Stealing Home

Take some threads from The Big Chill, weave in plenty of thirtysomething, and throw in a bit of Bull Durham – you have the design for Stealing Home. This is a movie that, in an evidently sincere way, touches a lot of the familiar bases of the baby boom generation. While it is sincere, it’s only intermittently successful.

It’s one of those convoluted flashback movies in which we’re brought up to date on the main character’s situation with a string of lengthy looks-back. The protagonist, a washed-up minor-league baseball payer (Mark Harmon), has been living an existence of despondency for some time when he learns that an old friend has died, and that she has willed him her ashes.

As he returns to his hometown, the flashbacks fill us in on his history. The woman was his former babysitter (Jodie Foster), who introduced him to a certain wildness and sense of fun. She was a free spirit who had a lot to do with him pursuing a baseball career in his teens, after the shock of his father’s death.

It follows that reliving these old memories, and making a few new ones in the present tense, helps him get his life back on track. (It also helps him figure out what to do with her ashes.)

Stealing Home is written and directed by Steven Kampmann and Will Aldis, who get a lot of mileage out of old songs (they make all the obvious choices), fashions, and adolescent buddy humor.

The best section of the movie involves an extended flashback to the summer in which our hero (played as a teenager by William McNamara) and his pal (Jonathan Silverman) hang out at the beach and dream of babes and baseball, with particular attention to a red-headed “goddess” to whom the pal will (happily) surrender his virginity.

The other parts of the movie have problems. Harmon, for one thing, doesn’t exactly radiate the burned-out hopelessness that his character is supposed to embody; he’s not a deep enough actor at this point, and the strain dulls his usual likability.

The fundamental difficulty, however, is that we never quite see what Foster gives him, or how she has influenced his life in such a profound way. Or why he would ever dissolve into such self-destruction.

What Stealing Home does have is a few isolated goodies, such as the adolescent sexual initiation that is interrupted by an oblivious parent, and an adult scene in which Harmon and his now-grown pal (Harold Ramis) get drunk and sneak into a baseball stadium at night. These are nice elements that a good director might have brought home, but this film leaves them stranded at third.

First published in The Herald, August 1988

One of those “dispose of the remains” movies, eh? I’d forgotten that detail. The cast also includes Blair Brown, Richard Jenkins, and Helen Hunt. Co-director Aldis, who died in 2019, was also known as Will Porter; he and Kampmann also wrote, under pseudonyms, the notorious Clifford, with Martin Short as a 10-year-old.

See You in the Morning

The opening credits of See You in the Morning are accompanied by the lilt of Nat King Cole singing, “When I fall in love, it will be forever.” As the rest of the movie goes on to prove, forever doesn’t always last that long.

See You in the Morning is a comedic-dramatic treatment of a second marriage, from two sides. On one side: a psychiatrist (Jeff Bridges), recently divorced from his glamorous model wife (Farrah Fawcett). On the other side, a photographer (Alice Krige), whose musician husband (David Dukes) has committed suicide. Both have a long way to go before they’ll let themselves be happy in a new marriage; Bridges has his feelings of failure as a husband, Krige has her guilt over what she might have done wrong as a wife.

And each carries two children into the new arrangement – this film doesn’t skimp on the complications, though the adults sometimes seem more anxious and awkward than the kids.

In fact, many of the best scenes are between a child and a parent – tender expressions of love, bitter explosions of resentment. The child actors (particularly Lukas Haas, as Bridges’ new stepson, who never wants to leave his father’s house) are free of child-actor ickiness, and they’re shrewdly observed.

One of the movie’s best moments occurs when Bridges, suffering through a horrendous day while his new wife is out of town, pours out his heart to a sympathetic dog. His step-dog, that is.

These observations come to us from director-writer Alan J. Pakula, who covered very similar territory in his 1979 film Starting Over, though that movie had a lighter tone. Pakula is an exceptionally intelligent filmmaker, and he always makes good-looking movies. (Aside from the marital dramas, he’s also turned out some of the best thrillers of the past 20 years, including Klute and All the President’s Men.)

But I was a little nagged by the talkiness of See You in the Morning. Pakula finds individual scenes of delight, such as Bridges’ proposal to Krige (he jots the question on a scrap of paper and tosses it at her during a symphony concert), but basically the movie is two solid hours of conversations. Even at that length, the characters and their situations emerge as being just a bit thin, not quite fully fleshed out.

Jeff Bridges and Alice Krige are good enough to hold interest for the duration. Krige, in particular, suggests depths and complexities that the movie isn’t quite willing to explore; she’s a fine-boned, unusual actress, and she could take up another movie with her subtleties.

First published in The Herald, April 20, 1989

Here’s one of those bits of business that stick in your mind even when everything else from the movie has vanished: Bridges, slumping into a couch with a newspaper after a series of challenging issues, sighing to himself, “Thank you, god, for sports.” (Although IMDb quotes it as “Thank God for Sports!”, which doesn’t sound as good to me, including the exclamation point.) You are wondering: What happened to Alice Krige? She was the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact, so that’s a thing, and she’s worked steadily. This movie’s box-office failure didn’t help her turn into the interesting lead actress she seemed poised to become. I managed to leave out Drew Barrymore and Macaulay Culkin from the cast list, as a couple of the other kids involved.

Starlight Hotel/A Winter Tan

Starlight Hotel is an undeniably nice movie from New Zealand, a picturesque tale of two mates traveling across Kiwiland. The travelers are a 12-year-old girl (Greer Robson), who’s run away from her uncle and aunt in search of her father, and a young man (Peter Phelps) on the lam because of a mix-up about a scuffle he was involved in.

Somehow these two fall into each other’s company; the girl is first dressed as a boy, but it isn’t long before her traveling companion realizes he’s stuck with “a bloody Sheila.” It is a standard road relationship, seemingly inspired by Paper Moon, in which the man acts grouchy and gruff, and the kid pulls a long face when he threatens to leave her behind.

The most laudable aspect of the movie is the re-creation of 1930s New Zealand. Director Sam Pillsbury takes a scenic tour, as our protagonists tramp through waving fields of wheat, into rundown towns, across hobo camps. It’s a pretty movie to look at, and easy to take, but it also evaporates quickly.

A Winter Tan is a more corrosive cup of hemlock. It’s based on the book Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder’s Letter from Mexico, a chronicle of the writer’s self-destruction while trying to find herself. Watching this movie is a genuinely disagreeable experience, as this thoroughly unpleasant person engages in utterly repellant behavior, and then tells us all about it.

A Canadian film, its writing and directing credits are collaborative, and it’s just the kind of pretentious and undefined movie that can result when no one’s in charge.

One of the co-directors is Jackie Burroughs, who also plays the main character. Burroughs is nothing if not brave, in making herself appear intentionally horrifying, with her hair bleached, her figure scrawny, and her voice raspy. (I trust it was intentional.) It’s an appallingly bravura performance, and one that I would never want to sit through again.

First published in The Herald, February 11, 1989

I saw A Winter Tan in Vancouver during a vacation, and it put a damper on things. The director of Starlight Hotel also did Free Willy 3 and some American TV, but notably wrote The Quiet Earth.

Signs of Life

Signs of Life is a movie that conjures up a winsome community of people whose lives are touched by magic. That description makes the film sound as though it could get a bit sticky, which it does. But just a bit.

The community in question is a fishing village in Maine called Easthasset, from which a few characters are trying to escape. The center of the story is a boat-building company that has fallen on hard times. Nobody wants beautiful, hand-built wooden boats anymore; fiberglass is the thing. For the owner of the boatyard, played by veteran Arthur Kennedy, fiberglass is the foulest word known to man.

As the boatyard grinds to a halt, some of its workers are making other plans. Daryl (Vincent Phillip D’Onofrio) and Eddie (Kevin J. O’Connor) are going to Florida to become commercial divers. First, however, Daryl needs to find a home for his developmentally disabled brother (Michael Lewis), while Eddie has to break things off with his determined waitress girlfriend (Mary Louise Parker).

Another employee of the boatyard, John (Beau Bridges), also has his hands full. His wife is about to have yet another child, and he no longer has any visible means of support. To please her, he asks his wife’s smarmy brother for a job in the chain hardware store he manages. “John,” the brother asks unctuously, “do you know what it means to be a Pure Thrift salesman?” To which John replies, “You … sell things?” It doesn’t work.

Signs of Life amiably browses among these marginal lives. As Eddie solemnly says, “Easthasset is just not a very big place, when you consider the whole East Coast.” The movie’s attempts at catching some magical elements in the denizens’ lives are not so successful. The film is at its best, for instance, in showing Eddie’s rocky breakup and reconciliation with his girlfriend (she seduces him in his car, a lovingly maintained ’69 Chevelle, until the spell is broken when her high heel dings the windshield).

Probably the film’s main pleasure is in seeing a plum role handed to Arthur Kennedy, who has been in movies for almost 50 years. Kennedy, who brought an intriguing cynicism to his roles in the 1940s and 50s, is very much in his cantankerous element here. After a 10-year layoff from films, this pro still knows how to get it done.

First published in The Herald, May 21, 1989

Yes, D’Onofrio was billed with three names for this one. The director was John David Coles, who went on to have a productive TV career. Will Patton, Kate Reid, and Kathy Bates are also in it. Howard Shore did the music.

Some Girls

Michael is visiting his girlfriend’s family; they live in a rambling, gingerbread mansion in Quebec City. The father, a writer, can work only in the nude. The mother is highly impressionable and weepy. The grandmother mistakes Michael for her long-dead husband.

But most pressingly, Michael arrives to hear his girlfriend say she doesn’t think she loves him anymore. Needless to say, this is dispiriting, except that she has two inordinately attractive sisters who seem eager to make Michael feel, shall we say, welcome.

Some Girls – a lousy, inappropriate title – takes off from this premise into some farcical situations, and eventually into a more somber treatment of Michael’s friendship with the grandmother, who is dying. The original screenplay, by Rupert Walters, clearly wants to thoughtfully examine manners and morals, and to explore the mysterious differences between the genders.

Some of this is interestingly treated, but more often the film waffles on what exactly it is about. It seems to be biting off a bit more metaphysics than it can comfortably chew, and the business near the end with the grandmother (the old gal supposedly teaches Michael some important lesson in life) feels particularly labored.

The movie is at its best a comedy of disorientation; almost everyone can identify with the terrors and humiliations of being a houseguest. Michael, of course, feels he’s doing everything wrong, a feeling that is verified when a naked romp with his girlfriend leads to the family waiting with a surprise birthday party at the bottom of the stairs. Oops.

Some Girls is the latest collaboration between producer Rick Stevenson and director Michael Hoffman (as with their most recent film, Promised Land, the executive producer here is none other than Robert Redford). They are nothing if not capable, but Some Girls plays uneasily like a social farce straining to be an arthouse movie. The filmmakers reach for the bittersweet atmosphere of a Francois Truffaut film, but they can’t conjure up the necessary magic.

I’m not sold on Patrick Dempsey (In the Mood) as Michael; Dempsey’s an affable focal point, but he doesn’t really show us what’s inside the character. The weird family is beautifully cast. It’s one of those rare movie families in which the members actually look like they could be related to each other.

First published in The Herald, September 1988

Looks like another review that got cut off at the end, because I sound like I’m about to hand out bouquets to people I haven’t mentioned, which is almost everybody in the cast. Regular readers of this website know of my frequently-mentioned declaration that Sheila Kelley would be a huge star (this was her first non-TV movie), and she played one of the flirtatious sisters (Ashley Greenfield is the other); Jennifer Connelly played the girlfriend. The parents are played by Andre Gregory and Florinda Balkan, and the grandmother by Oscar winner (for Zorba the Greek) Lila Kedrova. I remember wanting this movie to be better, because the set-up has tantalizing possibilities.

Sweetie

Its title notwithstanding, Sweetie is quite a tart little thing. Hailing from Australia, or from some corner of purgatory, this is a movie that seeks to out-weird the wiggiest imaginings of a David Lynch. You thought Blue Velvet was strange? Meet Sweetie.

The opening reels of first-time feature director Jane Campion’s film are breathtakingly understated and bizarre. A dour young woman named Kay (Karen Colston) has her fortune told: She is destined to find her mate in a man with a question mark on his face. Later, she looks at Louis (Tom Lycos) and realizes that a curl of his hair ends just above a mole on his forehead. A question mark. So she tackles him in a parking garage and that is that.

Later, when they are living together, Louis gives Kay a pathetic little tree for their back yard. She is bugged by trees and gets up in the night and tears the sapling out by its roots. From then on, their relationship worsens; she moves into another room in the house and tries to gloss over the problems by suggesting, “We’re probably just going through a non-sex phase.”

But the arrival of her sister (Genevieve Lemon), a heftily scaled terror who is known either as Dawn or as Sweetie, really sends the household into turmoil. Sweetie has brought her “producer,” a hilariously sluggish dolt (Michael Lake) who is supposedly working on ways to break Sweetie into show business.

And if that’s not enough, the girls’ middle-aged father (Jon Darling) arrives, having just been abandoned by his wife, who has gone into the outback to live with Australian cowboys, or “jackaroos.” He still thinks Sweetie is destined for greatness, despite the manifest evidence that suggests her total lack of charm or talent.

There is much grotesquerie along the way, some of which, I think, is entirely for its own sake. Campion obviously has some moviemaking juice, and there’s a lot about this film that’s delightful, in its freakish way.

Its outrageousness gets to be a bit much. At times Campion piles on the absurdity, as though trying to impress the New York reviewers who thrive on this sort of thing – which, judging by the enthusiastic critics’ quotes in the advertising for Sweetie, she seems to have done.

First published in The Herald, March 2, 1990

Not too long after this I saw Campion’s Angel at My Table, and realized this was indeed a major movie talent, but I wish I’d been a little quicker on the uptake here. Not a very impressive review, but it’s not an easy film, either. Also, I hadn’t seen any of Campion’s pre-Sweetie short films yet, and those are remarkable. And what’s up with the potshots at New York reviewers?

Shirley Valentine

Shirley Valentine is a middle-aged Liverpool housewife who refers to herself as “St. Joan of the Kitchen Sink.” Having raised two grown children, her function now is to make sure she has her husband’s supper ready at six o’clock every night.

The allure of this existence begins to wane, and Shirley has begun to talk to the walls, which is to say, the camera, in the movie that bears her name. Shirley spouts her philosophy (“Marriage is like the Middle East. There’s no solution”) and maintains as best she can. When a friend proposes a trip to Greece, leaving hubby behind, Shirley vacillates at first, but goes.

It’s in Greece that she falls in love. Not with the likably devilish tavern owner who takes her on a romantic boat ride, or any other man. She falls in love with the idea of living her own life. After two weeks, she’s haunted by a thought: Would anyone really miss her if she didn’t go back?

Shirley Valentine is based on a one-woman show written by Willy Russell (Educating Rita), who also adapted the screenplay. Russell has rewritten the stage play so that Shirley is now surrounded by other characters, but she retains the ability to speak directly to the audience, which she does with puckish regularity.

Shirley is played by Pauline Collins, who triumphed in the role in London and Broadway (she won the Tony this year). Collins is a delight; her rolling Liverpudlian accent and her brazenly unglamorous appearance make for a refreshing heroine. (Bernard Hill plays the husband; Tom Conti is the Greek fling. Both are excellent.)

Russell’s main point, about people taking charge of their destinies, is familiar. And his script is overwritten; there are too many pat one-liners and convenient situations, and director Lewis Gilbert, who also directed Educating Rita, gives the material a glossy overglow.

But it plays into a universal fantasy: It’s an irresistible moment when Shirley stands with her luggage at the Greek airport and simply walks away from the plane bound to take her back to England.

Of course, everything works out a little too neatly, but then this is something of a fantasy. And with Pauline Collins in control, it’s a pretty easy one to enjoy.

First published in The Herald, September 7, 1989

Collins was Oscar-nominated for her role; there was also a Best Song nomination, for a little concoction from Marvin Hamlisch and the Bergmans. The universal fantasy of walking away was very much my own at the time; but I assume it is also universal, at least some of the time.