Cinema: The War Between the Mates

Oh, men. Oh, women. Oh, puh-leeze. They must be able to do something besides meet cute, mate rompishly and end up happily ever-aftering. Come on, guys! Back to the typewriter. Back to the library. Back to the yellowing newspaper files, if you’re really desperate. We’re missing something.

Lots, as it turns out. Take, for example, Fatal Attraction. It is your standard slasher scenario. Pheromones sing sly duets in a seemingly innocuous setting. The sex object is cute and easily seducible, but interested only in an encounter that is brief and zipless. Whereupon the rejected partner falls to obsessive brooding and proceeds down a darkening path from harassment to stalking with a deadly weapon. Uh-huh. At best it sounds like a cult classic in the making.

/ Unh-uh. For in this very smart movie, the woman is the lovelorn psycho, the man the not-quite-innocent victim. She (Glenn Close) is an editor; he (Michael Douglas) is a lawyer with a wife (the lovely Anne Archer), a child and a career to lose if his two-night stand is discovered. That the two principals are ostensibly mature professionals, not adolescent airheads, gives the film some of its fatal attractiveness. So do James Dearden’s plausible, nicely observant script, Adrian Lyne’s elegantly unforced direction, and Close’s beautifully calibrated descent into lunacy. Together they bring horror home to a place where the grownup moviegoer actually lives. Men will suddenly, squirmingly, recall times when they barely escaped the consequences of their caprices. Women have been seen emerging from this movie wearing secret smiles. Their surrogate may be a nut case, but she is also a familiar case, and there are sisterly pleasures in seeing her madly prosecute it.

Well-made fictions like Fatal Attraction prosper because they seem more persuasive than fact. Nicolas Roeg’s Castaway has another challenge. Just try believing that a bright, spirited woman like Lucy Irvine (Amanda Donohoe) would answer a man’s ad for a desert-island mate and set out for a year alone with an impractical chap like Gerald Kingsland (Oliver Reed). But it did happen, and Roeg and Writer Allan Scott have made an engaging movie based on Irvine’s memoir.

Castaway too derives its energy from a reversal. Turns out that Lucy is the one with a taste for solitude and the practicality that survival requires. Gerald is there to catch naps, sun and only the occasional fish. Even a sexual strike by Lucy cannot force him to build a decent hut or a productive garden. There is perhaps a parable here, which Roeg does not force: that woman, however liberated, will build a nest, and that man will wander, if only in his mind, no matter how circumscribed his lot.

Phil Alden Robinson, the writer-director of In the Mood, does not seek even the modest parable. He is all amiability recounting the true tale of “Sonny” Wisecarver, the 1940s California teen who twice eloped with older women and became a media sensation. Patrick Dempsey, Talia Balsam and Beverly D’Angelo agreeably impart the message that adolescent sexual energy can cheerily compensate for lack of sexual sophistication. But one cannot help feeling that there is a wicked craziness in their odd couplings that escaped a directorial eye looking merely for goofiness.

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