The Hitcher
(Directed by Robert Holman; starring Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh; 1986)
The Hitcher begins and ends with the same sound: a match being struck, flaring into flame. At the beginning of the film, the sound is made by the villain, a hitchhiker who is a mass murderer. At the end of the film, the sound is made by the hero, a young man whose life has been spared so that he can become the special victim of the hitchhiker.
The movie seems to be telling us, by the use of the sounds and in several other ways, that the killer and the hero have developed some kind of deep bond through their shared experiences.
The victim’s identification with his torturer is not a new phenomenon. In many of the hostage cases in recent years, some of the captives have adopted the viewpoints of their jailers. What is particularly sick about The Hitcher is that the killer is not given a viewpoint, a grudge, or indeed even a motive.
He is deliberately presented as a man without a past, without a history, who simply and cruelly hurts and kills people. Although he spares the movie’s young hero, he puts him through a terrible ordeal, framing him as a mass murderer and trapping him in a Kafkaesque web of evidence.
At the end of the movie, there is, of course, a scene of vengeance in which the two men meet in final combat. And yet this showdown does not represent a fight between good and evil, because the movie suggests that there is something sadomasochistic going on between the two men. The death of the villain is not the hero’s revenge, but the conclusion that the villain has been setting up for himself all along.
This unhealthy bond between the young hero (played by C. Thomas Howell) and the older killer (the cold-eyed Rutger Hauer) is developed in a movie that provides a horrible fate for its only major female character. As Howell flees down empty desert highways from the violence of Hauer, he is befriended by a young waitress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She believes that he is innocent and goes on the run with him.
But the movie does not develop into a standard story of teenagers in love. And the Leigh character’s death—she is tied hand and foot between two giant trucks and pulled in two—is so grotesquely out of proportion with the main business of this movie that it suggests a deep sickness at the screenplay stage.
There are other disgusting moments, as when a police dog feasts on the blood dripping from its master’s neck, and when Howell finds a human finger in his french fries.
The Hitcher grants the Hauer character almost supernatural powers. Although that makes the movie impossible to accept on a realistic level, it didn’t bother me. I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary.
But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
(Directed by Chris Columbus; starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern; 1992)
I have a feeling that Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is going to be an enormous box-office success, but include me out. I didn’t much like the first film, and I don’t much like this one, with its sadistic little hero who mercilessly hammers a couple of slow-learning crooks. Nor did I enjoy the shameless attempt to leaven the mayhem by including a preachy subplot about the Pigeon Lady of Central Park. Call me hard-hearted, call me cynical, but please don’t call me if they make Home Alone 3.
I know, I know—the violence is all a joke. Some of the gags are lifted directly from old color cartoons, and in spirit what we’re looking at here are Road Runner adventures, with the crooks playing the role of Wile E. Coyote. As the two hapless mopes fall down ladders, are slammed by bricks and 500-pound bags of cement, and covered with glue and paint and birdseed, you can hear the cackling of the old Looney Tunes heroes in the background. And just like in the cartoons, the crooks are never really hurt; they bounce back, dust themselves off, bend their bones back into shape, and are ready for the next adventure. When little Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) taunts them (“Hey! Up here!”) he sounds like Bugs Bunny, and when they chase him (always unwisely) they’re in the tradition of Elmer Fudd.
The problem is, cartoon violence is only funny in the cartoons. Most of the live-action attempts to duplicate animation have failed, because when flesh-and-blood figures hit the pavement, we can almost hear the bones crunch, and it isn’t funny. Take, for example, the scene in Home Alone 2 where Kevin lures the crooks into trying to crawl down a rope from the top of a four-story town house. He has soaked the rope in kerosene, and when they’re halfway down he sets it on fire. Ho, ho.
The movie repeats the formula of the best-selling original film. Once again, Kevin’s forgetful family leaves home without him (he gets on the plane to New York instead of Miami), and once again they fret while he deals effortlessly with the world. He checks into the Plaza Hotel on his dad’s credit card, and has time for heartwarming conversations with a kindly old toy shop owner (Eddie Bracken) and a homeless bird lover (Brenda Fricker), not to mention Donald Trump, before running into his old enemies, the crooks (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). When he discovers they plan to rob the toy store, whose receipts are destined for a children’s hospital, he knows he has his work cut out for him (“Messing with kids on Christmas Eve—that’s going too far!”).
The kid outsmarts the usual assortment of supercilious adults, including hotel clerk Tim Curry, before setting a series of ingenious traps for the crooks. As before, he seems to have a complete command of all handyman skills, including rigging ladders and wiring appliances for electrical shocks—and, of course, he finds all the props he needs, even for rigging the exploding toilet and setting that staple gun to fire through the keyhole.
In between the painful practical jokes, there’s his treacly relationship with Fricker, as the Pigeon Lady, who shows him her hideaway inside the ceiling of Carnegie Hall. Christmas carols swell from the concert below as the sanctimonious little twerp lectures the old lady on the meaning of life. If he believes half of what he says, he’d give the crooks a break.
Is this a children’s movie? I confess I do not know. Millions of kids will go to see it. There used to be movies where it was bad for little kids to hurt grown-ups. Now Kevin bounces bricks off their skulls from the rooftops, and everybody laughs. The question isn’t whether the movie will scare the children in the audience. It’s whether the adults will be able to peek between their fingers.
Home Fries
(Directed by Dean Parisot; starring Drew Barrymore, Catherine O’Hara; 1998)
There is a moment about halfway through Home Fries when one of the characters is snaking a rubber tube up through the toilet of a house trailer, in order to pump in carbon monoxide and asphyxiate the woman inside—who he mistakenly thinks is the mistress of the stepfather he has earlier frightened to death. And I’m thinking—you know, this scene requires a whole lot more setup. And then I’m thinking, no, a scene like this only works if there is no setup at all.
The whole movie is kind of like that. The leaden plot hangs heavy on the characters, who could take flight if they could only break free from it. This is one of those movies where you wish you could just beam all of the characters up into another movie. I especially liked the work done by Drew Barrymore and Catherine O’Hara, but lord, the mileage they have to cover, slogging through the inane byways of the story line.