Monday, 28 August 2000

WEEKEND REVIEW

So, I guess Universal marketing thinks it has a free pass to give me the finger after Bring It On did an estimated $17.4 million this weekend despite its truly indecipherable print campaign. Well, I still maintain that I am right about the print ads, though, God knows, they won't be changed after this kind of opening. But the movie, which I liked, did about as well as anyone could have ever hoped for.

How well is that? It opened just behind the numbers that The Cell opened to. And that was a release that got about 20 times more free media attention because of the film's nature. It opened better than Disney's The Kid, despite the presence of Bruce Willis. It opened significantly better than Autumn in New York, for that matter, which had both Winona Ryder and Richard Gere. So much for the theory that you can't get an audience for a "teen girl movie." Of course, that was never true. Anytime someone spins an analysis about a category of movie that can't do business, it's because some movie didn't do business. Any kind of movie can do business. Movies that are sold badly or that eternally fickle audiences just don't feel like seeing don't do business.

If you want another false assumption, "Kirsten Dunst movies" don't do business. She's only really fronted three movies before Bring It On--Drop Dead Gorgeous, Dick and The Virgin Suicides (sharing the lion's share of the press with Sofia Coppola). They grossed, respectively and domestically, $10.6 million, $6.2 and $4.8 million. Bring It On will likely pass the total of all three before next weekend. The question of whether Kirsten is "The New Drew" will be on the lips of studio execs all over town this morning. The answer is, we don't know. She certainly doesn't have the mythology. But since she arrived on the scene as a precocious (and centuries old) kid blood sucker in Interview With The Vampire, it's been clear that this is not your ordinary Hollywood blonde. I do agree with those who say that they wish she wasn't on the cover of Maxim this month, though I understand how difficult it is for actresses who have made careers as teens to evolve in Hollywood's eyes into being women. Cancel the Playboy shoot, Kirsten. Bring It On will give you three major starring opportunities to hit your next home run. (Bring It On will be in profit, I'm guessing, before Jerry Lewis cries his last tear next weekend. The film could well be even more profitable for Universal than Road Trip was for DreamWorks.) Go for it.

I wish I could say that there were a lot of other surprises in the Top Ten. The Art of War will wind up just on the edge of profit because it was mostly paid for by foreign pre-sales and Warner Bros. probably didn't spend more than $30 million in P&A. The Crew was the kind of dumper that Disney clearly knew it was going to be. (Last year in this weekend, Disney got the pleasant surprise of The 13th Warrior doing $10.3 million to start, despite being dumped. Of course, the movie had cost at least $100 million, thanks to a year and change of interest payments as it sat on the shelf.) Meanwhile, What Lies Beneath passed the $130 million mark as The Klumps chowed down on that $110 million mark.

THE GOOD: Last Friday, I projected Fox Searchlights' Quills right into the middle of the Oscar® race. Now, it's time to really explain why.

There is greatness here. Greatness in the performances. Geoffrey Rush is, for me, even better than he was in Shine. He carries all the genius of Walsingham, the queen's council in Elizabeth, but this time, he is a man of words, not a man of mystery. His Marquis de Sade is a man of his time, breaking through every convention to speak to the heart that beats in every chest, male or female, slutty or chaste. And his real words, as laid out throughout the movie, are still tantalizing to this day. (I, for one, will be reading Justine on the airplane to Telluride later this week.) And Rush manages to balance this man of enormous talent, even greater ego and, as so lovingly portrayed here, an unstoppable need to express himself so that the audience turns from a combination of disgust and charmed acquiescence of this rogue to a tacit understanding of the soul of a man.

Kate Winslet is the glue that holds the movie together, spread in her yearnings between the honor of the young priest who runs the asylum where Sade is kept and the sensual power of unfettered honesty of which Sade wreaks. There may be no better actress of this generation when it comes to these efforts to grow on screen. Winslet is forever seeking truth. From her 19-year-old film debut in Heavenly Creatures, where she could only find truth in fantasy, to her Elizabethan turns as the girl trying to find herself to the defiant Rose of Titanic, and even in last year's Holy Smoke, Winslet is ripe for plucking, yet always seemingly worthy of more than such base instincts. Her drive for higher goals, while always remaining earthbound and physically accessible, is the core of her magic as an actress. And no less so here. She is a grown woman who still has that children's' habit, figuratively, of putting everything she comes in contact with to her mouth. She must taste it all. She can't help herself. She embodies all of our humantiy.

Quite the opposite is Michael Caine, in a brilliant reversal of last year's Oscar wining turn in The Cider House Rules. In that film, he was a controversial figure who hid from the world so he could do what he felt was morally right. Here, he plays a man who wants all the world to know of him and to think what he's doing is morally right. He is a bad, bad man. And you can almost feel the delight with which he returns to the dark side, where he has so wonderfully and wickedly won us over before. This guy's only redeeming feature is that he has no redeeming features. Like so many men of dogmatic extremes, he doesn't belief his own speechifying. He only believes in himself.

And keeping the space between Sade and Caine's Dr. Royer-Collard is Joaquin Phoenix. This has really been the year of Joaquin Phoenix. In Quills and Gladiator, Phoeniz went from a curiosity to a leading man. Here he plays Abbe de Coulmier, the keeper of Sade before Caine is brought in to clamp down on the writer who is as prolific behind bars as when free. Coulmier is a man twisted alive by his belief in virtue and his compulsion to treat even the most loathsome man with kindness. He is the moral ping-pong ball who gets batted back and forth from the earliest part of the film to its final frames. And Phoenix gives his most complex performance yet.

But it's more than just acting. Writer Doug Wright, adapting from his own play, brings a clear focus to the storytelling here. He manages to control the wave of emotion without allowing the story to become trite or predictable. His taste in using Sade's words is impeccable. And he allows all four major characters and a number of secondary characters fully rounded lives, even when we just see a sliver of their worlds. Particularly effecting are Coulimier's young wife and Winslet's washerwoman mother.

And then there are the lunatics. And this is where director Philip Kaufman must be given credit, blurring into the screenplay. Kaufman creates the most realistic, yet still macabre, cast of lunatics since One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. They are bizarre and extreme, yet each has a distinct and predictable personality. And so, when they act out, you are not surprised, and they are not just there for effect. Of course, this is just the start of Kaufman's wonderful work in this movie. This is the Kaufman of The Wanderers and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Kaufman who can work on a large canvas while keeping the intimacy palpable.

Kaufman and his cinematographer, Rogier Stoffers, who shot Mike van Diem's Oscar-winning foreign-language film Character, do beautiful work here. We are in the era of guarded opulence and while heads are rolling in town, a certain level of indulgence continues to continue in Napoleon's France. But they also manage to keep this from feeling like a period film. Yes, it is overtly a period film, undeniably of a time. But you don't spend a lot of time worrying about that, watching the scenery. The characters are fuller and richer than the landscape on which they live.

And then, there is the tale of morality that sits at the center of the Quills experience. How dangerous is free speech? How dangerous is subversive thought? And how much more dangerous is it to try to stop the freedom of expression? I'm not going to even begin to answer these questions or to tell you how the movie answers these questions. Quills is a movie that you have to experience for yourself. But I will tell you that this is not a movie that stacks the deck. The test of freedom is not the embrace of what you already believe, but in the unconditional embrace of what scares you most.

Finally, I must throw down the gauntlet. Fox Searchlight has been reconfigured over the last year, it seems to me, to take advantage of just the kind of opportunity that Quills affords the organization. If Miramax has a movie of this quality this year, you can be sure that there will be 8 nominations, at a minimum. I expect no less from the new team at Searchlight. Fox has suffered since 1996's Courage Under Fire--excepting Titanic, which was a shared American glory--with a bit of Oscar envy. Every year, they think they have the movie. Every year, from Anastasia to The Siege and The Thin Red Line to Fight Club and Anna and the King, it's been close, but no cigar. (My beloved The Thin Red Line did get 7 nominations. And no wins.) But this year, Fox could have its hands full with Quills from Searchlight, their DreamWorks co-production, Bob Zemeckis and Tom Hanks' Castaway, and potentially, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. Please, don't let this special film get lost in the shuffle. It will take more work than Castaway. And Moulin Rouge is either going to be an absolute sensation or an absolute car wreck. But particularly in an election year, Quills is an important film. And more importantly, it is a wonderful journey, especially if you aren't too afraid of the dark.

"More Crowe, Serving Crow & ROTD Crows about EWS"