The real tragedy of Pirates may be that the movie was more of a deal than an inspiration. Polanski wrote the script twelve years ago, shortly after finishing Chinatown, and it languished on his agent’s desk until Tarak Ben Ammar, a wealthy Tunisian, finally signed on as producer. Polanski had gone eight years without a movie (his last film was Tess), and no doubt he was happy to have the work. But Pirates should never have been made, at least not by a director with no instinctive sympathy for the material, and not by an actor whose chief inspiration seems to be the desire to be a good sport.
A Place for Lovers
(Directed by Vittorio De Sica; starring Faye Dunaway, Marcello Mastroianni; 1969)
A Place for Lovers is the most godawful piece of pseudo-romantic slop I’ve ever seen. I did see it. Yes. I sat there in the dark, stunned by disbelief. Could Vittorio de Sica possibly have directed it? De Sica? Who made Bicycle Thief? Even a director who had made no movies would have a hard time making one as bad as this.
It is about a beautiful woman (Faye Dunaway) who has an incurable disease and takes up with an engineer (Marcello Mastroianni) who designs big plastic bags of water that are supposed to bring an end to racetrack accidents. They go up to a ski lodge and ponder at each other. Ponder, ponder, ponder. When Faye gets all pondered out, she takes the Jeep and drives into town to enigmatically threaten suicide. But she never kills herself, alas.
Instead, she lingers on during some of the most incredibly static scenes ever put on film. There’s a byplay involving a stray dog that she rescues from the dogcatcher and then (apparently) abandons. Either she abandons the dog or the script does. The screenplay was written by no less than five writers, who were possibly locked into separate rooms and forbidden to communicate.
One goes to this movie in the same spirit one visits an ancient town buried by lava centuries ago: To try to determine by examining the ruins what made the gods punish man so.
The Postman
(Directed by Kevin Costner; starring Kevin Costner, Olivia Williams; 1997)
There are those who will no doubt call The Postman the worst film of the year, but it’s too good-hearted for that. It’s goofy, yes, and pretentious, and Kevin Costner puts himself in situations that get snickers. And it’s way too long. But parables like this require their makers to burn their bridges and leave common sense behind: Either they work (as Forrest Gump did), in which case everyone involved is a genius, or they don’t—in which case you shouldn’t blame them for trying.
In choosing The Postman as his new project, however, Kevin Costner should perhaps have reflected that audiences were getting to be overfamiliar with him as the eccentric loner in the wilderness, coming across an isolated community, and then joining their war against evil marauders. He told that story magnificently in Dances With Wolves (1990) and then did another version in the futuristic fantasy Waterworld (1995). Now he sort of combines them, in a film that takes place in the post-Apocalyptic future like Waterworld, but looks and feels like it takes place in a Western.
The movie, based on an award-winning science fiction novel by David Brin, takes place in 2013. The dust clouds have settled after nuclear war, and scattered communities pick up the reins of civilization. There is no central government. Costner is a lone figure in the wilderness, friendly only with his mule, named Bill. They support themselves by doing Shakespeare for bands of settlers. Bill can hold a sword in his mouth, and in Macbeth he plays Birnam Wood. His master recites lines like, “Life is a tale told by a moron,” not the sort of mistake he’d be likely to make, especially with a woman helpfully prompting him by whispering, “Idiot! Idiot!” Or maybe she’s a critic.
Costner is conscripted into a neofascist army run by General Bethlehem (Will Patton). He escapes, stumbles over an abandoned U.S. Mail van, and steals the uniform, cap, and letterbag of the skeleton inside. At the gates of a settlement called Pineview, he claims he’s come to deliver the mail. Building on his fiction, he tells the residents of a restored U.S. government in Minneapolis. The sheriff spots him for a fraud, but the people want to believe, and the next morning, he finds letters pushed under his door. Walking outside, he discovers that all the people of the town have gathered in hushed silence in a semicircle around his lodging, to await his awakening and appearance—the sort of thing townspeople do in movies, but never in real life, where some helpful townsman invariably suggests, “Let’s just wake the sonuvabitch up.”
In a movie that proceeds with glacial deliberation, the postman becomes a symbol for the survivors in their struggling communities. “You give out hope like it was candy in your pocket,” a young woman tells him. It’s the sort of line an actor-director ought to be wary of applying to his own character, but Costner frankly sees the postman as a messiah, and there is a shot late in the film where he zooms high above a river gorge in a cable car that serves absolutely no purpose except to allow him to pose as the masthead on the ship of state.
That young woman (Olivia Williams), by the way, wants the postman’s semen. Her husband is infertile after the “bad mumps,” and the couple desire a child. The postman eventually obliges, and she makes love with him in a scene reminiscent of those good Victorian wives who closed their eyes and thought of the empire. Her husband is murdered, and she’s kidnapped by General Bethlehem, who has seen Braveheart and knows about the feudal system where the lord gets first dibbies on the wedding nights of his vassals. She and the postman eventually escape into the wilderness and spend the winter together while she comes full term. This is some frontier woman; in the spring, she burns down their cottage so they’ll be forced to move on, and “we can find someplace nice for the baby.”
In his absence, the postman’s legendary status has been magnified by young Ford Lincoln Mercury (Larenz Tate), who has named himself after an auto dealership and in the absence of the postman has organized a postal service in exile. It is clear that the postman and Bethlehem will sooner or later have to face each other in battle. When they do, the general produces a hostage he has captured—Ford L. Mercury—and the postman pales and pauses at the prospect of F. L. Mercury’s death, even though the postman’s army consists mostly of hundreds of women and children he is cheerfully contemplating leading to their slaughter.
The movie has a lot of unwise shots resulting in bad laughs, none more ill-advised than one where the postman, galloping down a country lane, passes a gate where a tow-headed little tyke holds on to a letter. Some sixth sense causes the postman to look back, see the kid, turn around, then gallop back to him, snatching up the letter at full tilt. This touching scene, shot with a zoom lens in slow motion to make it even more fatuous than it needed to be, is later immortalized in a bronze statue, unveiled at the end of the movie. As a civic figure makes a speech in front of the statue, which is still covered by a tarpaulin, a member of the audience whispered, “They’ve bronzed the postman!” Dear reader, that member was me, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was right.
Priest
(Directed by Antonia Bird; starring Linus Roache; 1995)
Priest, one critic has written, “vigorously attack(s) the views of the Roman Catholic Church on homosexuality,” which is just the way the filmmakers probably want the film to be positioned. Actually the film is an attack on the vow of celibacy, preferring sexuality of any sort to the notion that men should, could, or would live chastely.