declarations
of independence:
safe
desperado
the prophecy |
director/screenwriter
Todd Haynes
producers
Christine Vachon
Lauren Zalaznick
cinematographer
Alex Nepomniaschy
music
Ed Tomney
editor
James Lyons
cast
Julianne Moore (Carol White)
Peter Friedman (Peter Dunning)
Xander Berkeley (Greg White)
Susan Norman (Linda)
Kate McGregor-Stewart (Claire)
Mary Carver (Nell)
Steven Gilborn (Dr. Hubbard)
April Grace (Susan)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 119m
u.s.
release: 6/30/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other todd
haynes films
reviewed on this website:
- far
from heaven
- superstar:
the karen carpenter story
other robert
rodriguez films
reviewed on this website:
- the
faculty
- four
rooms ("misbehavers"
segment)
- from
dusk till dawn (short review)
- once
upon a time in mexico
- sin
city
- spy
kids
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Todd Haynes has made a career
out of trying people's patience. He annoyed Richard Carpenter
with his infamous, unreleased Superstar, which told the
story of Karen Carpenter via Barbie dolls. He irritated me with
his feature debut, Poison, an art-house flower so swollen
with metaphorical pollen it could give a department of English
professors a bad case of the sniffles. And in his new movie,
Safe, Haynes risks losing viewers who aren't willing to
stay with him through long, static, slow spots before his vision
takes hold. Safe is another art-house flower, though this
one is more like a Venus fly-trap. Like Hitchcock and David Lynch,
Haynes lulls you with a pattern of dullness -- presentable middle-class
normality gradually eroded by perversity, until finally the perversity
takes over. The movie isn't in a trance -- it is a trance.
And either you find it weirdly compelling or you don't. I did.
Safe is about Carol White (Julianne Moore), a passive
and rather dull California homemaker who discovers that she's
allergic to the 20th century -- that she has Environmental Illness,
a rare disorder afflicting people who have a low tolerance for
the thousands of daily chemicals and irritants that most of us,
by now, take in stride. This is an actual ailment, and though
Haynes' script follows something of a TV-movie disease-of-the-week
trajectory, he knows a ripe symbol of modern alienation when
he sees one. Carol is like an innocent alien, a cross between
E.T. and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, driven
into seclusion by our intolerable atmosphere. She could represent
any number of other things, too (though Haynes has insisted that
we take her simply as a woman with a disease). Even her name
carries associations with Carol Brady and, of course, colorlessness.
In an odd way, too, Carol is linked to the Lily Tomlin character
in, of all movies, the 1981 Joel Schumacher comedy The Incredible
Shrinking Woman; Tomlin played an ordinary housewife whose
exposure to everyday household chemicals made her shrink, and
both movies share a certain anger about women who are victimized,
marginalized, and finally radicalized by their own consumerist
culture.
Little by little, Carol detaches
herself from the outside world, suffering at the hands of clueless
men who think she's just a bored rich woman angling for attention.
Julianne Moore is in almost every shot, and the physical preparation
she did for the role -- dropping about fifteen pounds from her
already slender frame -- certainly shows. She's convincingly
ravaged and weak, a helpless woman who, by the end of the movie,
has seen her world dwindle to the confines of a hermetic igloo.
Nobody can be trusted: not her doctor, not her insensitive husband
(Xander Berkeley), not the unctuous leader (Peter Friedman) of
a "safe" retreat for EI sufferers -- not even the air
she breathes, which at any moment can be fouled by the exhaust
of an unexpected passing truck. In the past, Moore has played
red-blooded women of intelligence (especially in Vanya on
42nd Street and Short Cuts, but even in brief bits
in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Benny & Joon).
Here she plays an empty, pallid, somewhat dim woman, yet she
never condescends to Carol. You're with her right from the start,
when she lies beneath her husband, silently enduring his thrusting.
And when her symptoms worsen and she's wheezing and gasping for
air as if through a pinhole, you gasp right along with her. Without
Moore's delicate portrait of disintegration, Haynes probably
wouldn't have a movie.
But Safe is still an
advance over Poison, a less focused study of disease and
society. "Inspired by the works of Jean Genet," Poison
was subversive, all right, but it was hard to tell what it was
subverting. Haynes used B-movie cheapness to hook us, then turned
around and sneered at the cheapness. The result was interesting,
perhaps, but not very satisfying -- antagonistic rather than
involving. In Safe, Haynes has a better story and a surer
touch, and in the lifeless, suffocating long takes of soulless
people sitting in boring living rooms he shows a Kubrickian taste
for visual irony and hypnotic mood. A populist exciter like Oliver
Stone might have turned Safe into a rampaging cautionary
tale, with Carol venting her rage at her male oppressors (probably
at a noisy press conference). Haynes isn't interested in catharsis.
He likes to confound the audience, punish us for wanting an easy
way out.
After Carol has been at the
retreat for a while, we realize that the leader's relentless
motivational talks amount to psychological fascism. "I've
stopped reading the newspapers," he announces -- the negative
news media being a roadblock to self-actualization. The confused,
unhappy people sitting in therapy-group circles are encouraged
to "take responsibility" for themselves, i.e., blame
themselves for their illness; they could get better if they would
only listen to the leader and become self-actualized. This section
of the movie rivals Kubrick in its cold-eyed satire of the new
therapy culture (just as toxic as the pollution outside, we're
meant to see), where people are made to feel they can't get by
without a motivational head-shrinker guru and Prozac, or at least
the latest self-help book. There's nowhere for Carol to escape
except into herself, which would be fine if she had a self. Safe
is one of the most mesmerizing and provocative films in recent
years. It's a rash of ambiguity spreading across your skin and
under it, too; if Haynes has the ointment, he won't apply it.
 The bad guys have a lot of guns. So
does the good guy. The bad guys outnumber the good guy, but the
good guy is a better shot. Bang, bang, you're dead. In
Desperado, the cheerfully meaningless new action movie
from Robert Rodriguez, Antonio Banderas arrives in town with
a guitar case crammed with instruments of death. Flashbacks tell
us that Banderas was once a mariachi who ran afoul of
criminals who mistook him for an escaped convict; though this
film is a self-contained story, it's a sequel to Rodriguez' 1993
El Mariachi, the famous $7,000 little-movie-that-could,
starring Carlos Gallardo as the hero. Taking over the role, Banderas
has been given back the fingers blown off at the end of the original;
now he just has a bullet wound preventing him from playing the
guitar. It does not, however, dissuade him from pulling the trigger.
Repeatedly.
Desperado was made for $7 million, a three-zero
upgrade of the original budget but still a pittance by today's
Hollywood standards, and needless to say, it has more bang for
the buck than any other movie this summer. Rodriguez is the first
to admit he isn't much of a screenwriter, but as a director he
has a kinetic genius that makes up for his narrative obviousness.
When Banderas is pinned to the floor by a bad guy, he drives
his feet up into the pachuco's chest and launches him
into the air, then empties his guns into the guy, prolonging
his flight. Banderas dispatches another guy by shooting a ceiling
fan, which crashes down onto the guy's head; in a later shot,
the still-whirring fan keeps smacking the unconscious guy in
the face. Within Rodriguez' pulp formula stories are little pockets
of ingenuity.
On the evidence of his two
features to date (excluding his enjoyable made-for-cable J.D.
homage Roadracers, which suggests a gift for comedy),
Rodriguez, unlike his contemporary and friend Quentin Tarantino,
isn't especially interested in toying with the narrative and
themes of action cinema -- he's happy enough just working in
the genre, and his happiness is infectious. (Try to think of
any other action film of the last five years that had any lift
or sense of play.) Rodriguez' films are all about proving something:
El Mariachi proved that a 24-year-old with no crew could
make an exciting and professional-looking movie for four digits,
and the new movie proves he can piss with the big dogs while
staying within the territory he's marked for himself. Desperado
is resolutely derivative but also breathlessly athletic and violently
witty. If you're attuned to it, you won't much mind the plot,
which just goes from point A to point B. Playing the battle-scarred
hunk, Banderas could have given a sullen, blank performance,
but he comes across as soulful and gentle in almost any role,
and he's worth whatever Rodriguez didn't spend on squibs and
explosions. Steve Buscemi (playing a barfly called, hilariously,
Buscemi) and Cheech Marin are terrific in their few scenes; Quentin,
fast becoming the Michael Caine of indie cinema, tells an endless
piss joke and gets blown away. Will someone please advise this
man to stay behind the camera?
 "See ya, kids," says Christopher Walken
to a group of schoolchildren in The Prophecy. "Study
your math." I don't think I've laughed harder at
a movie moment since ... well, since Walken's gold-watch monologue
in Pulp
Fiction. Walken didn't start out playing villains, but
about ten years ago, somewhere around A View to a Kill
and At Close Range, he must have decided to capitalize
on his unusual vocal rhythms and vampire-from-the-ice-planet
features. It's been a shrewd move. In most of Walken's films
now, he's the droll spider amused by the struggles of the fly.
And in The Prophecy, a mostly ridiculous religioso
thriller (call it Pulp Crucifixion) in which Walken plays
some sort of hard-ass angel, almost everything he did struck
me funny, whether or not the script intended it that way. "Hi,"
he says to a befuddled nurse. "Someone's gonna die
soon. I can smell these things." Indeed he can; not
a person or object onscreen goes unsniffed by Walken. I like
to think that Walken flipped through the script, realized how
lame it is, and decided to have some fun anyway. He's the only
reason not to nod off.
The hero of The Prophecy
is Elias Koteas as a cop who was once a candidate for the priesthood.
He alone understands the nature of the war brewing in Heaven
-- a war waged over human souls by bitter angels jealous of God's
love for us. In a way, I like this movie because it refutes the
current cotton-headed books about nurturing guardian angels on
our shoulders. The Prophecy confirms that angels do exist,
except they dress and act like reservoir dogs. One such angel
is Simon, embodied by Eric Stoltz, who's had the exact same look
for about five consecutive movies now; I expected to see a Speed
Racer T-shirt under his dark overcoat. Simon, who's supposed
to be a good angel, hangs out in an abandoned schoolroom, giving
off child-molester vibes: "Mary -- that's a very
pretty name," he remarks to a little girl. Simon picks the
prettily named Mary to be the container for the soul of a recently
deceased colonel -- a soul coveted by archangel Gabriel (Walken)
for strategic purposes in the celestial war and, gee, are your
eyelids getting heavy yet? Gabriel spends the movie stalking
Mary, and I wondered why simple Simon put the soul into a vulnerable
little girl instead of, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who could
snap Gabriel in half without breaking stride.
This is Gregory Widen's debut
as a director (he worked on the scripts for Highlander
-- another dippy mystical number with an unaccountably large
cult of fans -- and the 1991 fireman drama Backdraft),
and with The Prophecy he's made what he possibly hopes
is this year's The
Crow -- a hip, morbid freak-out that college kids prepare
for in the parking lot, if you catch my drift. But except for
Walken and Adam Goldberg (Dazed and Confused) as his morose
sidekick the movie is awfully short on entertainment; by the
time Viggo Mortensen turns up as Satan, all atwinkle at his own
evil wit, it's too little too late. Widen gets off on Gabriel's
icy amorality (as do we), but he also wants us to buy his message
that we humans are imperfect yet worthy couriers of God's promise
of love. Movies have never been adept at this sort of jazz, and
about halfway through The Prophecy I gave up and simply
looked forward to Walken, who somehow triumphs over his insipid
hairdo (it looks like a black cat died on his head) and makes
a spectator sport out of keeping himself amused.
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