Example. The movie wants to illustrate Poor Communication. It shows Pfeiffer at home, where the washing machine is spewing suds all over the room and the kids are fighting. Willis calls her from outside their old apartment building, which is being torn down. He tells her the wrecking ball has just taken out their bedroom. She doesn’t pay attention. His feelings are hurt.
The Marriage Counselor is in: She should shout, “The washer just exploded!” And he should say, “Catch you later!” Another marriage saved. Oh, and if I were her I’d turn off the power to the washing machine.
The movie is filled with lame and contrived “colorful” dialogue. Reiner, who plays a friend of the husband, gives him a long explanation of why appearances deceive. “We do not possess butts,” he says, “but merely fleshy parts at the top of our legs.” Whoa! Later there is a restaurant scene in which Willis screams angrily in a unsuccessful (indeed, melancholy) attempt to rip off Meg Ryan’s famous restaurant orgasm in Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally. At the end of his tirade, Willis jumps up and tells Reiner what he can “shove up the tops of your legs!”
Doesn’t work, because (a) he’s too angry to think up or stop for a punch line, (b) the line isn’t funny, and (c) the setup wasn’t funny either, because the concept isn’t funny. Oh, and the scene ends with Reiner doing a double-take directly into the camera. How many ways can one scene be mishandled?
Who thought this movie would be entertaining? The same person who thinks we need more dialogue about why guys do the wrong thing with rolls of toilet paper. And who thinks the misery of this film can be repaired by a showboat monologue at the end that’s well delivered by Pfeiffer, but reads like an audition scene?
There is a famous short story about an unhappy couple, and about what happens when it comes time to tell their children they’re getting a divorce. It is called Separating, by John Updike. Read it to understand how much The Story of Us does not reach for or even guess.
Striking Distance
(Directed by Rowdy Herrington; starring Bruce Willis, Sarah Jessica Parker; 1993)
Striking Distance is an exhausted reassembly of bits and pieces from all the other movies that are more or less exactly like this one. The credits say “written by Rowdy Herrington and Martin Kaplan,” but the right word would have been “anthologized.” How does it recycle its betters? Let us count the ways:
1. It is about an outspoken Pittsburgh cop (Bruce Willis), who gets in trouble by testifying against his partner in a police brutality case.
2. A serial killer is at work in the city.
3. The cop and his dad, also a cop, are on their way to the policemen’s ball when they get involved in a chase to capture the serial killer suspect, and the dad is killed.
4. “The killer must be a cop,” Willis says on TV, because of the way the guy drives and thinks.
5. His uncle (Dennis Farina) is on the force, and so are two of his sons, Willis’s cousins.
6. There is a scene on a bridge where Willis tries to talk one of the nephews out of leaping to his death. The dialogue is amazingly familiar.
7. Willis is demoted, and assigned to the River Rescue Squad, where he remains determined to catch the serial killer (who helpfully starts dumping bodies in the river where Willis can find them).
8. Willis is assigned a new partner (Sarah Jessica Parker). She is a woman. They don’t get along at first. Then they fall in love. Four durable clichés in a row. Good going.
9. Suspicion falls on Willis: Perhaps he is the serial killer?
10. One nephew goes to California, and the killings stop. Then he returns from California, and the killings resume. As veterans of this genre, we know with a certainty that this nephew is not the killer.
And so on, and on, until the ending, which cheats, indicating that all the clues in the story were simply inserted to jerk us around.
I wouldn’t really mind the clichés and the tired old material so much, if the filmmakers had brought energy or a sense of style to the material. A good singer can make an old song new. But Striking Distance seems unconvinced of its own worth. It’s a tired, defeated picture, in which no one seems to love what they’re doing, unless maybe it’s a few of the character actors, like Farina and John Mahoney (as the dad), who have scenes they seem to relish.
Want to write a screenplay? Why not start with these elements: A rebel cop stirs up trouble and is disciplined, but determines to stay on the trail of a serial killer, while meanwhile he is assigned a partner that first he hates and then he likes, while the killer cleverly tries to frame him. Add several chase scenes and a deadly confrontation in which all of the key characters magically congregate at the same time.
Just because it’s been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done again. And better. Believe me.
Stuart Little
(Directed by Rob Minkoff; starring Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie; 1999)
Any other consideration about Stuart Little must take second place to the fact that it is about a nice family that adopts a mouse. Yes, a mouse, in all dimensions and particulars, albeit a mouse with a cute little sports coat and an earnest way of expressing himself in piping English. Stuart is about two inches long, maybe a little longer. Early in the film Smokey, the family cat, tries to eat him, but is forced to spit him up, damp but no worse for wear.
I once read the book by E. B. White on which this story is founded. The peculiar thing about the book is that Stuart, in the imagination of the reader, swells until he occupies as much psychic space as any of the other characters. He is a mouse, but his dialogue runs from margin to margin just like the words of the humans, and his needs and fears are as great. Our intelligence tells us Stuart is a mouse, but our imagination makes him into a full-size literary character.
In the book, Stuart works just fine as a character. But movies are an unforgivably literal medium, and the fact is, no live-action movie about Stuart Little can possibly work, because he is so much smaller than everyone else!
Stuart is definitely a mouse. He is very, very small. There is something pathetic about a scene where his new parents (Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie) tuck him in at bedtime. It doesn’t matter how much they love him or how happy he is to be in this new home; all we can think about is how he hardly needs even the hem of his blanket. All through the movie I kept cringing at the terrible things that could happen to the family’s miniature son. It didn’t help that a few days earlier I’d seen The Green Mile in which an equally cute and lovable mouse was stamped on by a sadist, and squished.
The movie of course puts Stuart through many adventures and confronts him with tragic misunderstandings. He is provided with a new wardrobe and a tiny red convertible sportster to race around in, and is chased through Central Park by hungry cats. That sort of thing.
My mind reeled back to last year’s grotesque family “comedy” named Jack Frost. That was the film in which a family’s father dies and is reincarnated as a snowman. Now that is an amazing thing. If your dad came back as a snowman after being dead for a year, what would you ask him? Perhaps, is there an afterlife? Or, what is heaven like? Or—why a snowman? But no sooner does the snowman in Jack Frost appear than it is harnessed to a desperately banal plot about snowball fights at the high school.
Stuart Little is not anywhere near as bad as Jack Frost (it is twice as good—two stars instead of one). But it has the same problem: The fact of its hero upstages anything the plot can possibly come up with. A two-inch talking humanoid mouse upstages roadsters, cats, little brothers, everything. I tried imagining a movie that would deal seriously and curiously with an intelligent and polite child that looked like a mouse. Such a movie would have to be codirected by Tim Burton and David Lynch.