For one thing, the noses: Her is graceful, a delicate thing that flares up and away from her full lips. His is inelegant, a flattened King-size that retains some Roman nobility while staying ready for a fight. There is nothing particularly complementary about these noses, nor about the people behind them, but they can’t seem to stay away from each other. It could be the old opposites attracting; then again, it could be nothing more than being the same place at the same time (in this case, the place is high school, Trenton, New Jersey, and the time is the mid-Sixties) and sharing a restless feeling. Whatever it is, they’ve got it, and it’s the kind of thing they won’t lose even when they want to.
She is Jill Rosen, a Jewish princess with the acting bug; he is Albert Capadilupo – just call him “Sheik” – an Italian stallion who fancies himself the next Frank Sinatra. They are the main characters in Baby It’s You, the new film by John Sayles, and we see their rocky relationship from the end of the their greaser high-school days to the beginning of their disoriented (and separate) college-age careers. That’s a pretty traumatic shift; the high school environment is sheltered and oppressive, having not changed since 1962, by the looks of things, although it must be ’66 or so. When the characters leave Trenton for the real world, they are suddenly swimming in hippiedom. That’s kind of an unrealistic leap, but Sayles seems more interested in showing the dramatic change of moving into any new environment than he is in documenting the history of psychedelia’s creep into national consciousness – in short, to make a movie about Any Time rather than a nostalgic time capsule.
Sayles indicates as much by his use of the anachronistic music that sometimes accompanies Sheik. A few of Bruce Springsteen’s streetkid songs underscore some of Sheik’s most intense moments, and serve as a shorthand for his character. (The Springsteen songs also remind us of our own vantage point, and perhaps that, with all the changes in popular culture through time, attitudes and experiences remain pretty much the same.) In fact, sometimes the music provides a large part of the understanding we have for these people; the reason for Jill’s love (or whatever) for Sheik remains a bit obscure (to me, anyway). Aside from his general hunkiness, he is not gifted with an overload of redeeming qualities – and yet, he is exciting, and unpredictable, and that danger attracts Jill. Sayles establishes this during one of the couple’s first encounters, a frenzied, rave-up car ride that Jill takes in Sheik’s car, cut to the scorching strains of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” It’s a giddy dangerousness, the kind that is so seductive. Maybe Sheik’s charms aren’t so elusive after all.
But then, part of the point of the movie is that the motivations of real people are frequently mysterious; and Sayles, in his movie career thus far, seems far more intrigued by ordinary people and problems than in contrivance or glitz. That’s a tricky business, and Baby It’s You carries the added burden of being set in a period that seems ready to perish from cinematic overuse. However, Sayles has a bonus, too: Baby It’s You marks his first use of real Hollywood actors, cinematographers, etc. Thus the film has a sharper look than Sayles’, first, homegrown films, Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna; and the film benefits hugely from the assured performances of Vince Spano as Sheik, and, especially, the remarkable Rosanna Arquette as Jill. They give their ordinary people something special, and their combined presence illuminates Sayles’ examination of the process by which two individuals can become something more than strangers in the night.
First published in The Informer, March 1983
Arquette was coming off The Executioner’s Song, so my enthusiasm came from that, with good reason. The cast also included small roles for Matthew Modine, Tracy Pollan, and Robert Downey, Jr. As I write this, John Sayles has not directed a film since the (very sharp) Go for Sisters in 2013, which is a tragic waste.
WHAT A FEELING! 