The movie is not unskillful. The acting is much better than the material deserves, and individual scenes achieve takeoff velocity, but the movie ends without resolution, as if its purpose was to strike a note and slink away. The Myth of Fingerprints makes one quite willing to see the same actors led by the same director—but in another screenplay. This one is all behavior, nuance, and angst, seasoned with unrelieved gloom. Some families need healing. This one needs triage.
Newsies
(Directed by Kenny Ortega; starring Robert Duvall, Ann-Margret; 1992)
Newsies, we are informed as the movie opens, is based on actual events. I do not doubt this. I am sure that shortly before the turn of the century, newsboys organized a strike against the greedy Joseph Pulitzer, and were cheered on by a dance-hall madam with a heart of gold. Nor do I doubt that the lads, some of them boys of nine or ten, hung out in saloons and bought rounds of beer while making their plans, or that the proprietor of an evil city orphanage made himself rich by collecting fees from the city. I don’t even doubt that the newsboys printed their own strike paper on an old flat-bed press down in the basement of Pulitzer’s building. Of course I believe. Yes, Virginia.
What I find it hard to believe, however, is that anyone thought the screenplay based on these actual events was of compelling interest. Newsies is like warmed-over Horatio Alger, complete with such indispensable clichés as the newsboy on crutches, the little kid, and of course the hero’s best pal, who has a pretty sister. Nor does the movie lack the standard villains, including Oscar nominee Michael Lerner as the hard-hearted circulation manager.
In the role of New York publisher Joseph Pulitzer, Robert Duvall, wearing a beard that makes him look like one of the Smith Brothers, plays a standard fat-cat industrialist, with none of the wit or insight that the original Pulitzer employed while selling the first mass-circulation newspapers to the unwashed masses. The real Pulitzer, who was one of the inspirations for Citizen Kane, must have known something about ordinary people; here he seems here to despise them.
Ann-Margret, who plays Madda, the dance-hall star, has a role whose purpose is all but incomprehensible. She acts as a sort of big sister and confidante to the striking newsboys, chucking some of them under the chin while talking to others in terms of fairly alarming intimacy. Are we to guess that her dealings with some of the lads have gone beyond buying a paper for a penny? She performs onstage in her music hall, which functions in the movie primarily as a transparent device for getting an Ann-Margret number into the show.
The newsies themselves are up in arms because Mr. Pulitzer has cut their take by a tenth of a cent. They organize, form a union, and agitate for workers’ rights with such articulate energy that we can only wonder what these kids could accomplish if they were high school graduates, instead of street waifs. They sing and dance a lot, too, on olde New York street sets that stretch unconvincingly for hundreds of yards down studio back lots. The music is by Alan Mencken, whose material for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast was unforgettable. Here he achieves the opposite result.
I saw the movie at a Saturday morning preview attended by hundreds of children. From what I could see and hear, the kids didn’t get much out of it. No wonder. Although the material does indeed involve young protagonists, no effort is made to show their lives in a way today’s kids can identify with. This movie must seem as odd to them as a foreign film. The fact that old man Pulitzer once tried to screw newsies out of a tenth of a cent must represent, for many of them, the very definition of the underwhelming.
Nick and Jane
(Directed by Richard Mauro; starring Dana Wheeler-Nichols, James McCaffrey; 1997)
You don’t want to watch Nick and Jane, you want to grade it. It’s like work by a student inhabiting the mossy lower slopes of the bell curve. Would-be filmmakers should see it and make a list of things they resolve never to do in their own work.
The story involves Jane (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), a business executive, and Nick (James McCaffrey), a taxi driver. She is unaware of the movie rule that requires that whenever a character arrives unannounced at a lover’s apartment for a “surprise,” the lover will be in bed with someone else. She finds the faithless John (John Dossett) in another’s arms, bolts out of the building, and into Nick’s cab. Then follow the usual scenes in which they fall in love even though they live in two different worlds.
I call that the story, but it’s more like the beard. Inside Nick and Jane’s heterosexual cover story is a kinky sex comedy, signaling frantically to be released. Consider. Nick’s neighbor in his boardinghouse is Miss Coco Peru (Clinton Leupp), a drag queen. Nick’s roommate is Enzo (Gedde Watanabe), whose passion for feet is such that he drops to his knees to sniff the insteps of complete strangers. The friendly black woman at the office is into bondage and discipline with the naughty boss. Carter (David Johansen), the boss’s special assistant, is Miss Coco’s special friend. Key scenes take place at a drag club where Miss Coco is the entertainer (her act consists of singing “The Lord’s Prayer”—in all seriousness, and right down to the “forever and ever, Amen,” I fear).
These elements could possibly be assembled into quite another movie (for all I know, they were disassembled from quite another movie). But they don’t build into anything. They function simply to show that the filmmakers’ minds are really elsewhere—that the romance of Nick and Jane is the bone they’re throwing to the dogs of convention. I kept getting the strange feeling that if they had their druthers, director Richard Mauro and writers Neil William Alumkal and Peter Quigley would have gladly ditched Nick and Jane and gone with Miss Coco as the lead.
As for Nick and Jane, they have alarming hair problems. Dana Wheeler-Nicholson goes through the movie wearing her mother’s hairstyle, or maybe it’s Betty Crocker’s. James McCaffrey starts out with the aging hippie look but after an expensive makeover paid for by Jane he turns up with his hair slicked back in the Michael Douglas Means Business mode. I think the idea was to show him ever so slightly streaked with blond, but they seem to have dismissed the stylist and done the job themselves, maybe over Miss Coco’s sink with a bottle of something from Walgreen’s, and Nick looks like he was interrupted in the process of combing yolks through his hair.
The camera work is sometimes quietly inept, sometimes spectacularly so. Consider the scene involving a heated conversation, during which the camera needlessly and distractingly circles the characters as if to say—look, we can needlessly circle these characters! The dialogue is written with the theory that whatever people would say in life, they should say in a movie (“This is a wonderful view!” “I’ve never been in the front seat of a cab before!”).
There is one scene where Nick bashfully confesses to having studied art and reluctantly lets Jane see some sketches he has done of her. The usual payoff for such scenes is a drawing worthy of Rembrandt, but what Nick shows her is one of those Famous Artist’s School approaches where he drew an egg shape and then some crosshairs to mark where the ears and eyes should line up.
Nick’s artistry knows no bounds. Masquerading as a business executive, he effortlessly absorbs the firm’s current challenge, which apparently involves saving 25 percent on the importation of scrap metal from Surinam. He dispatches Enzo (wearing those L.A. Gear shoes with heels that light up) to collect lots of scrap metal from a junkyard, after which Nick dons a handy welder’s helmet to fashion a sculpture that he hauls into the CEO’s office, explaining it is intended “to punctuate the enormity of the idea I’m about to present.” Yes. That’s what he says.