There is a way to make material like Godzilla work. It can be campy fun, like the recent Gamera, Guardian of the Universe. Or hallucinatory, like Infra-Man. Or awesome, like Jurassic Park. Or it can tap a certain elemental dread, like the original King Kong. But all of those approaches demand a certain sympathy with the material, a zest that rises to the occasion.
In Howard Hawks’s The Thing, there is a great scene where scientists in the Arctic spread out to trace the outlines of something mysterious that is buried in the ice, and the camera slowly pulls back to reveal that it is circular—a saucer. In Godzilla, the worm expert is standing in a deep depression, and the camera pulls back to reveal that he is standing in a footprint—which he would obviously have already known. There might be a way to reveal the astonishing footprint to the character and the audience at the same time, but that would involve a sense of style and timing, and some thought about the function of the scene.
There is nothing wrong with making a Godzilla movie, and nothing wrong with special effects. But don’t the filmmakers have some obligation to provide pop entertainment that at least lifts the spirits? There is real feeling in King Kong fighting off the planes that attack him, or the pathos of the monster in Bride of Frankenstein, who was so misunderstood. There is a true sense of wonder in Jurassic Park.
Godzilla, by contrast, offers nothing but soulless technique: A big lizard is created by special effects, wreaks havoc, and is destroyed. What a coldhearted, mechanistic vision, so starved for emotion or wit. The primary audience for Godzilla is children and teenagers, and the filmmakers have given them a sterile exercise when they hunger for dreams.
The Good Son
(Directed by Joseph Ruben; starring Macaulay Culkin, Elijah Wood; 1993)
Who in the world would want to see this movie? Watching The Good Son, I asked myself that question, hoping that perhaps the next scene would contain the answer, although it never did. The movie is a creepy, unpleasant experience, made all the worse because it stars children too young to understand the horrible things we see them doing.
The story begins with the death of the hero’s mother. His father needs to go to Japan urgently on business, and so young Mark (Elijah Wood) goes to spend a couple of weeks with his aunt and uncle’s family in Maine. They’ve had tragedy, too: A baby boy drowned in his bath some time ago. Now young Henry (Macaulay Culkin) has the house all to himself—except for his sister, who may not last long.
The two boys seem to be about nine or ten. They are allowed to roam freely all over the island, which seems to be have been designed as a series of death traps for kids. Mark almost falls out of a towering tree house, and then, led by Henry, stands on the edges of cliffs, walks around the rim of a deep well, runs down the railroad tracks, and eventually watches with horror as Henry kills a dog and later causes a highway crash by dropping a human form off a bridge.
This is a very evil little boy; the movie could have been called Henry, Portrait of a Future Serial Killer. But what rings false is that the Macaulay Culkin character isn’t really a little boy at all. His speech is much too sophisticated and ironic for that, and so is his reasoning and his cleverness. He would be more frightening, perhaps, if he did seem young and naive. This way, he seems more like a distasteful device by the filmmakers, who apparently think there is a market for glib one-liners by child sadists.
Young Mark quickly realizes how evil Henry is, but no one will listen to him—not his uncle, not his aunt, not even the friendly local child psychiatrist. Everything leads up to a cliff-hanging climax that somehow manages to be unconvincing, contrived, meretricious, and manipulative, all at once. I don’t know when I’ve disliked the ending of a movie more.
The screenplay is by Ian McEwan, that British master of the macabre (The Comfort of Strangers was based on one of his novels). But don’t blame him. He has already published an article in a London newspaper complaining that once the Culkin family came aboard the movie, the original screenplay was the last of anyone’s considerations. The story was shaped to fit Macaulay, he charges. Strange. You’d imagine that the tyke’s parents and managers would have paid good money to keep him out of this story.
One of the reasons the movie feels so unwholesome is that Macaulay seems too young and innocent to play a character this malevolent. At times, hearing the things he’s made to say, you want to confront the filmmakers who made him do it, and ask them what they were thinking of.
For that matter, what were Culkin’s parents thinking of when they pushed him into a movie where he drowns his baby brother, tries to drown his little sister, and wants to push his mother off a cliff? If this kid grows up into another one of those pathetic, screwed-up former child stars who are always spilling their guts on the talk shows, a lot of adults will share the blame.
The movie is rated “R.” Market surveys indicate that kids want to see it, probably because it stars their Home Alone hero. This is not a suitable film for young viewers. I don’t care how many parents and adult guardians they surround themselves with. And somewhere along the line, a parent or adult guardian should have kept Macaulay out of it, too.
The Good Wife
(Directed by Kem Cameron; starring Rachel Ward, Sam Neill; 1987)
It gets lonely out there in the country. Sometimes it gets so lonely a woman just doesn’t know what to do. “I just wish something would happen to me,” Marge complains to her husband. “Anything.” But it always seems like things happen to someone else. Just this morning, for example, she assisted in the delivery of a child. Tonight she will go to bed with her brother-in-law. You see how it is.
The Good Wife is slow, solemn, and boring, and so I assume it is meant to be a serious study of Marge and her problems, recycled D. H. Lawrence, maybe. But this material is so dead that maybe having fun with it was the only hope; it needed a David Lynch or a John Cleese to make it work.
The movie stars Rachel Ward as Marge, the repressed young wife, and Bryan Brown as Sonny, her loving and long-suffering husband. They live on a farm in Australia where, as already noted, nothing much seems to happen, not even after Sugar, Sonny’s brother, comes to live with them.
Sugar is a total loser who asks Marge if he can sleep with her. Marge advises him to ask her husband. The husband generously gives his permission, but about three seconds later Marge is more bored than ever, if you get what I mean. Meanwhile, the hotel in town hires a new bartender, a slick Clark Gable type played by Sam Neill.
Sexual conduct must have been more permissive in Australia in 1939 than it is these days. Neill gets off the train, sees Marge standing in the station, walks two blocks with her, shoves her up against a hedge, and sexually assaults her. She fights him off, and he says bitterly, “One chance is all you’ll get with me.”
Marge returns to her lonely farm and begins to develop an obsession about the bartender. She can think of nothing else. She goes into town and gets drunk and shouts lewd suggestions at him in front of the whole barroom. Her husband comes and takes her home in the truck. And so on.
There are some murky minor characters, such as Marge’s sluttish mother, who are no doubt supposed to provide some psychological insights. But basically what we have here is a sad woman who is mentally ill, and a husband who is incredibly patient with her. Or, as the movie’s press release phrases it, “She is bored, hot, and in trouble—a dangerous combination.” Out in the audience, I was bored and hot, an even more dangerous combination.