Chattahoochee

Chattahoochee is reminiscent of the most familiar prison movies, but it most resembles Robert Redford’s Brubaker, in revealing atrocities that happened in the Southern prison system. It’s also based on a true story.

This film is set in the 1950s, at a dilapidated mental institution in Florida. Our slightly unbalanced protagonist, Emmett Foley (Gary Oldman), a Korean War hero, has shot up some houses on his street in a bungled attempt to get himself killed so his wife can collect some insurance money. He’s sent to the Mental Hospital at Chattahoochee, a filthy hellhole – “This dark and hopeless place,” as he describes it to his faithful sister (Pamela Reed).

Emmett’s wife (Frances McDormand) is an oversexed honey who’s only too happy to abandon Emmett to the bottomless pit that is Chattahoochee. He adjusts to the grind with the help of a grizzled inmate (Dennis Hopper). But after a few years inside, he realizes he can’t adjust to the systematic violence and degradation of the place.

When he tries to report the horrors through proper channels, he’s met by a Catch-22 of bureaucracy. He insists that he is sane and suitable for release, and an investigating board asks him, “If you’re sane, why haven’t you tried to escape?”

This film has some potency, but many of its scenes seem recycled from previous prison dramas. Its best, most imaginative sequence is the opening scene, the weirdly comic episode in which Emmett takes his revolver and shoots up his neighbors’ lawns.

English director Mick Jackson, a veteran of British TV, brings an overwrought style to this material. It’s the bludgeon effect. After a while, the film just dissolves in its own gruesomeness, with only the watchability of Gary Oldman (Sid Vicious from Sid and Nancy) to maintain interest. Oldman finally isn’t enough.

First published in The Herald, May 4, 1990

Must’ve been a couple of other paragraphs lopped out of this one – I didn’t even mention Ned Beatty or M. Emmet Walsh, two men who belong in prison pictures about the bad old South. I recall this movie’s grittiness, but not much else. Curious shout-out on my part to Brubaker, not a movie I care about much, but a modest hit in its time. Jackson’s career is one of those baffling (I mean from the outside of course) arcs; lots of Brit-TV, then he followed this movie with L.A. Story and the blockbuster The Bodyguard, then directly to … the Dana Carvey amnesia comedy Clean Slate. But of course.

The Best of Times

Ever since 9:22 p.m., November 15, 1972, there has been an overriding reality in the life of an otherwise ordinary man from the small town of Taft, California. It was at that very moment, 13 years ago, that Jack (Robin Williams) dropped a last-second pass that would have given the Taft Rockets their first-ever victory over the hated Bakersfield Tigers.

Instead, Jack muffed the catch, Bakersfield won the high school rivalry again, and Jack was doomed to a life as The Man Who Dropped the Ball.

This is the situation for the protagonist of The Best of Times, a spunky, endearing slice-of-life comedy. As the film begins, Jack is recounting a brief history of the town of Taft, which has never seemed to win at anything. In a way, he’s like the town itself—small, unassuming, bloody but not bowed.

Jack gets it into his head that he can remove the nagging memory of that dropped ball—extricate himself from “the bowels of hell,” as he puts it—by replaying the game; that is, gathering all the now-paunchy players from the two squads and going through it all again.

But he’ll need the help of the greatest high school quarterback in the history of Taft: Reno Hightower (Kurt Russell). Reno resists, but a terrorist attack by a man dressed in a tiger suit—everyone thinks it’s a Bakersfield bad buy, but it’s actually Jack, trying to whip up enthusiasm for the game—changes Reno’s mind, and the preparations for the battle begin.

These are amusing; but at least as important to the heart of the film are the marital tribulations of Jack and Reno. Jack’s wife (Holly Palance) has thrown him out of the house because of his insistence on the replayed game. And long-standing problems have driven Reno’s wife (Pamela Reed) to temporary residence at the Top Hat motel.

A sequence with the two couples coming together for a reconciliation dinner is the comic centerpiece. The wives swig wine from the bottle in anticipation, the husbands try to bolster themselves with a game plan (“Be bland, but strong—careful, but with a touch of reckless”).

The women have deliberately scheduled the dinner for a Monday night, with the attendant televised football game; the dinner is a test to see whether the boys can resist the temptation. If that that setup seems a bit familiar, the results are funny nevertheless.

It all builds up to a conclusion that is also familiar and predictable: Every person who watches this movie knows that the big rematch will come down to a single play in which Jack will either redeem himself or become the goat of all time.

The plot may strike some as formula—how many movies can we take with a big sporting event as the finale? And yet The Best of Times has a wonderful freshness; it combines humor and heartache in a beguiling combination—in scenes such as Reno’s off-key rendition of “Close to You” at his wife’s motel room door, or the touching entreaty Jack makes to his wife in the gymnasium restroom during a pregame sock-hop.

Director Roger Spottiswoode (Under Fire) has a keen sense of how people talk, and behave; and he’s well-served by his actors. Williams and Russell have nice chemistry, and Palance (currently appearing in the Seattle Rep’s The Real Thing) and Reed (The Right Stuff) are attractively unglamorous.

The Best of Times doesn’t break new ground, and it’s a decidedly self-effacing work. But it’s a tremendously agreeable movie, and very easy to enjoy.

First published in the Herald, January 29, 1986

Lovely movie. I didn’t mention its screenwriter, because like most people I didn’t know who Ron Shelton was; Bull Durham was still a couple of years in the future. But of course Shelton’s spirit is all over this film, in the best ways. As for the director, this seemed like the moment Spottiswoode was going to settle onto the A-list, which didn’t happen although he did get some high-profile jobs, including a Bond picture. He was married to Holly Palance (yes, daughter of Jack), who didn’t really stick with the movie thing. This film just radiates a good feel, and everybody’s doing top-line work; of course, it didn’t do anything at the box office.