The Good Wife

Marge Hills is the sort of character in novels who stares out the window a lot and wonders why interesting things always seem to happen to other people, while she is stuck in her dreary, workaday existence. Except that The Good Wife, a mood piece set in 1939 Australia in which Marge is the titular character, isn’t a novel, it’s a movie.

One of the problems with the film is that it never quite finds a way to make Marge’s issue alive in cinematic terms. In pages of description, a novel can vividly portray spiritual suffocation. A movie must come up with images to show the same thing, and The Good Wife hasn’t found them.

What is has found is a good performance from the heretofore wooden Rachel Ward, the gorgeous star of The Thorn Birds and Against All Odds. Her lean face holds all the texture of a thousand hours spent looking out into the arid Australian afternoon.

In screenwriter Peter Kenna’s scheme, she will find a change in her dull life through sexual curiosity. Her husband (Bryan Brown, also Ward’s real-life husband), is one of those rough-hewn laborer types; he engages in, shall we say, uncomplicated lovemaking. It’s not enough for Marge, and she looks to his brother (Steven Vidler) for a different approach.

Actually, the brother turns out to be as unsatisfactory. Then a city slicker (Sam Neill, the smooth Soviet of Amerika) arrives, to take over the bartending job at the town hotel, and also to cut a romantic swath through the town’s womenfolk. Marge is both repulsed and attracted to this rake, and she makes him the focus of her attention – to the lip-smacking interest of the gossipy locals.

The situation is well into D.H. Lawrence territory, but oddly without any dark sensuousness. The oppressive dustiness of the atmosphere seems to seep into the characters, and director Ken Cameron’s style is so dry that Marge’s obsession doesn’t really catch fire.

The film comes close to acknowledging this. When someone points out to Marge that she’s wasting her time chasing after the ne’er-do-well bartender, she looks lost and says, “He must be able to love me, or what would be the point of my feeling like this? It wouldn’t make sense.” It doesn’t, quite, and even Ward’s sensitive, wearied performance can’t bring it convincingly into focus.

First published in The Herald, February 24, 1987

I must have watched the TV miniseries Amerika, but I don’t recall it. Just from reading this description, it seems obvious Neill should’ve played the husband and Brown the rakish bartender, but maybe Brown already had the script for Cocktail sitting around, so who knows. (That one came out a year after The Good Wife.) Director Cameron worked a lot in Aussie TV; screenwriter Kenna died this year this came out. Original title: The Umbrella Woman.

How to Get Ahead in Advertising

“Whatever it is, sell it!”

This is the governing credo of frantic ad man Dennis Bagley, who works for one of London’s most high powered advertising agencies. Bagley is known as a genius at selling, but his newest account has him stymied. How can he make pimple cream sexy?

“I cannot get a handle on boils,” he laments, as he drinks, chain-smokes, and generally frazzles himself toward an impossible deadline. Suddenly, in mid-emotional breakdown, he comes to see the hypocrisy and horror of selling people things they don’t need. He decides to quit his job and devote himself to telling the truth about the corrupt advertising world, which is to say, the world at large.

Just then, a boil sprouts up on his neck. And, although his wife and friends can’t see it, the boil begins to take on human features and to talk in impertinent phrases, like an unwelcome voice in a TV commercial. Clearly the boil means to sabotage his plans to subvert the advertising industry.

This wild story is the premise of How to Get Ahead in Advertising, an original film from writer-director Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I). Robinson uses black comedy and science fiction to skewer the ad world, and he does so with a glee that is intoxicating.

The dizzy Bagley resembles a Frankenstein who has created his own monster, the advertising lie, which then manifests itself on his neck (“The boil! It’s alive! It speaks!” he cries). It’s a wonderful role and a manic tour-de-force for Richard E. Grant, the actor who played Withnail in Robinson’s first film.

Grant is skeletal and bug-eyed, and he masterfully spits out the spiky dialogue (“The boil can speak,” he snarls to a psychiatrist, “but that doesn’t qualify it to have an opinion”). Lovely Rachel Ward, who plays his wife, can’t quite hold her own.

Robinson’s main idea is a provocative one: that Big Brother isn’t watching us, we’re watching Big Brother, and quite happy to do so. How to Get Ahead in Advertising is far from perfect. It tends to move along clunkily, but Robinson is much more interesting than lots of polished directors. Here’s hoping he keeps doing things his own peculiar way.

First published in The Herald, June 3, 1989

Robinson’s career has gone in different directions; he’s written a few books (including one about Jack the Ripper), directed the suspense movie Jennifer 8 and the Hunter S. Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary, with Johnny Depp.

Against All Odds

Against All Odds is another of those sweaty, hot­ looking movies that builds up a great sense of atmosphere. It may be that the director was too busy whipping up this atmosphere to notice that the movie was coming unglued, because Against All Odds is a rambling piece of work that succeeds neither as a love story nor as a thriller. It bears scant resemblance to the 1947 film on which it is based, Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur. That film was a lean, hard story about a guy with a past, a shady deal and a bad girl. It hurtled toward the hero’s eventual doom with efficiency and terseness.

Against All Odds meanders through a more complicated scenario. The story may be more ambitious, but it’s also more confused. And the film is so awkwardly shaped that it seems to come to a full halt a few times.

This washed-up Los Angeles football player (Jeff Bridges), at loose ends, agrees to go to Mexico to find the girlfriend of a sleazy bookie (sleazy James Woods) who is also the daughter of the football team’s wealthy owner (Jane Greer, who played the lead in Out of the Past opposite Robert Mitchum).

Woods has evidence incriminating Bridges in a fixed game, and Bridges is more or less blackmailed into looking for the girl, who stabbed Woods before she ran away. When Bridges finds the girl (Rachel Ward) on a Caribbean island, he quite naturally falls for her himself. Their island idyll is cut short when they realize that Woods will not give up looking for her.

But Bridges finds out that Ward plays a mean game, too; she leaves him standing on top of a Mayan temple with blood on his hands. At this point, the film switches back to Los Angeles, and you start to get almost as confused as Bridges’ character must be.

The love story gets woven into a bigger scam that involves Greer’s development of a Los Angeles hill into condominiums, and the devious and dangerous ways this is done. But by this time, so many crosses have been doubled that it’s hard to keep up with the complications.

Director Taylor Hackford – who scored such a big hit with 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman – has paced the film to an inappropriately lazy beat. A fast car chase toward the beginning of the movie and some nice suspense in an office building toward the end are taut sequences, but there’s too much slack in between, and many things don’t make whole lot of sense. For instance, Woods’ henchman (Dorian Harewood) hangs around in a lot of scenes, but ultimately doesn’t seem to be there for any reason.

And the film is almost humorless – a disappointment when you’ve got a very witty actor, Jeff Bridges, in the lead, as well as some supporting players with solid comic credentials (Alex Karras, Saul Rubinek, and Swoosie Kurtz especially; only Kurtz gets to supply some much-­needed comic relief).

The acting of former model Rachel Ward seems to be improving. She’s a whole lot less wooden here than she was in TV’s The Thorn Birds, certainly, and she throws herself into the love scenes with gusto. She’s so gorgeous that the relative merit of her technical skills stops mattering after a short while.

First published in the Herald, March 3, 1984

A lot of plot revealed here. Maybe I didn’t know what else to say about this blah remake. And yet no mention of the impossible-to-escape Phil Collins title song (the film’s only Oscar nomination). My description of Out of the Past sounds odd now, as that movie strikes me as voluptuous rather than lean or terse, but maybe I was trying to make a point. Richard Widmark’s in this movie, too.