His Three Daughters

Maybe it goes without saying that the three sisters who have gathered at the New York City apartment of their father where he has entered hospice care are estranged, but as “His Three Daughters” begins, writer/director Azazel Jacobs is content not just to say it but show it. The three sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) are gathered at the dining table, but Jacobs does not show them together, not at first, separating them through individual shots even as they converse with one another, or maybe more accurately, talk at one another. Only when hospice care worker Angel (Rudy Galvan), a moniker that feels less ironic than dryly absurdist, does Jacobs draw the siblings together in the same frame, underlining their congregating by necessity. Angel suggests that they're coming together might provide dad the emotional and spiritual comfort he needs to stop hanging on and just let go, setting up “His Three Daughters” as a journey of healing. Or, seeming to, anyway, because thankfully what Jacobs renders proves much more prickly, even occasionally profound in its reluctance to provide the emotional tidying up we are conditioned to expect. 

Given that “His Three Daughters” is set almost exclusively inside this apartment and is driven by so much precisely written dialogue, often in the form of monologues, one would be forgiven for thinking that Jacobs had based it on a play. I mean, when the movie cuts to its opening shot of Katie mid-monologue, you can practically feel a spotlight being switched on. But nope, this was an original screenplay by Jacobs, made specifically for the screen, and because it was, it is necessary to consider intention – why did he make such a theatrical-feeling film? And as much as “His Three Daughters” is about the eponymous trio coming to grips with their father’s impending demise, it’s more about them slipping into their pre-defined roles: Katie as the nagging “mother,” and Rachel as the detached stoner, and Christina as the stressed peacemaker. And so, while those white walls and kitchen cabinets do create a genuine lived-in sensation of a real apartment, they also give the feel of a theatrical space, underlining this sense of role-playing that these sisters resort to in order to get through.

That role-playing extends to the actors. Coon is theatrically trained, and she brings a theatrical air to the part of Katie, rehearsed in her dialogue and her mannerisms, notable straight away in that opening shot monologue. It can feel a little phony, and I mean that as a compliment, because Katie can feel a little phony in her over-determination to take charge, to set things straight, to say this how it is, and this is how it should be. Lyonne, then, as one of our most naturalistic actors, works in spectacular contrast to Coon. Rachel being a pothead with a penchant for dry witticisms might suggest Lyonne is just playing herself. Except, in becoming clear Rachel is the one daughter most sure of who she is, Lyonne’s turn becomes the one most through the looking glass, the one you can’t quite tell where the performance begins, or ends. Olsen gives the most expressively and physically mannered performance by far because Christine is the one most obviously wearing a mask, trying to leave her bohemian past behind by being someone else, even as little cracks show all the time. 

As a movie about performance, “His Three Daughters” is chiefly about the performers, but that does not mean Jacobs fails to leave an auteur imprint. For a good long while, it seems as if we will not meet their father. We see the hallway leading to the room, but the camera never enters. Near the end, though, Vinent (Jay O. Sanders) finally appears, helped into the living room by his daughters and set down in his easy chair. Independent of everything else, I found this moment incredibly moving; a dying guy who just wants to sit in his chair one more time. He does not just sit though, he speaks, delivering a monologue in which he essentially says farewell by coming clean. It’s a moment that seems too good to be true, and the way Jacobs pulls the rug out, one cut breathlessly altering the point-of-view, is as cruel as life itself, the dream of closure manifested as just that. 

In Memoriam: Jim Abrahams

I wasn’t more than 8 years old, and it was a late spring / early summer central Iowa evening spent entirely under a tornado watch, meaning I was allowed to stay up late in case we had to hurry to the basement to seek shelter. My parents must have been staying abreast of the situation via radio, or maybe the tiny monochrome TV we also owned, because the color television in the living room was tuned to HBO which was showing “Airplane!” (1980). I had never seen it, and though I don’t remember anything specifically from watching it that night, I still remember the overall experience, how my parents probably put it on to calm me down. It’s hard to worry about twisters dropping from the sky when you can’t stop laughing. Over 30 years later, during the early days of the first global pandemic of my lifetime, I had a similar experience in stumbling upon “Hot Shots!” (1991) on some television channel one evening and hearing a joke I didn’t remember. “Interesting perfume,” remarks Topper Harley (Charlie Sheen) to Ramada Thompson (Valeria Golino). “It’s Vicks,” Ramada replies. “I have a cold.” For a few seconds, the world was brighter.

“Hot Shots!” was co-written and directed by Jim Abrahams who co-wrote and co-directed “Airplane!,” the first letter of his last name doubling as the middle letter of the so-called Team ZAZ acronym – (David) Zucker, Abrahams, and (Jerry) Zucker. The trio grew up together in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 60s, early 70s where they formed a sketch comedy show called Kentucky Fried Theater. Though the era was turbulent, they eschewed commentary for generating laughs. KFT received a rave from George Hesselberg of the Badger Herald independent student newspaper and in speaking recently with the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Hesselberg noted, “(W)hat I was the most impressed with is how serious they were about being funny. The ‘seriousness’ was everywhere at that time, the antiwar feelings and all. There was a big hole in the humor blanket — and here are these guys being very serious about being funny.” That observation evokes the most celebrated punchline in “Airplane!”: “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”

That seriousness about being funny is what set “Airplane!” apart as the funniest American movie of the 80s. Unlike the chaos of a movie like “Animal House” (1978), as Janet Maslin noted in her contemporary New York Times review, “Airplane!” had “a steadier comic attitude.” “The film’s sense of humor is distinctly predatory,” Adam Nayman wrote in honor of its 40th anniversary, “sizing up every possible element in the frame—the actors, the sets, the music, even the subtitles—and treating their basic integrity as either momentarily or wholly expendable in the service of a joke.” The great revelation of “Airplane!,” though, was to task its actors with playing serious rather than silly. Almost no one is on the joke. (The exception is Stephen Stucker essentially playing the movie’s own peanut gallery as a person.) When I caught up years later with “Airport,” the 1970 disaster movie from which “Airplane!” cribs its conclusion, I was surprised how in its way, the latter did it better. “Good luck, we’re all counting on you,” Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen) enters the cockpit to say at an especially dramatic moment, calling back to an earlier line, his posture and voice oblivious to the airliner rattling and rocking, simultaneously the greatest release valve and the greatest send-up of a release valve in screenwriting history. That’s impressive. 

After “Airplane!,” ZAZ dabbled in television with the cop show spoof “Police Squad!” that despite being unceremoniously cancelled after only six episodes still paved the way for the other funniest American movie of the 80s, “The Naked Gun – From the Files of Police Squad!” Nielsen reprised his role from the small screen as the immortal Lt. Frank Drebin, becoming an unconventional movie star along the way, his impeccable stone face a stand-in for the last sane man, in a manner of speaking, in a world gone to cats and dogs, which is why the Nothing to see here sequence endures, the This is fine meme before the This is fine meme, before memes themselves. What’s more, as a testament to its own unflagging creativity, a movie which begins as a police procedural spoof improbably morphs not only into a preeminent baseball movie spoof but the preeminent baseball movie by virtue of nothing more than one extended sequence on the diamond, taking all the game’s stuffy regimented pageantry and running it through the shredder, epitomized in Lt. Drebin mangling The Star-Spangled Banner.

 

ZAZ would eventually split, amicably, not acrimoniously, and in 1991 both David Zucker’s “Naked Gun” sequel and Jim Abrahams’s “Hot Shots!” took their turn at the top of the box office. A spoof of “Top Gun,” and all manner of movies in-between, the latter could feel a little closer to the trio’s 1977 sketch comedy debut “Kentucky Fried Movie” than the true narrative subversions of “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun” but it was funny, occasionally even truly inventive (one could mount a contrarian case that despite “Terminator 2” and “Point Break” the best action scene of 1991 is the funeral scene in “Hot Shots!” – I mean this) and more than anything, perhaps, Abrahams deserved immense credit for turning leading man Charlie Sheen’s unchanging facial expression and monotone into the perfect vehicle for ludicrous wordplay and deadpan punchlines. The inevitable follow-up, “Hot Shots! Part Deux” (1993) was, aside from the Great Expectations joke, perhaps best for the accompanying half-hour mockumentary, “A Filmmaker’s Apology,” in which Abrahams spoofed Eleanor Coppola’s “Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” about the turbulent making of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” “We had access to too much money, too many extras, too much manpower,” Abrahams says at the start, tongue firmly in cheek even if it might double as a clarion call on behalf of filmmakers who have access to no money, no extras, and no manpower. 

I don’t think Abrahams was ridiculing Coppola, just gently lampooning him and his tendency toward self-mythology even while innately pointing out there were a couple different ways to make a movie. Fittingly, both “Apocalypse Now” and “Airplane!” were both eventually deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the National Preservation Board and selected for preservation within the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress, two sides of the same coin. “Apocalypse Now” was about the horrors and horrifying riddles of existence and in its own way, so was “Airplane!” and so was “The Naked Gun” too which is what I thought of when Abrahams died last week at the age of 80. Near the end, Ricardo Montalban’s villain dies when he falls to the cement below, run over by a bus, and then a steamroller, and then stomped all over once more for good measure by a marching band. Watching all this from above, Capt. Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) is moved to tears. “That’s so horrible,” he says to Drebin. “My father went the same way.”

The Christmas Quest

“The Christmas Quest” is funny. Oh, it’s funny in a regular way, aiming more for screwball than sentiment, always a welcome reprieve on the Hallmark Channel this time of year, and because Lacey Chabert and Kristoffer Polaha are having so much fun in one another’s presence, in fact, that they inadvertently undersell that their characters used to be divorced and are supposed to be falling back in love. These two never broke up! You couldn’t fool me! I didn’t care! (Filmed in part on location in Iceland, one conversation between the two takes place against the backdrop of the Hallgrimskirkja Church glowing red in the night in downtown Reykjavik, Chabert’s hair whipping wildly in the Nordic wind, and it reminds you how stuffing every scene with everything in the Balsam Hill® catalog in these movies just can’t compete with a little on the ground atmosphere.) No, “The Christmas Quest” is funny because in melding “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” with “National Treasure,” but in a neat gender reversal essentially having Chabert play the Harrison Ford/Nic Cage part and Polaha play the Karen Allen/Diane Krueger part, the movie is a treasure hunt (without action scenes that I’m sure Hallmark couldn’t afford) that leads us to the end of the treasure map to tell us the treasure is in each one of our hearts. Like Christmas itself. It wasn’t supposed to be a punchline, I’m pretty sure, but it felt like the conclusion to a big joke, nonetheless. I laughed, anyway.

Top 10 Made for TV Christmas Movies Synopses Version 2024

Being locked away in a COVID hotel for almost three weeks in late 2021 meant being locked up in the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas which is generally my favorite time of the year; I like the weather, I like the light, I like the lights, l like how despite all the attendant hustle and bustle, it’s the one time of the year when you can sort of, sometimes, feel the world slow down. It was even more distressing being in Rome, a city I’ve heard puts on a good Christmas, but which I was unable to see, because even once I was released, I went straight to the Airport Hilton so I could catch an early flight the next morning home. At least the Hilton had a Christmas tree, albeit one tucked away in some weird, empty alcove with a single red wingback chair. And though the bright lighting and pointed lack of sound that made it feel like a mausoleum were a long way from celebrating the season in the Piazza Venezia, I plunked myself down in that chair, nevertheless, just so I could scroll my phone in the presence of an artificial holiday spruce. 

At some point, I realized a door across the way was even more sparsely decorated than the alcove, a single strand of gold tinsel wrapped around its handle. If it looked like someone had been left with this one last strand and hung it there for lack of a better idea, I imagined that maybe it was someone who used that door all day long and hung it there to provide themselves this one little bit of recurring merriment, however small and futile, like me sitting in this alcove beside this Christmas tree. You take what you can get. For an American of a certain disposition, it might well be a bleaker sort of holiday season, and if it is, it is, do not let anyone tell you that there is no time to despair or that you can’t grieve in whatever way you see fit. You can; you should. But I also hope you can find a little bit of joy here and there, like tinsel haphazardly hung from a door handle, or in these, the 10 best Made for TV Christmas Movie synopses this year. (All movies from the Hallmark Channel except where otherwise noted.) 

Top 10 Made for TV Christmas Movies Synopses Version 2024

10. Operation Nutcracker. “When an antique nutcracker set to be auctioned at the Warby family Christmas charity goes missing, a demanding event planner and the heir to the Warby dynasty try to track it down.” It’s always a demanding event planner.

9. Twas the Date Before Christmas. “Jessie invites a fake date to her family’s Christmas Olympics to avoid cancellation, but as they bond over quirky holiday traditions, real feelings develop, and she struggles to keep her secret from unraveling.” Christmas Olympics? I’m listening.

8. Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story. “Alana Higman, a die-hard Kansas City Chiefs fan and her family are competing to win the team’s Fan of the Year contest, in a process judged by the director of fan engagement Derrick.” The Hallmark Channel Christmas universe might seem to exist outside the realm of current events, but Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are so big, they have infiltrated it. Naturally, it leads one to wonder what football celebrity couple Hallmark could exploit next. Simone Biles & Jonathan Owens? Olivia Culpo & Christian McCaffrey? I think we should go further back, much further, all the way to the 1980s and Brigitte Nielsen & Mark Gastineau. Then again, that movie would probably have to be on Lifetime. Google it, kidz. 

7. Five Gold Rings. “New York City painter Audrey Moss returns to her small hometown in Minnesota for the holidays and is met with an unexpected quest from her beloved late grandmother: find the owners of five mysterious gold rings and return them to their rightful homes before Christmas morning, only nine days away.” What do you think, are the five gold rings five pieces of jewelry or are they five ring-necked pheasants? And what is the Minnesota small town? I predict Zumbrota, “the only Zumbrota in the world.”  

6. Hot Frosty. (Netflix) “Widow Cathy magically brings a snowman to life. His innocence helps her heal and find love again. They bond before the holidays, but he's doomed to melt.” No disrespect to Lacey Chabert, the Queen of Christmas, who stars here, but I’m not sure she’s the right choice for this material just as I’m not sure Netflix is the right platform. This synopsis demands Keira Knightley in a Victorian Era tragedy.  

5. Leah’s Perfect Gift: “Leah Meyer, a Jewish woman who has always dreamed of experiencing a traditional Christmas, faces unexpected challenges when she spends the holidays with her boyfriend's uptight Connecticut family.” Hoo boy, a lot to unpack here. First of all, what even is a traditional Christmas in this context? Christmas Eve Mass and the Nativity? Or Santa Claus and chestnuts roasting over an open fire? And why does Leah want to have to experience a traditional Christmas? Can’t her boyfriend want to experience Chinese food on Wednesday December 25th? And Leah? Of course, it had to be Leah! As sure as every other Hallmark heroine’s name is Holly, or Noelle, it only makes sense it would be Leah (or Esther, or Rachel). Anyway. Maybe next year Hallmark will finally get one of these inclusive offerings historically accurate and make Christmas at the Pogroms.  

4. Trivia at St. Nick’s. “When students all flee an elite university in Vermont for winter break, the locals and faculty hunker down for their favorite time of year - the annual Christmas Bar Trivia Tournament.” It’s “The Holdovers” for Hallmark! 

3. The Christmas Quest. “An archeologist and her ex-husband, an expert in ancient Norse languages, are sent to Iceland at Christmastime to search for the legendary treasure of the Yule Lads. When others join in the hunt, the pair find themselves swept into a thrilling adventure as they race to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.” Oh yeah. This is the good stuff. This is the sort of stuff Paramount should be greenlighting for $20 million.

2. The Christmas Charade. “Facing another dull Christmas alone, sparks fly when a risk-averse librarian accidentally gets wrapped up with a grinchy FBI agent in an undercover mission to save the Heart of Christmas.” Lots of noteworthy Hallmark female coding happening in this one, but it’s the punctuating Heart of Christmas that really puts it over the top. Is Heart of Christmas supposed to be literal, like the Heart of the Ocean in “Titanic?” Or is Heart of Christmas more figurative, like they are saving the essence of Christmas, that sort of secular holy spirit that is the reason for the Hallmark season? 

1. A 90s Christmas. “While celebrating her promotion alone on Christmas Eve, a workaholic lawyer is transported back to 1999 via a mysterious rideshare experience.” We have now reached the point where 1999 is to 2024 what 1955 was to 1985 in “Back to the Future” and, oh my god, will somebody please pass the spiced eggnog? 

Watched on a Plane: What Happens Later

This is another in Cinema Romantico’s non-existent sporadic series of reviews of movies watched on planes.

Meg Ryan’s 2023 return to the rom com as both actor and director proves less triumphant than transitory. Set over the course of one night in an unnamed regional airport, it appropriately works best as an airplane movie, which is where I watched it, on a Dreamliner somewhere over the Pacific, and which is why I think I kept thinking the title was “What Happens Here” rather than “What Happens Later” – what happens at 35,000 feet stays at 35,000 feet. Uh, unless you write a review. Moving on. Based on a 2008 play by Steven Dietz, who wrote the script with Ryan and Kirk Lynn, “What Happens Later” is about an old college couple, Willa (Ryan) and Bill (David Duchovny), who run into each other in this anonymous airport when both their flights are delayed during a dreaded bomb cyclone. She is a free spirit, denoted by her rain stick, and he’s a square, denoted by his suit, a juxtaposition as old as “Barefoot in the Park” (1967) and though they have gone on to lead different lives, each one has remained on the other’s mind. It’s the ‘Before’ Trilogy mixed with Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno’s “Jet Lag” (2002) but with something of a mystical bent given an airport announcer who seems to be talking directly to them. (This disembodied voice is credited to a Hal Ligget, though the identity of the real person has remained deliberately unconfirmed, even if I would have sworn in the moment that it was Josh Lucas.)

“What Happens Later” is not all bad, at least, not at first, not when Willa and Bill are just, like, talking and/or arguing. It’s just nice to be in the presence of Rom Com Ryan and her patented exasperated charm after 8 years away from the movies and Duchovny infuses his role with a knowing middle-aged weariness, a guy who just wishes he could retire, already, but still has to go through life’s motions for who-knows-how-longer which, in the interest of full disclosure, was relatable. Indeed, there is a sequence in which Willa and Bill just whine about the curious attitudes and predilections of younger generations for a little while, and well, if in getting older, I have pledged to always remember what it was like to be young, I can also advise the young people that you, too, as Liz Lemon once observed, will get old someday. Right now, the movies are mostly for you, but they won’t always be, and so, let us have this. Where was I? Ryan and Duchovny. The performances work well in this breezier register, but less so when events turn more serious, not least because the attendant set-ups and payoffs, like Bill’s daughter’s dreams of being dancer, feel so rote.

The real problem, though, is that the eventual, ostensible magic realism is conveyed through nothing more than the announcer voice and a dwindling number of airport patrons. The universe might momentarily exist just for Willa and Bill, but that universe is forged of little more than fuzzy shots of snow, standard issue rom com montages, and discussions circling back to what was discussed before. It is hardly the stuff of metaphysics, rendering what should feel otherworldly as merely of this boring old world instead, and unintentionally underlining the struggle of old fogeys to believe life can still be magical. In fact, if “What Happens Later” worked in any way, it was to make me reconsider my dislike of the ending to 2013’s “Before Midnight,” the (possible) culmination of Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ Trilogy. The manner in which its central couple resorts to fantasy as it concludes always struck me as surrender without realizing it was surrender, but now, after so many more miles on the odometer, and one screening of “What Happens Later,” I wonder if I had it wrong and it was, in fact, a grim kind of hope all along. 

End of Days (Going Back to 1999)

(Optional musical accompaniment to this post.)

In assessing the best movies of 1999 for Salon on December 17th of that year, Michael Sragow quoted James Agee assessing the best movies of 1945, deeming himself “neither more ‘hopeful’ nor ‘despondent’ than usual.” And maybe that’s the best way to approach a year-end movie audit, not decreeing it the best of times, or the worst of times, but just a moment in time, one that can be properly contextualized from a significant remove. That’s how Mark Caro saw it for the Chicago Tribune, writing “(1999) was an excellent year for very good movies and a breakthrough year for interesting movies, but only time will tell whether it also was a good year for great movies.” He had an inkling, though, noting, “Hollywood took risks in ways it hadn’t since the 1970s, and the result was films that were exciting, ambitious, innovative and imperfect.” In his year-end appraisal, Roger Ebert had an even bigger inkling: “The last four months of 1999 were a rich and exciting time for moviegoers–there were so many wonderful films that for the first time in a long time, it was hard to keep up.”

Jeff Gordinier dropped any pretense of qualifying. “You can stop waiting for the future of movies. It’s already here,” he wrote for Entertainment Weekly. “Someday, 1999 will be etched on a microchip as the first real year of 21st-century filmmaking. The year when all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble.” Mr. Gordinier appears to have segued into becoming a food and travel writer somewhere along the way, and so I was unable to locate his thoughts on Matt Zoller Seitz’s recent piece at the Roger Ebert site decrying the impoverished, anti-intellectual state of modern popular cinema and whether his heralding the new and improved future had been premature. Then again, the treacly “Cider House Rules” won a few Oscars at the ceremony honoring the best in film from 1999, and a Washington Post reader survey crowned “The Phantom Menace” as the best movie of 1999. Maybe populism is an inviolable fortress. “It was the best of movie times,” Manohla Dargis summarized for the L.A. Weekly on December 29, 1999, “sometimes.”

Even so, in due course of a quarter-century, 1999 has proven a seminal one for the movies, as the ongoing silver anniversary retrospective at the New York Times illustrates, if not the Best.Movie.Year.Ever, which was the title of Brian Raftery’s book, subtitled: “How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen.” That book was published in 2019, going to show how even five years ago the consensus had already formed. Indeed, that same year The Ringer ran a 20-year retrospective much like The Times is running now, Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson lauded 1999’s cinematic risk-taking, and both the BBC and Kristopher Tapley at Uproxx declared no movie year had been better. Esquire proclaimed no movie year had been better ten years ago, five years before 2019.

Esquire also wondered if 1999 was the last great year for movies, which seems a little over-emphatically dubious. I always thought 2007 was an especially great year for movies. And as to whether 1999 was, in fact, the exemplar, there are myriad other noted contenders, like 1939 standing as the pinnacle of the Golden Age, 1960 pointing toward the future, the blooming of New Hollywood in 1967, the disparate tendencies of New Hollywood and the nascent blockbuster age in 1975. That’s why my instinct is to hedge, to say, if the working theory is that 1999 was the Best.Movie.Year.Ever then another movie year is likely just as good. I mean, I worked in a movie theater for most of 1999. I had a front row seat, in a manner of speaking, and I’d like to state for the record that I put together film reels for “My Favorite Martian, “The Deep End of the Ocean,” “Forces of Nature,” and “Pushing Tin,” among many forgotten others, a virtual what’s what of the mediocre DVD shelf from The Onion. They can’t all be winners, can they? And then: I examine the movies released in 1999 and wonder if everybody else had it right all along.

Among 1999’s considerable crop are my favorite Robert Altman movie (“Cookie’s Fortune”), and my favorite David Lynch movie (“The Straight Story”), and my favorite David Cronenberg movie (“eXistenZ”), and my favorite Steve Martin movie and favorite Eddie Murphy movie and favorite Hollywood movie in one (“Bowfinger”), and my favorite horror movie (“The Blair Witch Project”), and maybe, probably, my favorite Kirsten Dunst performance (“Dick”) and, I mean, heck, if you go by the U.S. release date then maybe, probably, my favorite Kate Winslet performance too (“Hideous Kinky”). Of course, these were not all beliefs I held in 1999; a couple of these movies I did not see until a few years later. If the passage of time takes so much, it also gives a lot in the form of perspective and understanding. And if back then I suspected that “Dick” was the essential Watergate movie, time strengthened my belief, and if back then I was lukewarm on Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday,” time has allowed me to see it as the definitive American football movie, and if back then I really liked, even loved, Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” time has cemented it as a masterpiece, an aesthetic work of art, and of the innumerable movies I have so far seen over the years, quite possibly the best.

We didn’t have Vibes in 1999, but there were feelings and sensations and there were eerie, unsettling ones in the air, maybe owing to the impending Y2K Armageddon that ultimately fizzled, or perhaps just a natural uncertainty that goes hand-in-hand with the end of a century. If it was unmooring, so many filmmakers also found it inspiring, etching cinematic documents to capture their moods during that moment in time. Grandmaster Martin Scorsese deployed Nicolas Cage’s haunted eyes in “Bringing Out the Dead” to seemingly carry the entire weight of the previous hundred years. Paul Thomas Anderson sought to provide absolution in the form of frogs raining from the sky in “Magnolia” while “Fight Club,” on the other hand, ended with David Fincher calling for revolution. In “Office Space,” Mike Judge conveyed apocalyptic anxiety as indistinguishable from white collar tedium while “American Beauty,” getting one more account of suburban malaise that so often seemed to define the last half of the 20th century in just under the wire, sought to infuse our tedious reality with meaning. “The Matrix,” “Being John Malkovich,” “Run Lola Run,” and “Eyes Wide Shut” all questioned reality itself. Compared to this, “The Insider” felt more traditional, drawing from real events by telling the story of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) blowing the whistle on Big Tobacco on 60 Minutes and Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and the news program’s herculean efforts to air the story. 

If it was classical storytelling, it also epitomized that 1999 sense of upheaval by upending those classical inclinations by handing the narrative from one character to another mid-stream and ended with a victory that felt so much more like defeat. Facts and reality are left distorted, journalism bends to corporations, truth becomes negotiable, doing the right thing only brings reprisals, rendering an upside-down world that comes across an awful lot like the one we are all enduring right now. It might have been pointing toward what laid ahead, but being based on recent events suggested that what ails us now was always in the American bloodstream, and is why, like Gordinier wrote, if in a different manner than he meant, “The Insider” was already living in the future.

Some Drivel On...Welcome to Mooseport

If the unrememberable “Welcome to Mooseport” (2004) is remembered for anything, it’s as the last movie of the irascible, immortal Gene Hackman before he unofficially retired. Did he retire because of “Welcome to Mooseport?” That’s the theory his co-star Maura Tierney half-jokingly floated in a 2014 AV Club interview, though it’s not a theory anyone has ever been able to confirm, not that I could find, likely because of Hackman’s notorious privacy. And having now, 20 years later, finally watched Donald Petrie’s poorly reviewed comedy, I can confirm, that not only is it bad, and not only is it blah, but it is also so, so feeble. It might have been Hackman’s last movie, but it was his co-star Ray Romano’s first (non-animated division), released during the final season of his “Everybody Loves Raymond” sitcom. And boy, does he feel like a sitcom star transplanted to the big screen, figuratively beating a retreat in every scene, virtually shrinking before our very eyes. I kept thinking of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993) during that scene with Billy Bob Thornton’s wannabe outlaw Johnny Tyler in the street: “Oh. Johnny, I apologize,” Doc Holliday says. “I forgot you were there.” I kept forgetting Romano was there. I wonder if Hackman did too. 

Hackman is Monroe Cole, “The Eagle,” not just the former President of the United States but the President of the United States with the highest approval rating in history who finds himself running for mayor in the small town of Mooseport, Maine against Romano’s local handyman Handy Harrison. Why, exactly, Handy wants to run for Mayor in the first place is never elucidated, an early sign of the milquetoast evasiveness in Tom Schulman’s screenplay, but he opts against dropping out upon discovering the divorced Cole has asked out Handy’s girlfriend of many years, Sally (Maura Tierney). She wants to get married, see, and Handy isn’t picking up the signal, which Romano plays with such inert obliviousness that it’s impossible to believe she would be with this dufus in the first place. It ruins any sense of romantic tension from the jump and the whole plot line becomes devalued further in the way it reduces Sally to nothing more than a wedge between the two men. At one point, Cole and Handy even play a game of golf to decide who gets to court her. The screenplay at least admits the insulting outmodedness of this idea, but it never grants her character any real agency, never mind identity, and you can sense Tierney’s disassociation from the role in real time.

Hackman, at least, comports himself with a believably Presidential air, and even better, effortlessly toggles between Person and Politician without letting the seams show, injecting a little vigor in a movie that otherwise has none. The media circus that descends on Mooseport is ripe for satire of how elections have metamorphosed into entertainment only to sand down every possible edge into weak sitcom punchlines while the purported conflict of the political campaign between Cole and Handy never materializes because, like, there is no political campaigning. There are no ideas expressed, no views established; for God’s sake, the screenplay doesn’t even have the guts to say whether Cole is a Democrat or a Republican. It’s tempting to label “Welcome to Mooseport” as Capra-esque given the Frank Capra-like underdog storyline, but whether they were profound, simplistic, or something in-between, Capra movies had politics. What “Welcome to Mooseport” intrinsically argues is government without politics, a fallacy so fanciful and pitiful it’s enough to make one think Alexander Hamilton’s skepticism of the will of the people was right all along.