DIRECTOR
Barry
Levinson
SCREENWRITER
Paul
Attanasio
based
on the novel by
Michael
Crichton
PRODUCER
Barry Levinson
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Tony Pierce-Roberts
MUSIC
Ennio Morricone
EDITOR
Stu Linder
CAST
Michael Douglas (Tom Sanders)
Demi Moore (Meredith Johnson)
Donald Sutherland (Bob Garvin)
Caroline Goodall (Susan Hendler)
Roma Maffia (Catherine Alvarez)
Dylan Baker (Philip Blackburn)
Rosemary Forsyth (Stephanie Kaplan)
Dennis Miller (Mark Lewyn)
Nicholas Sadler (Don Cherry)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 128m
U.S. release: December 9, 1994
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Barry
Levinson films
reviewed on this website:
- Sleepers
- Sphere
- Wag
the Dog
|
The
novel Disclosure was pure Michael Crichton: a fast, alarmist,
topical read without so much as a pebble of complexity to trouble
the waters. Crichton no longer writes books; he writes Soon-to-Be-Major-Motion-Pictures.
Yet Disclosure raised many hackles upon publication, as
has the new movie version, which is far superior simply by virtue
of not shoving tons of technobabble down our throats. (Crichton
lingers over descriptions of CD-ROM drives the way Judith Krantz
lingers over orgasms.) Crichton is famous for tailoring his novels
to Hollywood players: Jurassic
Park practically had "Property of Steven Spielberg"
stamped across its dust jacket, Rising Sun was written
for Sean Connery, and Disclosure was so bald in its intentions
that book critics wondered who would star opposite Michael Douglas
in the movie. The odds-on favorites were Glenn Close or Sharon
Stone, but Demi Moore won out.
Was Crichton, in fashioning a reverse-sexual-harassment plot,
really doing what he said he was doing? The novel had a trashy-contemplative
aura designed to make you think you were being made to think.
Tackling this hot-button issue laterally, Crichton came up empty:
The plot motor is still a beleaguered white guy's anger at losing
what little power he's managed to attain. The junky, resentful
novelty of the book is also present in the movie, but the director,
Barry Levinson, has the wit to steer around it. His Disclosure
is explicitly about power in all its corrosive aspects. The issue
now is not whether it's plausible for a woman to subject a man
to sexual harassment (and the dynamics are too different to be
comparable). The movie's subject is the intricate web of paranoia
and competitive aggression that creeps down and smothers any
flicker of loyalty.
Levinson and scripter Paul Attanasio make clear that Disclosure
will concern not sexual harassment, but false claims of it. The
protagonist, Tom Sanders (Douglas, of course), a happily married
father of two and an engineering exec at a computer firm, watches
as his former lover, Meredith Johnson (Moore), snags the VP slot
he covets. What happens next can be interpreted any number of
ways. Meredith invites Tom up to her office and aggressively
jumps him. He repeatedly says no, but to what extent does no
mean yes in this situation? She gets him so worked up that he
throws himself upon her, then snaps out of it and withdraws.
Frustrated and enraged, she shrieks at him and storms out; the
next day, she slaps him with a harassment claim. Given the lousy
option of demotion and relocation, Tom threatens to countercharge
Meredith.
There's much debate over whether Meredith abused her power --
she, being his boss, put him in that awkward situation -- and
whether Tom should have had the immediate wherewithal to defuse
the festivities before they went too far. That was Crichton's
thesis; he turned personal accountability into a bland abstract
issue. The movie breathes less heavily about ethics, preferring
instead to explore this office misadventure (ludicrous on the
face of it) as a metaphor for the rapist mentality of corporate
America. Big-business power plays have always seemed like expressions
of impacted sexuality -- think of terms like "acquisition,"
"hostile takeover," "merger" -- but few films
besides Disclosure have approached the Freudian corporate
subtext as a vehicle for satire. Tom almost gets taken over by
the hostile Meredith, who would like to acquire him and definitely
merge with him; and because he's Michael Douglas and not a woman,
we feel freer to laugh. In his shrewd-earnest way, Michael Crichton
was (maybe unconsciously) on to something. Disclosure
told its male readers what too many women already knew: how it
feels to be screwed, in all senses of the word, by someone vicious
and more powerful.
Levinson and Attanasio nourish this neat seed of an idea, but
in one respect they don't transcend Crichton. The firm's CEO,
Bob Garvin, was much more sympathetic in the book; he handpicked
Meredith (and later came to her defense) because he wanted to
see more women in power. His PC-ness blinded him to the truth.
In the movie, Garvin, played by Donald Sutherland in full, gleaming
cold-bastard bloom, is nakedly ruthless. A loud clinker here
is that this Machiavellian CEO now has no reason to keep Meredith
on, if his public speeches about smashing the glass ceiling are
just hot air; it seems more corporately in character for him
to make Meredith disappear and avoid the inevitable furor, which
occurs on the brink of a crucial merger. And why would this man,
who knows and sees everything, be unaware of Tom's past with
Meredith? Or is he covertly trying to stage a shake-up?
Garvin's motives could be a whole lot clearer.
Wisely, Disclosure takes us into Tom's growing paranoia,
his suffocating helplessness as his life slips from his hands.
Michael Douglas, by now, has found his niche. In movie after
movie, he sounds the frightened bleat of the dying white male.
His rising blood pressure has become one of the most familiar
sights in modern movies; he taps right into the wounded zeitgeist
of middle-class white liberals who are sick of being called oppressors.
His recent string of performances is an eloquent rebuttal to
the reflexive man-bashing of the '90s. He's saying, Hey, we guys
have it rough, too; everybody has it rough -- these are rough
times. In a sense, what he's doing by casting himself as a victim
of women is a repudiation of the popular victim culture that
has paralyzed feminism and led to the insane Antioch rules, that
has taught women that male domination is not only frequent but
a given, and thus impossible to fight except through a kind of
atavistic prudity. The message of these Douglas movies might
be: Don't whine -- fight. Whoever's holding you down,
threatening you -- fight him. Or her.
Like a true Hollywood entertainment, Disclosure doesn't
disturb its waters with complexity much more than Crichton did
-- at least, not enough to spoil the fun. And the movie is solid
fun, make no mistake. It has all the ingredients of an absorbing
courtroom thriller, except nobody ever makes it into court. The
central sex scene is wonderfully staged, casting a queasy spell
of eroticism and fear; it has the vertiginous, disorienting feel
of the real thing. (Levinson, not known for carnality in his
work, makes a quantum leap here.) There's subtle support from
Caroline Goodall as Tom's lawyer wife, who's much savvier about
corporate piranhas than he is; Roma Maffia as the harassment
attorney who takes Tom's case; and Dennis Miller, who surprisingly
refuses to smirk his way through his role as a techie.
As for Demi Moore, she's a bit of a dud. Her Meredith is so transparently
evil that nothing much seems at stake. (God, what Christine Lahti
might have done with her -- or Geena Davis, who's overdue to
play a villain.) As he has done with good movies and bad, though,
Michael Douglas takes Disclosure on his back and runs
with it. He succeeds where Michael Crichton failed; he makes
you care about Tom's clearing his name and savoring his triumph
-- which turns out, in the movie's best unstated joke, to be
staying in a cutthroat corporation, building CD-ROM drives for
the rest of his life. |