For example: In the film, Diamond plays a young Jewish cantor at his father’s synagogue. He is married, he has apparently settled down to a lifetime of religion. But he also writes songs for a black group. When one of the quartet gets sick, Diamond takes his place, appearing in a black nightclub in blackface. Oh yeah? This scene is probably supposed to be homage to Jolson’s blackface performance of Mammy in the original, but what it does in 1980 is get the movie off to an unintentionally hilarious start.
The bulk of the movie concerns Diamond’s decision to leave New York, his father, and his wife and go to Los Angeles, where he hopes to break into the music industry. This whole business of leaving the nest, of breaking the ties with his father, seems strange in a middle-aged character: Diamond is just too old to play these scenes. But no matter; the movie is ridiculous for lots of other reasons.
When he arrives in LA, for example, he’s instantly “discovered” in a recording studio by Lucie Arnaz, who plays an agent and is filled with energy and spunk—she’s the best thing in the movie. She thinks he has promise, so she gets him a job as the opening act for a comic. This gives Diamond a chance to sing, and his onstage appearances, I guess, are supposed to be the big deal in this movie. Because of that, the film sacrifices any attempt to present them realistically: For his West Coast debut as a warm-up for a comic, Diamond is backed up by dozens of onstage musicians, which look like the LA Philharmonic and, at union scale, would cost upward of $80,000. Sure.
The plot plods relentlessly onward. Laurence Olivier plays the aging father in the film, in a performance that seems based on that tortured German accent he also used in The Boys from Brazil, Marathon Man, and A Little Romance: Is it too much to hope that Sir Laurence will return to the English language sometime soon? Father and son fight, split, grudgingly meet again, hold a tearful reunion—all in scenes of deadly predictability.
One sequence that is not predictable has Neil Diamond abandoning the (now pregnant) Lucie Arnaz in order to hit the highway and become a road-show Kristofferson. This stretch of the film, with Diamond self-consciously lonely and hurting, is supposed to be affecting, but it misfires, it drips with so much narcissism.
But then Diamond’s whole presence in this movie is offensively narcissistic. His songs are melodramatic, interchangeable, self-aggrandizing groans and anguished shouts, backed protectively by expensive and cloying instrumentation. His dramatic presence also looks overprotected, as if nobody was willing to risk offending him by asking him to seem involved, caring, and engaged.
Diamond plays the whole movie looking at people’s third shirt buttons, as if he can’t be bothered to meet their eyes and relate with them. It’s strange about the Diamond performance: It’s not just that he can’t act. It’s that he sends out creepy vibes. He seems self-absorbed, closed off, grandiose, out of touch with his immediate surroundings. His fans apparently think Neil Diamond songs celebrate worthy human qualities. I think they describe conditions suitable for treatment.
Jennifer 8
(Directed by Bruce Robinson; starring Andy Garcia, Lance Henrickson, Uma Thurman; 1992)
Jennifer 8 promises a plot of excruciating complexity, but the story line turns relentlessly dumb. By the end the characters might as well be wearing name tags: “Hi! I’m the serial killer!” This is the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its tortuous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Somebody should have taken a hard look at the screenplay and decided that it wasn’t finished.
The movie stars Andy Garcia as a big-city detective who is recovering from a bad marriage with a cheating wife, and returns to the smaller city where his brother-in-law (Lance Henriksen) is a cop. Within minutes of his arrival, he’s digging through a garbage dump in search of body parts, and in no time flat he’s on the trail of a serial killer.
Deducing that a severed hand belonged to a blind person (yes, the fingertips are worn down from reading Braille) and that it was in a freezer for a long time, Garcia runs a computer search and discovers a pattern: Eight blind women have been killed and mutilated, all with .22 revolvers, within a 300-mile radius. (The fact that it takes a computer to discern this trend reminds me of the classic line from Fargo, “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.”) This is obviously the work of a serial killer, Garcia announces, only to arouse the fury of the local cop (Graham Beckel) who was on the case of the original missing woman.
The movie turns into a police procedural as Garcia interviews the blind roommate (Uma Thurman) of one of the missing women. Before long they have fallen into a particularly unconvincing love affair; I didn’t believe it because Thurman, usually so alive in her roles, here interprets her character as a soggy zombie who occasionally musters a smile. At Christmas she gets all dressed up to go to a party, but retreats in tears to the bedroom after she loses her way and everybody talks loud at the same time. That wouldn’t stop any of the blind party animals I’ve known.
The movie has no insights about the blind, other than they benefit greatly from talking alarm clocks and don’t need any lightbulbs in their bedrooms. Blindness is simply another plot gimmick in a movie with so many it can hardly remember what corner it’s currently cutting. Like many needlessly complicated movies, it plays long—real long—and it’s a relief when John Malkovich appears, at about the ninety-minute mark, playing an FBI man (I think) who accuses Garcia of murder.
The murder in question has to be seen to be believed. One cop climbs a fire escape into a building where he suspects the killer is hiding. He tells his partner, “If anyone comes down this fire escape but me, shoot.” Somebody else comes down the fire escape, shining a flashlight into the eyes of the other cop, who of course stands in full view to make himself a better target, and does not shoot. Even movie cops should be smarter than that.
And then there is the big climax, a red herring of truly startling proportions, indicating that the movie is willing to cheat, lie, and defraud to get a cheap thrill. The audience simply laughed in disbelief. Jennifer 8 has aspirations to be a cross between the murderer-next-door thriller and the Pathology Picture, so named because everybody stands around making hard-boiled comments about body parts (my favorite: A cop, examining a corpse at the dump, asks, “How long has he been feeling like this?”).
The cast in this movie has been outstanding in other movies; in addition to Garcia, Thurman, Malkovich, and Henriksen (The Stepfather), there’s Kathy Baker as the sister-in-law, plucky and determined, and even Kevin Conway as a police chief. It was quite an achievement to assemble them into one picture, but my guess is they’ll skip the reunions.
Joe’s Apartment
(Directed by John Payson; starring Jerry O’Connell, Megan Ward, Robert Vaughn; 1996)
I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe’s Apartment. That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production. I do not like cockroaches, and I wonder if they even like themselves. Although it is said that after a nuclear holocaust they would inherit the earth, my guess is they would still scurry out of sight even when there was no one left to see them.
Joe’s Apartment would be a very bad comedy even without the roaches, but it would not be a disgusting one. No, wait: I take that back. Even without the roaches, we would still have the subplot involving the pink disinfectant urinal cakes. Not everybody’s cup of tea.