The Weekly Gravy #75

That’s right, I’ve kept up this series up for 75 entries. Not too shabby. And last week marked eight years I’ve been running this blog. I don’t have anything special planned to mark the occasion, but feel free to have a drink – hard, soft, hot, cold, whatever – in recognition of this milestone.

On to the movies.

Parallel Mothers/Madres Paralelas (2021) – ***½

In his great book On Writing, Stephen King talks about how prefers to write his novels by putting forth a “what-if” question (my 6th-grade science teachers would hate that) and going from there, letting the story tell itself rather than strictly plotting it out. I wonder if that’s how Pedro Almodóvar wrote the script for this film, since I never really knew what would happen next, even as the final scenes began to unfold. For much the film, it works, but in the final analysis, a little more structure, a greater tightening of the narrative screws, would’ve made for a stronger work.

Two years ago, Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory was widely acclaimed by almost everyone but me; I couldn’t quite understand why everyone was so enamored of the film or Antonio Banderas’ performance. Neither were bad, but I found myself quite unstimulated by the film. With Parallel Mothers, I still don’t fully grasp why it’s on so many top 10 lists (not in a year like this), nor do I quite understand why Penélope Cruz is in the awards conversation for a performance that’s good – quite good, really – but just not one of the best performances in a very solid year for Best Actress. But I found a lot more to appreciate.

I won’t give away too much of the story, since unfolds so unpredictably. Photographer Janis Martinez (Cruz) begins an affair with forensic archaeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde), whom she’s approached about leading the excavation of a mass grave near her home village, filled with persons executed by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, including Janis’ great-grandfather. She becomes pregnant, and shares a room in the maternity ward with teenage Ana Manso (Milena Smit), whose mother Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is trying to balance Ana’s impending motherhood with her acting career taking off at that exact moment.

Janis and Ana have their children, both daughters, and both face the challenges of single motherhood (Arturo is married; the father of Ana’s child isn’t in the picture at all), with their paths crossing again under unexpected circumstances. Suffice to say, there are melodramatic revelations, sex, and bright colors to keep our senses occupied as the story progresses. And yes, the matter of the mass grave – and how it relates to the larger matter of Spain’s dark past – remains significant.

The problem is that Almodóvar had two somewhat distinct stories he wanted to tell – one about the stories of two very different women contending with motherhood, one about the literal excavation of Spanish history – and he doesn’t quite weave them together. Maybe I’m missing something, but it feels like he was banking on the two stories informing one another, that he was banking on the alchemy of narrative to carry his film over the finish line. It comes as close as it can without quite sealing the deal.

Until then, it’s not quite a great film, but it’s a very good one, with an engaging story, a warm, layered performance by Cruz, a dynamically sensual turn from Smit (who really should be in the awards conversation more than she is), a solid supporting cast, solid filmmaking, and a very good score by Alberto Iglesias, heavy on the strings and tambourines, sounding at times like an atonal tango. (Is that a thing? I don’t know music.) Kudos to Almodóvar for confronting not only a dark chapter of his country’s history, but the indifference – or reluctance – of the government to investigate it.

If only he had pulled off the balancing act the story attempts, it might’ve earned a couple more points from me. I do wonder just what Almodóvar is really trying to do these days, now that he seems to have passed the taboo-breaking stage of his career. I guess he’s respectable now. Like John Huston says in Chinatown, “Of course I’m respectable. I’m old.” But Huston made great films right up to the end of his life. How many more will Almodóvar make? Will they be great?

That’s a weak note to end on, so I’ll finish by adding that Spain didn’t submit this to the Oscars for Best International Film, instead submitting The Good Boss, which stars Javier Bardem, who’s married to Cruz, who’s in the conversation for Best Actress, as is Nicole Kidman for Being the Ricardos, which also stars Bardem.

Score: 83

Flee/Flugt (2021) – ****

On one level, Flee is like the center of some strange art-film Venn Diagram: it’s a Danish animated documentary about a gay refugee from Afghanistan, and as such, it may become the first film to get nominated for all three specialty Oscars. It’s good enough to deserve that, being, on my own list, the 5th best foreign film (second best on the Oscar shortlist), the second best animated film, and the second best documentary of the year (and the best on the shortlist). There’s also a push to get it nominated for Best Picture, which would be impressive if it happens, however unlikely.

It certainly wouldn’t be a bad choice, since it’s such a good film. It’s the story of a man named Amin. Except that’s not his name; it’s an alias, since there are very good reasons for protecting his identity. (The animated figure we see throughout the film is apparently not a precise depiction of the real person either.) He’s a refugee from Afghanistan, whose family was killed during the Afghan Civil War. Except that wasn’t what happened. His father disappeared and was probably executed, but his mother and siblings made it out. But making it out was only the first step.

See, first they had to go to the Soviet Union – the only country that would take them. But they couldn’t stay there, and needed to be smuggled into Sweden, where Amin’s oldest brother lived. But the cost of doing so meant they couldn’t all go at once. And it meant they couldn’t go comfortably, or safely, or even get where they were going at all. Amin finally made it to Denmark, applied for asylum, and went to high school with Jonas Poher Rasmussen, the film’s director. And that still wasn’t the end of his struggle.

Not only did Amin have to come to terms with his harrowing past without his family, and adapt to living in a new country, speaking a new language, but he had to come to terms with his homosexuality – a great taboo in his native Afghanistan, but no big deal in his adopted country. And as the film is being made, he’s grappling with the prospect of marrying his boyfriend, Kasper, and building a permanent home with him in the Danish countryside – a degree of stability and happiness beyond anything he’s known in years.

What Flee does is put a face – a specific human face, even if it’s partly created through animation – on the sheer agony of the refugee experience. To be denied peace in one’s formative years, and at so many levels, is hard to comprehend, but the film gets at some of the sheer chaos of this way of surviving – can it be called a way of life?

The use of animation is quite stirring, with the relatively clean and well-defined present-day sequences interwoven with memories which are often rendered with rough, sketchy imagery, suggesting the tricky elusiveness of memory – and subtly hinting at the layers of deception Amin has constructed for the sake of survival over the years. Archival footage is smoothly interwoven throughout, and there’s a quietly effective cut to live-action near the very end, reminding us of the distance which must be maintained between viewer and subject.

Add in the smooth editing and Uno Helmersson’s haunting minor-key score, and you’ve got an effective little documentary that earns most of its plaudits. As with many documentaries, I could quibble about what elements of the story get more attention and which get less – in particular, we learn little about how Amin managed to find his place in Danish society and his academic field, though I have to imagine privacy issues were a major factor. It doesn’t really matter, because Flee does an excellent job telling one person’s story, potently illustrating how conflict makes a horrible mess of human lives.

Score: 88

Slapstick of Another Kind (1982) – Dreck

Having gone several days without seeing a film – I saw Flee on Saturday and saw this film and the next on Wednesday – I decided to do a Dogshit Double-Feature, watching two famously bad films I’d never seen, both of which a friend of mine watched and discussed with me in the last week or so. I began with this critically savaged adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut novel, one which Vonnegut himself considered a lesser work. Later critics have spoken more favorably of the book while showing the film no mercy. I can’t speak for the book, but the film certainly deserves all the scorn heaped upon it, and then some.

I was familiar with the basic premise: a pair of twins, when together, possess a superhuman level of intelligence. This, going by the novel’s Wikipedia page, more or less makes it to the screen, as do a number of other plot points: the declining fortunes of America, a Chinese program for self-miniaturization, the twins’ pretending to mentally incapacitated in the presence of others, and (albeit briefly in the film) a plan to create families by assigning everyone in America new middle names combining a noun and a number; those with nouns in common are cousins, those with nouns and numbers in common are siblings.

What the film seems to have added is the idea that the twins were implanted in their mother’s womb by aliens trying to aid the course of human development, the notion that, in light of skyrocketing gas prices, vehicles are now powered by chicken droppings, and the fact that the Chinese ambassador (who’s a few inches high) flies about in a fortune cookie-shaped craft. Assuming these were wholly the invention of writer Steven Paul, one might wonder why these ideas were ever allowed to reach the screen. That Paul was also the director and producer is part of the answer.

Another part of the answer is that Paul, about 23 when Slapstick was made, was the son of a casting director and an investor, meaning he had connections and resources – and, it would seem, no one to tell him no. He’d already made his debut behind the camera, aged 21, with the poorly-received Falling in Love Again, and would later help create the Baby Geniuses franchise, proving, if nothing else, his consistency as an artist. (He also produced the execrable Bratz: The Movie and executive-produced the baffling Pottersville. He’s got a touch.)

He certainly got some talented people involved with Slapstick, with Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn playing dual roles as the twins and their vapid parents, Marty Feldman as the butler who cares for the twins in their parents’ absence, character actor John Abbott as the family doctor (named Frankenstein, ha ha), Jim Backus as the President, Pat Morita as the Chinese ambassador, Samuel Fuller as the head of a military academy, Merv Griffin as himself, and Orson Welles as the voice of the chief alien. Some of them don’t completely embarrass themselves.

Lewis may have made at least one film that was even worse (the unwatchable Which Way to the Front?), but as Wilbur (the male twin), he mugs tediously and engages in uninspired physical comedy, and as the father, brings not a flicker of energy to the table. Kahn at least manages a bit of wry sweetness as Eliza (the female twin), and tries to make the shallow arrogance of the mother amusing, but has nothing to work with. Feldman, with a hissing, Peter Lorre-ish voice and oddly muted affect, is sadly unamusing. The rest of the cast aren’t so bad – even Morita almost manages to overcome what a hideous gimmick his character is – but they’re working in a vaccuum.

The film isn’t terribly well made; Paul’s direction is clumsy, it’s quite badly edited (it was recut after its European release; it didn’t open in America until 1984), and the special effects are truly dreadful. Morton Stevens’ score isn’t so bad (though the original cut had a Michel Legrand score, which was almost certainly better), and the production design tries to meet the story halfway, but the makeup on Wilbur and Eliza, deliberately off-putting though it is, achieves a Pyrrhic victory at best.

But what destroys the film beyond any redemption is the script. Not only is it incredibly unfunny, not only is it aimless and badly structured, and not only is it racist in the most baffling ways – Griffin drops a slur out of nowhere, for example – but it culminates in a scene which totally negates everything which came before, reducing the whole film to a shaggy-dog story. A tiresome, confusing, pathetically unfunny shaggy-dog story. It’s slapstick of another kind, all right. The bad kind.

Score: 9

Heartbeeps (1981) – **½

Despite its own weak reputation, Heartbeeps really isn’t that bad of a movie. Maybe it’s because I watched it after the horrifically bad Slapstick, but I found myself a good deal more amused by this odd little trifle than I expected. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a good film by any means, but for a huge flop which destroyed any chance Andy Kaufman had at a film career – though why this property was chosen to test his screen presence is a real mystery – it’s a lot more enjoyable, even endearing, than you might think.

In a world where humanoid robots are an established part of daily life, a Val-Com robot valet (Kaufman) is taken to a facility to await repairs. He’s placed in storage next to an Aqua-Com robot hostess (Bernadette Peters), and they soon form a bond. Along with a joke-telling robot named Catskil (voiced by Jack Carter), they decide to leave the facility, ostensibly to go on a fact-finding mission about trees (Val specializes in the lumber trade), but more likely to get a taste for the possibilities of life…inasmuch as robots can experience it.

Unfortunately, their absence is noticed, and facility employees Charlie (Randy Quaid) and Max (Kenneth McMillan) set out to find them, while an overzealous Crimebuster robot cop-tank (voiced by Ron Gans) overhears Charlie and Max and sets out on his own. Initially oblivious to their pursuers, Val and Aqua build a small robot named Philco (“voiced” by Jerry Garcia – yes, that Jerry Garcia – although at least one review suggests his work on the film was removed in post), making them the first robot parents, but as they seek supplies to repair and enhance Philco and themselves, they realize just what they’re up against.

Well, they’re up against a rogue Crimebuster and a couple of bumbling humans, that’s what. And they’re up against their own dwindling power supplies (they run on fuel cells, which seems inefficient). But their goals are rather vague, the stakes aren’t much clearer (the humans aren’t really villainous), and the happy ending (because can you imagine a film like his having a sad one?) is a total ass-pull, making for a film that, on a narrative level, falls fairly flat.

That said, there are scenes which do work. Almost every scene with the Crimebuster is hilarious, thanks to Gans’ stentorian delivery (he sounds like a crazed Paul Frees) and the contrast between the good-natured fugitives and the Crimebuster’s deranged determination. When he detains them (they’re incognito), he “treats” them to a muzak version of “The Girl from Ipanema,” a moment which I found genuinely funny. And the very final scene has the Crimebuster out on the streets once more, serving up justice as only he can – a more satisfying finale than the rather weak resolution to the main story.

Peters is limited by the role and the material, but she brings a bubbly sweetness to Aqua which makes Val’s interest entirely believable. Carter delivers Catskil’s quips (some good-bad, some bad-bad), supplied by Henny Youngman, with the right amount of crass cheer. Quaid doesn’t really make much of an impression, but McMillan brings a bit of crusty wit to a one-dimensional role. Many of the character actors (Richard B. Shull, Dick Miller, Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, Melanie Mayron, Christopher Guest) who appear have too little to do, but Kathleen Freeman’s distinctive presence, while fleeting, is always welcome.

It’s possible that some of the aforementioned actors had more to do in director Allan Arkush’s original cut. As it is, Heartbeeps runs a mere 78 minutes, exceedingly brief for a studio film of this era. Apparently, the studio was quite unhappy with Arkush’s cut – the pacing in particular – and I would guess whittled the film down to try and give it some narrative momentum. But I would also guess a lot of the issues lay in John Hill’s script, which seems to be in search of an actual story. (At least Arkush did a better job handling this film than he did Caddyshack II.)

Not helping matters is the character of Val and Kaufman’s performance. Kaufman apparently found the production tedious, and certainly it’s hard to imagine that the character (a nerdy nebbish who speaks in a robotic monotone) held his attention for very long, but his charmless delivery and the nasal voice he affected (based, he claimed, on Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd) fail to compel our own attention. I’m still undecided as to how I feel about Kaufman, but I really can’t imagine this material suited his strengths in the slightest.

Better is Stan Winston’s makeup, which earned an Oscar nomination in the first year of the category; Kaufman and Peters look convincingly robotic, but their appearances are just exaggerated enough to be wryly amusing. And to my surprise, John Williams himself wrote the score, and if it’s not one of his most iconic achievements, it’s still an agreeable mix of lush orchestral passages and about the lushest synthesizer themes this side of Vangelis. It adds to the odd charm of this odd little film, which doesn’t really hold together well enough to be good, but has enough going for it to be watchable.

Score: 61