The Big Chill

Have you ever watched a TV show or movie that your parents used to swear was great, but when you watched it, it seemed...quaint?  It happens with me all the time, partially because I'm a little snotty, and partially because my dad still laughs out loud at Barney Fife.  It's not a bad thing, but it just goes to show how certain things age differently than others.  It also serves as an example to generational gaps.  I understand that; I still look back fondly at Homer Simpson falling down Springfield Gorge, but objectively, that Simpsons episode is pretty old and not very funny.  It just holds nostalgic value for me that my children will never understand.

Keep that in mind as I take a look at The Big Chill.

Alex (an uncredited --- because they left his face on the cutting room floor --- Kevin Costner) commits suicide.  His college buddies from the '60s show up for his funeral and get to catching up.  They include a married couple, Harold (Kevin Kline) and Sarah (Glenn Close); a successful Magnum, PI-style television actor, Sam (Tom Berenger); an unhappy public defender, Meg (Mary Kay Place); a professional drug-dealing Vietnam veteran and former radio shrink, Nick (William Hurt); a "journalist" for People magazine, Michael (Jeff Goldblum); and a housewife that regrets marrying a "safe" husband, Karen (JoBeth Williams).  They are joined by Alex's much, much younger (and very flexible) girlfriend/amateur space cadet, Chloe (Meg Tilly).  This group (minus Chloe) went to a Division I college and more than half of them got rich.

And yet, none of them are truly happy.  Sadly, the lovely Motown soundtrack does not include a track of the smallest violin in the world playing a sad song, just for them.  Sarah once had an affair with Alex, and her relationship with Harold never had the same level of trust again; this is compounded by their decision to help financially support Alex in the months preceding his suicide.  Sam feels cheapened by his lame acting gig and wants, more than anything else, to fulfill his long desire to be with Karen.  Karen feels trapped by her boring husband and kids.  Michael is unfulfilled, writing journalistic tripe for a magazine you read in the bathroom or at the doctor's office.  Meg wants a baby, but has no suitors and her biological clock is ticking away.  Nick felt like a fraud as a radio host and balances that with his lack of self worth as a drug dealer.  Oh, and he apparently has erectile dysfunction as a side effect of going to Vietnam.  Or he has a war wound in his crotch.  Or he has a terrible STD from Vietnam.  Whatever.  The big guy has a problem with his little guy.  Chloe is just bizarre and seems attracted by damaged men.  By the time the weekend ends, all of these problems are addressed and (more or less) solved.

I think my favorite thing about this movie is the script.  It is clever and witty, and it leaves out a lot.  That might sound like a drawback, but there is a lot of great dialogue, and real conversations do not spell everything out for onlookers.  There are dozens of funny one-liners, but the script is deeper than that, forcing the viewer to come to their own conclusions about how each character feels about the rest.  As the least sexually-successful member of the group, Michael has a lot of great lines that work, regardless of context, and Jeff Goldblum delivers these lines with panache.  There is a lot of sarcasm in the script, and everyone gets a turn eventually, but I think Goldblum's lines make him the most memorable supporting character.

The acting and direction (by Lawrence Kasdan) are both pretty good, too.  Kevin Kline and William Hurt are usually pretty dependable, and they both are given some solid dialogue, so it's a win-win with them.  Jeff Goldblum is sarcastic, witty, and nobody has sex with him, which is probably as it should be.  Meg Tilly was surprisingly wonderful as the spacey young member of the group; she is alternately distant and intimate, random and on-the-nose, throughout her performance, and I imagine that is hard to pull off.  The rest of the cast (Bernenger, Place, and Williams) are decent, but nothing special.  There was one character that I outright disliked.  Glenn Close's character struck me as particularly disturbing and unrealistic.  I know Close can act, but her emotions in this movie are so unpredictable and inconsistent that I just can't deal with her.

It's not all her fault, though.  The plot for this movie is absolutely ludicrous.  I know coming-of-age stories with ensemble casts usually have a suspicious number of characters come to important conclusions by the end of the film, but this is ridiculous.  Everyone in the principal cast has a life-changing weekend?  What is this, The Breakfast Club?  I don't appreciate some of the plot devices, either.  Why would anyone sit in front of a video camera and be bluntly honest and emotional if they were planning on watching the video in front of their friends?  That is beyond awkward.  I think my biggest problem with the plot deals with Glenn Close's character.  ***SPOILER ALERT*** So Meg wants a kid, but can't find a daddy.  She asks around, and Sam won't do it, Nick can't do it, and she doesn't want Michael, so Sarah suggests her husband?  I'm sorry, but that makes no sense to me.  One the one hand, I would feel uncomfortable (at best) if Glenn Close encouraged me to cheat on her.  She is Ms. Fatal Attractions, you know.  On the other hand, where do you go after that?  How does sympathy sleeping with a friend not attract jealousy and discontent within a marriage?  It's one thing to be married to a crazy woman, but to have her allow you to cheat...well, it may seem like a blessing, but I see a death-by-butcher-knife in your future, my friend.  

If this was almost any other movie, I would give it a few stars for the clever dialogue and dock it points for the ridiculous story and predictable plot.  As it happens, though, my parents were pretty big fans of this film when I was growing up and, while the film doesn't carry as much weight for me as it did them, my early exposure left a soft spot in my heart for it.  Despite the clumsiness of the dance scenes, the implausibility of most of the romances, and almost everything relating to William Hurt's character, I am going to give this movie the benefit of the doubt.  That said, I cannot forgive the egomaniacal self-centeredness of the Baby Boomers, no matter how handsomely it is disguised.  As such, I give this tribute to rich people schtupping each other...

Mary Reilly

Gothic horror.  The phrase immediately brings to my mind heavy shadows, forbidden longings and the time when morality and science were often completely opposed. If you give me a few more seconds to think about it, though, I might imagine fat kids with dyed black hair, eyeliner, stocking sleeves and combat boots that make me wish that I didn't like the Cure.

Those seemingly disparate ideas are not as separate as I might want to believe.  For every good Gothic horror story (Dracula, Frankenstein, From Hell - the comic), there is a crappy bastardization on film (Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, From Hell - the movie).  All play with the same basic set of tools (science vs. superstition, dark vs. light, love vs. seduction), but the Hollywood versions in the 1990s consistently missed the mark.  Mary Reilly is a novel that offers an different point of view on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  It doesn't try to change much of the story, but offers some alternate motivations for the Jekyll/Hyde character.

The movie Mary Reilly attempts to do the same by shifting the narrative focus onto the shoulders of the title character.  Mary Reilly (Julia Roberts) is one of many servants in the Jekyll household.   I'm going to assume that anyone vaguely interested in this movie has a passing familiarity with Jekyll and Hyde, as an idea if not as literature, because the movie makes this assumption as well.  But, just to clarify, Dr. Jekyll is a middle-aged (maybe a little older) scientist that is brilliant and kind; unfortunately, he represses his emotions (which was the style at the time) and begins to long for a way to release them.  He creates a drug that transforms him into Mr. Hyde, a younger, more virile persona that is essentially Jekyll's Id unleashed.  Hyde's appearance varies from version to version, but he is always the lusty, violent side of Jekyll.  So, while that story is playing out in the background, Mary Reilly does her household chores, encountering Jekyll and Hyde from time to time.  She spends most of her time carrying food trays and gathering laundry.  Oh, the suspense exclamation mark three times.

Mary draws the attention of Dr. Jekyll (John Malkovich) when he notices some scars on Mary that are clearly from animal bites.  Initially too shy or socially reserved to tell her story, Mary later relates how her abusive father (Michael Gambon) once locked her in a closet with rats, which bit her many times.  When Jekyll asks if she hates her father for what he did, Mary refuses to hate; she reasoned that alcohol made him into a monster, one that acted, spoke, and even walked differently than her sober father.  This really hits home for Jekyll.  I think.  The camera holds a few extra beats of Jekyll staring with his mouth slightly open at this point, but Malkovich doesn't really emote much here.  Mr. Hyde (still Malkovich) also pays Mary special attention.  He enjoys flirting with her and making her uncomfortable.  He is rude and arrogant around her.  Presumably, this is because Jekyll is attracted to Mary, but cannot express himself properly.  Eventually, Hyde appears more and more, until he murders an important man in broad daylight in the streets of London for no reason.  And that's the movie.

I really want to point out this movie's flaws, but I'm going to start out positive.  John Malkovich is a good actor who can play an emotionally reserved man as easily as he can a jerk.  I thought the differentiation between the Jekyll and Hyde characters (vocal tones, facial expressions) was pretty decent.  I'm glad that at least one character (but sadly, only one character) pointed out the visual similarities between Jekyll and Hyde --- and yes, that is a poodle-haired Michael Sheen making that comment.  I liked Jekyll's laboratory, although it was unnecessarily weird; I get having the operating room be an auditorium, but there is no reason for the walkway into the lab to have been a suspended chain bridge.  That's just not practical.  As far as the acting goes, Michael Gambon did a decent job of being a disgusting, abusive drunk.  I thought Glenn Close's performance was muy macho, and it was brave of her to play a Victorian brothel-owning transvestite.  Oh, wait... she was supposed to be a woman?  With that accent?  And that Jay Leno chin?  That can't be right...

...And that's the best this movie has to offer.  Why is that, you ask?  Well, for starters, Julia Roberts was cast in the lead role.  I have nothing against Roberts, although I will admit that she does not usually star in movies that I desperately want to see.  This role goes against her strengths, though.  Julia Roberts is at her best when she is smiling and charming audiences.  Here, her performance reminds me of something I heard in The Goonies cast/director commentary; apparently,director Richard Donner's most common directorial instruction to his cast of child actors was "big eyes."  Julia Roberts channels that direction in this movie like no other.  She spends most of the movie looking like a Precious Moments doll, particularly one commemorating the moment when a child watched its dog get hit by a train.  I kept wanting to staple her lower lip to her face so she wouldn't keep tripping over than damn thing.  I get that working for Jekyll and Hyde doesn't make for slapstick comedy, but even servants have more than one emotion.  And that is just her character's normal state!  Eventually, she has a nightmare where Hyde begins to rape her, but when she wakes up screaming, her roommate tells Mary that the dream didn't sound bad to her.  That implies that Mary had a Hyde rape fantasy.  Finally, a movie that has the guts to stand up for rape.  Three cheers for rape!  In a related note, no matter how hard I scrub, I don't feel clean.

John Malkovich is not at his best here, either.  For a movie that is very British and very Victorian England, John's accent has attendance problems, to put it mildly.  I also find it hard to believe that anyone could  look at Malkovich's Jekyll and Hyde and not immediately conclude that they are the same person, or, at the very least, siblings.  Hyde has longer hair and no beard.  Aside from that, he still looks and speaks like Jekyll.  And I don't care what time period it is, John Malkovich is not someone that inspires dark, erotic dreams (I typed those words, but the only thing that made me feel better when I read it back was scraping my tongue).  I also didn't care for the way Hyde's crimes were handled.  In the original story, only the final murder is clearly a crime; the rest of Hyde's activities might have ranged from fairly innocent fare, such as staying out late in the city, drinking to excess, and sleeping with women of questionable morals to the more grisly stuff, like violence and murder.  Here, it is primarily a blood lust, which cheapens the character in my mind.  Also, the first evidence of violence shows Hyde's bedroom covered in blood, with only an animal's carcass (possibly a rat's) to imply that the blood is not human; the effect, however, is for the scene to resemble an act of beastiality gone horribly wrong (not that I'm judging).  Hyde then goes on to decapitate someone off camera and murders a man with a cane handle.  While not particularly fun to watch, there is little or no suspense, horror, or Gothic-ness in any of these scenes.  In fact, they come off as little more than disagreeable.

The biggest problem with this movie (aside from the two actors and their characters) is the subtlety of the film.  I rarely accuse any movie of being too subtle, but this movie never comes out and says anything.  I assume that Jekyll and Hyde have an emotional or sexual attraction for Mary Reilly, but I just don't know for sure.  This movie stays true to the Victorian way of not letting emotions show, but that really cramps a film's style when those same emotions are implied to be the motivating factors for the climax of the film.

The film was directed by Stephen Frears, a man that is capable of greatness (High Fidelity, anyone?).  Surely, his direction can be seen in Roberts' performance and the overall feel of the movie.  It is rare that I say this about a director that has talent, but either he missed every mark he set for this film, or he didn't aim for the right things.  This was painful to watch.  It wasn't until I was finished watching the movie that I realized that the movie's tag line ("Evil loves innocence") didn't refer to Jekyll/Hyde and Mary, but to the film and its audience.