DECK THE PLEX WITH TARANTINO
By RICHARD CORLISS; RICHARD SCHICKEL
Will any child want to jump out of bed on Christmas morning and rush off to a Quentin Tarantino film? Can Wag the Dog possibly be mistaken for a Snoopy holiday special? Does the 19th century Australia of Oscar and Lucinda have nearly the same Christmas kick as Scrooge's London? And Woody Allen, musing on death and betrayal--now there's the cure for seasonal depression.
The release of ambitious films at year's end has nothing to do with noel and everything to do with the Dec. 31 deadline for Academy Award qualifiers. While real people flock to Scream 2, movie people begin their homework by seeing Oscar contenders. Most of these films don't open till Christmas, but we can't wait. Here are five shiny baubles for right now. IT'S PULP, BUT IT AIN'T QUITE PULP FICTION
The wait is over. It's 3 1/2 years since Pulp Fiction exploded at the Cannes Film Festival, and now everyone can stop wondering what Quentin Tarantino will do next. The answer, in JACKIE BROWN: more of the same, and less.
The film is an elaborate, fitfully funny Tarantoon about chatty folks with big guns. Working reverently from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, the writer-director tosses half a dozen wary people into the pit of their avarice and lets us guess who will survive. Pam Grier's title character is a flight attendant running money from Mexico to California for her drug boss Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), who is variously inconvenienced by his lazily taunting girlfriend (Bridget Fonda), his low-IQ henchman (Robert De Niro), an eager fed (Michael Keaton) and an aging bail bondsman (Robert Forster), whose creased face is a road map of disappointment in the venality of humankind.
There's little moral rooting interest here; the fun comes from expert actors spitting out the lurid rhythms of punk patter. You want affability fragging into menace? Tarantino can write it for you. Jackson and Fonda, especially, can deliver it with a swell sting.
But at 2 1/2 hours, it all plays like the rough assembly of a 90-min. caper film--an anecdote told at epic length. Grier, foxy lady of '70s blaxploitation, is given little chance to radiate; you never even glimpse her magnificent shoulders. As for Tarantino, he is playing peekaboo with his sizable talent. Jackie Brown marks time, lots of it, between Pulp Fiction and his next great project.
The wait goes on. --By Richard Corliss
LOVE, FAITH, HOPE AND OTHER ECCENTRICITIES
It's a sight to behold and an image to cherish--a little country church, improbably fashioned out of glass and wrought iron, bobbing down an untamed river deep in the 19th century Australian wilderness. How in the world did it and the man delivering it--a nice, pious (if defrocked) clergyman named Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes)--end up in these unlikely precincts?
Logically enough, if your definition of the logical encompasses the inherent illogic of human passion. For gangly Oscar, nervous yet nervy in Fiennes' gloriously addled performance, is a gambling man. Gambling is an activity that, as he sees it, permits him leaps and tests of faith, with all his winnings going to churchly charities. He has bet that he can deliver this fragile edifice by a certain date despite the roughness of both the country and the crew that's helping with the tugging and hauling.
His wager is with Lucinda Leplastrier (the luminous and spunky Cate Blanchett), also a gambling addict. For her, gambling is a way of asserting herself against gentility and separating herself from some of the money she has inherited but doesn't really want. Equally unlikely for a woman of her time, she is an industrialist. That church is a product of her glass factory, and it is intended as reparation to another clergyman who has been exiled for being seen in her raffish company.
O.K., you say, you know where OSCAR AND LUCINDA is heading--toward the kind of happy, reconciling ending that usually crowns romantic period adventures. Don't get too comfortable with that thought. For this story, adapted from Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel by Laura Jones and directed by Gillian Armstrong, is as wayward as its main characters--comic, fierce, digressive. Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film. --By Richard Schickel
FINDING THE DALAI LAMA--WITHOUT BRAD PITT
The Bible plays like wild melodrama: a father commanded to sacrifice his child, an ark in a deluge, God's son betrayed and murdered and reborn. Ideal material for Martin Scorsese, as he proved in The Last Temptation of Christ, his mean-streets-of-Jerusalem story of a tormented Jesus. By contrast, Buddhist texts are static and serene, antidramatic. And the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet is the ultimate good fellow, not a goodfella. So what can Scorsese find to make his own in KUNDUN?
That turns out to be the wrong question. The director has come to this biography of "the Buddha of compassion, the wish-fulfilling jewel" as a pilgrim. He is in Tibet (actually Morocco) to explore, bend, learn, find new ways of seeing and showing the light. That makes Kundun his simplest and most experimental film.
Melissa Mathison's script dares to tell an Asian tale with no Westerners, not even Brad Pitt. At two, Tenzin Gyatso is found in a remote village and proclaimed Buddha's incarnation. Schooled and coddled, he grows to manhood. He confronts Mao and his acquisitive legates, and he finally flees to India.
So far, so sonorous--perhaps soporific. But aided by Roger Deakins' pristine camera work and the euphoric drone of Philip Glass's score, Scorsese devises a poem of textures and silences. Visions, nightmares and history blend in a tapestry as subtle as the Tibetans' gorgeous mandalas of sand. For some, Kundun will be a slog. For the open mind and eye, though, this is rapture in pictures. --R.C.
MR. HOFFMAN GOES TO WASHINGTON
Eleven days before the election, the President is accused of sexual dalliance with a visitor to the Oval Office--an underage visitor, at that. What's needed, the spin doctor (a coolly cynical Robert De Niro) decrees, is a splendid little war to divert the populace. None being handy, one will have to be invented out of rumor and falsified electronic imagery.
That's where Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) comes in. And WAG THE DOG takes off. It requires a paranoia that might make Oliver Stone wag his head to believe in the film's overarching proposition; you need too many potentially leaky support personnel to fake a war. But director Barry Levinson and writers Hilary Henkin and David Mamet (no less) have obviously known their share of Stanleys, and we have no trouble believing in him.
Especially as Hoffman, a furiously contradictory blend of hubris and insecurity, venal focus and material distraction, and transparently false charm and roughshod willfulness, plays him. Arranging for the patriotic songs and sentimental images needed to stir our nascent jingoism--a war orphan rescuing her kitten from a bombing, a POW posing for an enemy camera and sending a secret, reassuring message home to Mom--he transcends his origins as a show-biz in-joke. For he is less immoral than pre-moral, childlike in his gleeful wickedness. That somehow completes his perfect embodiment of everything that's awful in American life nowadays and even, curiously, induces a sympathetic pang at his ultimate downfall. --R.S.
HE'S STILL NAUGHTY BUT NOT AS NICE
The grim reaper knocking at the door, the failures of psychiatry, reality and fantasy getting all mixed up in people's minds, vengeful former spouses--certain images and ideas do tend to keep turning up in Woody Allen's movies. And that says nothing about his recurring sexual tropes--older men lusting after much younger women or, still more disastrously, after their sisters-in-law. Lately, sex with an agreeable prostitute as a way of staying out of deeper trouble seems to have become his new fixation.
DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, in which Allen plays a novelist with the unfortunate habit of drawing a little too obviously on the facts of his life for his fiction, is a compendium of the writer-director's well-known obsessions--an anthology of angst, if you will. It has a great if often underutilized cast and some bold comic conceits: an actor who literally loses his focus, appearing as a blur onscreen and in the eyes of his loved ones, lovers caught en flagrante by an elderly blind woman who thinks that what they're really doing is stirring a pitcher of martinis.
But on the whole, the movie feels regressive and dispassionate, especially when you compare it with the sustained inventiveness of Bullets over Broadway or the serene surrealism of Everyone Says I Love You. Worse, Allen's character is shrill, sour and even somewhat irrelevant in ways it was not when Allen's neuroses were still touched by romantic hope and when the sexual revolution had not yet entered its present grimly Stalinoid phase. --R.S.