Santa Leaves a Six-Pack

GRAND CANYON

The business of the movies is to reassure us. The boy eventually gets the girl; the bad guy bites the dust. And maybe Grand Canyon, which ends on a subdued but nevertheless optimistic note, must finally be construed as a conventionally cheering film.

But before it brings most of its principals to the edge of the title gorge, there to commune with a symbol of the timeless universe’s indifference to our petty bedevilments, the film accomplishes something remarkable: it forces us to contemplate the fragility of our everyday arrangements, the ease with which brutal chance can void the habits and relationships we count on to give life its continuity. It is hard to think of another American movie that has so directly, even naively, confronted the basic source of our existential unease. Or done so with such easy humor and graceful sentiment.

Grand Canyon’s structure is rewardingly complex, intertwining disparate lives that represent a fair cross section of big-city life. The fulcrum character, discovered in a slightly off-center condition, which will get worse before it gets better, is a mildly depressed, mildly humorous man named Mack (Kevin Kline). The process that will force him to higher consciousness begins when his car breaks down in a bad neighborhood and his life is threatened by a menacing gang, then saved by Simon (Danny Glover), a lonely tow-truck operator. The episode is Mack’s first lesson in just how tenuous our grip on normality is.

Others quickly follow. Mack’s discreet little affair with his secretary (Mary-Louise Parker) threatens to become indiscreet. His best friend, a heedless movie producer (Steve Martin), is permanently crippled in a mugging. His wife Claire (the luminous Mary McDonnell) discovers an abandoned baby on her morning run and, afflicted by empty-nest malaise (their son is growing up), begins a campaign to adopt the foundling. An earthquake thunders through town, a neighbor dies suddenly, and overhead the police helicopters endlessly circle, their probing searchlights constant reminders of disorder and imminent sorrow.

Against which everyone bravely, touchingly, builds his or her none-too- sturdy defenses. Mack, in fact, turns into a benign busybody, trying to pat almost all the lives that touch his into shape. His work comes out a little too neatly, but Kline’s performance, like all the others, is engagingly soft- spoken. And well spoken. The screenplay — by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan — has a nice, unforced wit, and Lawrence Kasdan’s direction has its jagged edges. If sometimes this loose and anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities — generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither smug nor sentimental.

By Richard Schickel

THE PRINCE OF TIDES

There’s the love story, of course, in which opposites warily circle, passionately and adulterously engage, and ruefully part. Then there’s the memory piece, in which a man comes to grips with the dark, dangerous and deeply buried secret of his childhood and by so doing achieves peace and self- reconciliation. There’s comedy too: shrewd bumpkin goes to New York City and shows them city slickers a thing or two. Finally, there’s a teacher- student relationship that leads to some mutually instructive, emotionally gratifying male bonding.

Wow! Four movies for the price of one. The Prince of Tides may be the biggest bargain of these recessionary holidays. Excessive is the word for director Barbra Streisand’s movie — and not an entirely pejorative one either. It is adapted — by Pat Conroy and Becky Johnston — from Conroy’s romantic, sentimental and gothic novel, which has attracted a passionate following precisely because, in an age when most serious fiction has a pinched quality, his work is so gloriously unbuttoned.

The movie is as lush visually as Conroy’s book is lush verbally. There is something tidal — that is to say, patiently inexorable — in its rhythms. And as Tom Wingo, protagonist of all the movies Streisand is sweeping along on the imagistic current she has unleashed, Nick Nolte gives a force-of-nature performance — shrewd and gullible, bitter and innocent, bigger than life but still in touch with it.

Good father, impotent husband, unemployed football coach and tormented modern male, he is summoned to New York because his sister Savannah, a poet, has again attempted suicide. It develops, of course, that her psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein (played not entirely believably by the director), has a life as miserable as Tom’s. Her husband (Jeroen Krabbe) is a cold, egomaniacal concert violinist, her son (played well by Streisand’s real-life son Jason Gould) the victim of the Golden Boy syndrome, torn between the violin and a rough sport (in this case football).

With all this trouble, can a love affair — healing for him, liberating for her — be far behind? Unfortunately, the look that Streisand imparts to this passage — that of a commercial for a feminine-hygiene product — is a deal breaker, the moment at which at least some portion of the audience is likely to realize that their eager-to-please saleslady has been soft-soaping a hard sell all along. By slamming several minor domestic dramas together in one handsomely presented package, Tides achieves the length and weight of an epic. But it is a false epic, a grandiose delusion compounded of conventional problems, easy sentiments and pretty pictures. R.S.

FATHER OF THE BRIDE

Annie (Kimberly Williams) is home from Europe with big news. Good news, if you are not her father George (Steve Martin). She met a guy, she’s in love, they’re getting married. The first pleasure this sentimental comedy offers is the sight of Martin’s reaction to Annie’s plans: the tan seems to seep off his magnificently fretful face. He will pay for this wedding in many ways.

On its surface, Father of the Bride is a parable for the New Depression, in which a middle-class family is expected to pony up $100,000 or so in lieu of letting a young couple elope. At heart, though, the story is about the deep, complex, poignant love a man has for his daughter: it’s the Lolita syndrome without the lust but with every bit of the doting possessiveness. Annie’s budding maturity means that George can no longer even pretend he is young; her engagement is a renunciation of their old flirtatious bond. “I was no longer the man in my little girl’s life,” he says with a sigh. For this father, a wedding is a funeral.

Back in 1950, when middle-class values were less besieged, MGM told this story sharply and beautifully, with two stars — Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor — who were born to play Everydad and Gorgeous Gal. Neither the ’90s nor the husband-wife team of Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer (they wrote the new version, she co-produced, he directed) can match the original film’s grace or wit. The humor is sometimes gross, often wan. Which doesn’t mean you can’t shed an agreeable tear at the climax, or take pleasure in recalling what weddings, families and movies were like in the chapel of optimism where, once upon a time, America worshipped.

By Richard Corliss

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD and BLACK ROBE

Not so long ago, even nonbelievers looked upon them with a certain awe. It took courage for priests and ministers to go among the savage heathens, trying to claim their souls for a Christian God. Now, in the age of cultural relativism, even some believers look upon these evangelicals skeptically; who are they to impose their beliefs on others? Amazing how the missionary position, or perhaps one should say our position on missionaries, has changed.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord presents a team of Fundamentalist interlopers in the Amazon rain forest whose leader, Leslie Huben (John Lithgow), has made a secret deal with local authorities to help drive an isolated, innocent tribe off its valuable land. Martin Quarrier (Aidan Quinn), the man directly in charge of bringing the good word to the natives, starts losing faith after his son dies and his wife (Kathy Bates) rather too colorfully goes bonkers.

Their behavior is contrasted to that of the noble half-savage Lewis Moon (Tom Berenger), a bush pilot who is part American Indian. He crashes his plane near the endangered tribe’s village, dons a teeny-weeny bikini and passes himself off as one of their sky gods. He means well, but he too carries civilization’s taint: the virus of lust, for Huben’s wife (Daryl Hannah), which will lead to the villagers’ destruction.

This is supposed to be a tragedy. But the contrivances are so loopy that the film often plays like a comedy: Monty Python on an off day. The rest of the time it plays like a documentary — PBS on an off night — as director Hector Babenco solemnly records native customs, an activity that accounts for much of the absurd three-hour length.

Black Robe, in contrast, is dark and stark, the perfectly controlled story of one Father Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau), a 17th century Jesuit priest whose burning faith is expressed as an obsessive desire to save the souls of Canada’s Huron Indians. They are relentlessly cruel, licentious, obscene in their behavior, squalid in their way of life. Yet as it is slowly revealed to him, their religion — a thing of dark dreams, not texts, and peopled by forest spirits — is in its way as subtle as his own, and perhaps rather more suited to this harsh environment.

In the end, priest and natives can do no more than grant one another their mutual irredeemability, the dignity of their otherness. Screenwriter Brian Moore, adapting his novel, avoids anachronistic political correctness, and director Bruce Beresford refuses melodramatic imposition — no dancing with wolves for them. This magnificently austere epic makes us too feel (and taste and smell) that otherness, the discomfiting strangeness of these lives, the authentic tragedy of their collision.

R.S.

NAKED LUNCH

“The unfilmable Naked Lunch.” Even this movie’s producer called William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel that, and he was right. A gallimaufry of hallucinations, literary gossip and medical info, Burroughs’ confession of a hipster junkie is its own X-rated movie, so vivid is its evocation of a mind gone bad, a soul shriveled. “Gentle reader,” he writes, “the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description.” Which Burroughs of course describes, in language both raw and heroically ironic. The novel is a detective story in which the private eye is desperate to forget, not learn, life’s mysteries; or maybe sci-fi set in the lunar wastes of an addict’s mind; or else it’s a spy story, in which the secret agent is bug powder.

Bugsy could be the name of the film David Cronenberg has woven from remnants of Naked Lunch. Its main character, Bill Lee (Peter Weller), is an exterminator who sees roaches everywhere — not least because his wife Joan (Judy Davis) has been stealing the bug powder he needs for his job; she cuts the stuff with baby laxative and injects it into her breast. “It’s a Kafka high,” she says. “You feel like a bug.” In his daymares, Bill is visited by beetles — big ugly things, chatting away through purulent orifices — that send him on a spy mission into the Tangier of his delirium. Typewriters turn into bugs, and so do the humans Bill meets, who are verminous to begin with. Cronenberg, whose 1986 movie The Fly was a great parable of love and decay, takes this line as his mandate: “Exterminate all rational thought.”

The movie welds snippets of scenes from the novel to elements of the writer’s life: his accidental shooting of his wife Joan; his friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Paul and Jane Bowles; his own sepulchral charisma. With his cracked voice and deadpan insolence, Burroughs was the Beat Generation’s W.C. Fields — a raconteur of depravity, a cracker-barrel coroner. Weller gets the haunted look right, but he can’t get inside the junkie’s pocked skin. Burroughs lived and nearly died there; Cronenberg and the actors are only visiting. The movie is way too colorful — cute, in a repulsive way, with its crawly special effects — and tame compared with its source. Instead of an insider’s view of drug despair, Cronenberg takes us to the Hell Pavilion at Walt Disney World. R.C.