DIRECTOR
Jon
Turteltaub
SCREENWRITER
Gerald
Di Pego
inspired
by the novel Ishmael by
Daniel
Quinn
PRODUCERS
Barbara Boyle
Michael Taylor
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Philippe Rousselot
MUSIC
Danny Elfman
EDITOR
Richard Francis-Bruce
CAST
Anthony Hopkins (Ethan Powell)
Cuba Gooding Jr. (Theo Caulder)
Donald Sutherland (Ben Hillard)
Maura Tierney (Lynn Powell)
George Dzundza (Dr. John Murray)
John Ashton (Guard Decks)
John Aylward (Warden Keefer)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 126m
U.S. release: June 4, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
|
Perhaps
I am not the ideal audience for Instinct. Such heavy message
movies are meant to be inspirational and uplifting, but they
mostly just make me angry -- they inspire me to uplift myself
from the theater seat and head for the exit. Instinct
is yet another spiritual weepie that decries human follies and
yet puts a happy face on it all. It serves up chicken soup for
the soul while pretending that the soup isn't made of dead chickens.
The movie runs on a low-powered, inoffensive Hollywood engine
-- the same one that kept Phenomenon chugging all the
way to the bank. I mention that 1996 John Travolta weepie because
it, like Instinct, was directed by Jon Turteltaub and
written by Gerald Di Pego. Both movies stack the deck for themselves
by taking a star most people like and casting him as an ordinary
guy with unusual passions who is persecuted, poked, and prodded
for his troubles. These men are better than you and me, you see;
they are in tune with nature, the cosmos, and movie clichés.
In Instinct, the misunderstood saint is Anthony Hopkins
as Dr. Ethan Powell, an anthropologist who lived among the gorillas
in the African wild for two years. At some point, Powell went
bonkers, killing two men and seriously wounding three others.
The movie somberly works up to the big revelation (What drove
him to murder?) as if we couldn't already guess, as if we hadn't
seen Gorillas in the Mist. I guess Dr. Theo Calder (Cuba
Gooding Jr.) hasn't seen it either; this ambitious young shrink
can break through a woman's Pope obsession early in the movie,
but he takes forever to figure out what makes Powell tick.
Aside from the director and writer, both of whom have yet to
impress me, Instinct is the feeble one-handed work of
many talented hands (including the two Oscar-winning stars) who
have seen much better days. Ace cinematographer Philippe Rousselot
(who won his Oscar for A River Runs Through It) finds
no beauty in the lush African jungle; top-flight monster-maker
Stan Winston (he got his Oscar for Aliens) builds some
fake gorillas, but unfortunately he's no Rick Baker, and the
noble beasts are elegantly-sculpted, blatantly obvious latex.
Even the usually idiosyncratic Danny Elfman (no Oscars yet, but
two nominations) falls into sub-Lion King drums and weepy
violins for his score here. As for the stars, Hopkins does nothing
he hasn't done before, and Gooding overdoes Theo's sensitivity;
he always seems just about to cry, and when he finally does,
it doesn't move us.
There's about enough material here for an hour-long episode of
TV drama, so the filmmakers toss in a lot of extraneous padding,
like Powell's estranged daughter (poor Maura Tierney, stuck with
some of the worst lines) and every sequence dealing with the
backward prison where Powell is being held -- an allegedly heart-tugging
moment involving the defiant ripping of playing cards should
be ripe for vicious parody if the movie is a hit.
Which it may well be. Instinct may fill a need in the
mass audience, just as Phenomenon did and Patch
Adams did. Apparently we need to be told that we've lost
our way, that we've misplaced our souls on the fast track to
the millennium. Which may very well be true, but these movies
also tell us that we can regain our nobility if we just believe,
and open our hearts, and go stand out in the rain or something.
Are people so stressed and spiritually exhausted now that they
need to find meaning in this hypocritical Hollywood New Age fluff?
(I'd like to know how many natural resources were conserved in
the making of Instinct.) Past a certain point, chicken
soup for the soul becomes horseshit for the brain. |