best Supporting Actress; the movie won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Picture. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

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