cold
fish:
waterworld
swimming with sharks |
director
Kevin Reynolds
screenwriters
Peter Rader
David Twohy
producer
Kevin Costner
John Davis
Charles Gordon
Lawrence Gordon
cinematographers
Scott Fuller
Dean Semler
music
James Newton Howard
editor
Peter Boyle
cast
Kevin Costner (Mariner)
Dennis Hopper (Deacon)
Jeanne Tripplehorn (Helen)
Tina Majorino (Enola)
Leonardo Cimino (Elder)
Jack Kehler (Banker)
Sab Shimono (Elder)
Robert A. Silverman (Hydroholic)
Michael Jeter (Old Gregor)
John Fleck (Doctor)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 136m
u.s.
release: July 28, 1995
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
director/screenwriter
George
Huang
producers
Steve Alexander
Joanne Moore
cinematographer
Steven Finestone
music
Tom Hiel
editor
Ed Marx
cast
Kevin Spacey (Buddy Ackerman)
Frank Whaley (Guy)
Michelle Forbes (Dawn Lockard)
Benicio Del Toro (Rex)
T.E. Russell (Foster Kane)
Roy Dotrice (Cyrus Miles)
Matthew Flint (Manny)
Patrick Fischler (Moe)
Jerry Levine (Jack)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 101m
u.s.
release: March 21,
1995
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
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In the future of Waterworld,
everyone looks both wet and dry -- soaked by their constant exposure
to the water that has covered the planet, their skin red and
wrinkled by the sun reflecting off the ocean. The polar ice caps
have melted, and dirt is a prized commodity, like petrol in the
Mad Max trilogy. In fact, almost everything in Waterworld
is like the Mad Max trilogy (the movie could be called
Wet Max), except for its pace. The director, Kevin Reynolds,
doesn't give us the cartoon-kinetic jolts of George Miller; he
gives us exhausting physical realism. The relentless forward
journey, over water instead of scorching desert, progresses against
harsh and unforgiving backdrops, like the cattle drives in Anthony
Mann's westerns. Yet, for all the motion, we get no real sense
of progression: The damned vast expanse of ocean always looks
the same as it did two scenes ago. Reynolds wants us to experience
the endless sea as the characters do: both wide open and smothering
-- the way you felt as a kid, looking up at the stars in the
night sky and feeling infinity come over you in a frightening
rush. Some of the images have a suffocating grandeur. Water,
water everywhere.
The anti-hero, Mariner (Kevin Costner), is the latest in a long
line of callous loners that include not only Mad Max but Josey
Wales, James Stewart's hard-asses in the Mann westerns, and probably
all the way back to Beowulf. The basic function of these personality-challenged
slabs of beef is to be the steady rock at the center of the action
-- the rock that various weaker, more human, and generally more
lively characters cling to. And gradually some of their humanity
rubs off on the loner, while some of his self-reliance rubs off
on them. The difference in Waterworld is that those subsidiary
characters are in short supply. Everyone we see (mostly men)
is grubby, stressing over survival. Only the villains seem to
have any form of recreation, and even they're a ragged, indistinct
bunch. Mariner has been out on the water alone so long that he's
lost any pretense of compassion or patience. About all that sets
him apart from everyone else on the screen is that we see more
of him -- that, and his webbed toes and gills.
More than once, the camera pulls back and back until Mariner's
huge boat is just a speck in the ocean. The people are specks,
too. Kevin Reynolds actually can do people, as he showed in his
amiable feature debut, Fandango (also starring Costner).
In his haplessly misconceived Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,
Reynolds gave himself over to the mud and cold and physical discomfort
of medieval times -- apparently not caring that, for many of
us, the magic of Robin Hood had been forever embodied by the
athletic, boisterous Errol Flynn. That project wasn't right for
Reynolds; if he wanted to make a realistic movie about the Dark
Ages, he should have done it some other way. Reynolds' great
talent (you heard me) lies in making us feel, actually feel,
whatever atmosphere or climate he chooses to evoke. Waterworld
is an anti-summer movie -- it's as tiring and headachy as a long
day at the beach. Is it fun? Not really. Is that the point? Not
really. The futuristic milieu is oppressively convincing; Reynolds'
obsession with the elements, at the risk of alienating an audience
that wants only escapism, makes him perhaps the most radical
big-movie director since Kubrick. All the effort pays off: Waterworld
has my respect. I had no idea what the characters were thinking
half the time, but I had an excellent idea what they were feeling,
physically. This may be the only water-filled movie in history
that makes you thirsty. You can almost smell the salt
on Mariner's sunburned skin.
Kevin Costner has taken some lumps for his one-note performance
as Mariner, but I thought he was funny -- more so, even, than
Dennis Hopper, who turns up as the Deacon, the maniacal one-eyed
leader of the villainous Smokers. Costner spends most of the
movie acting like a grumpy bear with a migraine (which may not
have been acting). Mariner takes two survivors onto his ship
-- a little girl, Enola (Tina Majorino), who has a map tattooed
onto her back, and her companion-protector Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn).
He sees them both entirely as obstructions. "Hi," Enola
says cheerfully to Mariner. "Move," he replies. Helen
offers Mariner her body; he looks her over and grunts, "You
got nothin' I need." (Later, he tells her he didn't seize
the moment because "I knew you didn't really want me."
Okay, so there's something that sets him apart from most guys
on Waterworld, and on our world too.) Mariner eventually thaws
a little, but in the meantime his very humorlessness is amusing.
When Enola gives a friendly, innocent wave to the Smokers, Mariner
slaps her upside the head: "What are you thinkin'
about?" Costner's relentlessly antagonistic performance
at the center of this big movie is another risk that pays off.
Costner is doing something daring; Dennis Hopper isn't. He's
funny, but he's funny in exactly the same way he was in Speed,
which is a polite way of saying he's in a rut. His Deacon has
no menace. As entertaining as Hopper can be, he's never grasped
the great secret of playing a villain, which is to act as if
the movie is really about the villain -- an ambitious
guy who keeps getting thwarted by some tiresome hero. (Recent
example: Tim Roth in the otherwise pathetic Rob Roy.)
Audiences laugh fondly at Hopper now, and he's stunted by that
fondness. Like Jack Nicholson, Hopper has learned precisely which
bits of business will go over big -- these once-dangerous actors
have turned into sitcom crazies. Their timing has become immaculate
and disheartening; their wildness arrives right on schedule,
like Kramer bursting through the door on Seinfeld. Hopper
may have another ferocious Blue Velvet performance (or
touching Hoosiers performance) in him, but the evidence
against it gets more depressing every summer. He seems to have
handed his career over to goofing around in movies for teenagers.
Reynolds may have thought that if the Deacon were as grim and
resourceful as Mariner, Waterworld would have been unwatchable.
(Would it have been unwatchable if Mariner had been as loud and
high-spirited as the Deacon?) This director isn't interested
in the eternal good-evil throwdown. His heart is in the scenes
of Mariner leapfrogging around his boat like an organic cog in
the machinery. The conflict in Reynolds' movies is between man
and nature -- or, most often, between Kevin Costner and nature:
Costner in the desert looking for Dom, Costner brooding in the
fog of Sherwood Forest, Costner on the water. Watching Costner
live it up in Fandango before going to see Waterworld
is a vivid lesson in the difference ten years make. Assuming
that these men want to work together again, what's left for them
to conquer? The frozen tundra? Outer space? A lost city under
the earth? Kevin Reynolds could become a major director, working
his own private side of the street, but he needs better scripts.
(The one here, credited to Peter Rader and David Twohy, is sometimes
witty but also sketchy and derivative.) Waterworld isn't
anything great, but it's miles ahead of the usual summer fluff.
It's the work of a talented director-star team who, at this point,
probably want their next collaboration to be a quiet romantic
comedy with Costner sitting in a nice restaurant talking to a
beautiful woman for two hours.
"Shut
up, listen, and learn," hisses Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey)
to his cringing assistant Guy (Frank Whaley) in the indie black
comedy Swimming with Sharks. Buddy, a senior production
executive at Keystone Pictures, enjoys grinding his lackeys into
the dirt, where they belong. The protagonist, Guy, is perhaps
meant to be writer-director George Huang's nightmare of what
he might have turned into. Huang did time as a schlepper at various
studios; when he met Robert Rodriguez around the time that El
Mariachi was the toast of Hollywood, Huang was inspired to
quit his job and make his own movie. The result is smooth and
sometimes funny. But Huang errs on the side of modesty. He hollows
Guy out, gives him no inner life, and lets Buddy -- and Kevin
Spacey -- dominate the movie.
Spacey makes a magnificent prick. When Buddy launches into one
of his imitation-Joel-Silver tirades -- "Let me hear you
say 'Would you like that in a pump or a loafer?' Because from
now on you're gonna be selling shoes!" -- or tells Guy,
"Your opinion means nothing. Your feelings mean nothing.
You are nothing. You are here for me," Spacey
takes such palpable delight in being a suave hard-ass that it's
impossible not to like him. Huang gives Buddy a sob story to
explain why he's so inhuman, but he doesn't need to. Spacey's
performance has a subtext of compassion. Buddy, we feel, used
to be Guy -- an idealistic kid who entered the studio inferno
with visions of celluloid dancing in his head. After years of
taking abuse and humiliation, Buddy is in charge now, and he
believes it's his turn to dish out abuse -- he's earned
it. Spacey makes us see how idealism can calcify, over years
of disappointment and stress, into cynicism, self-hatred, cruelty.
For the first time, I empathized with bastards like Buddy (who
are plentiful outside Hollywood as well).
I wish I could say the same for Guy. He's as generically named
as Buddy, but he's also generically written. Guy, an aspiring
writer, enters the lion's den hoping to work his way up to a
position of creative importance. Generally, this is the route
of the talentless -- the route of people like Buddy, or Guy's
predecessor Rex (Benicio Del Toro), who's hopping over to an
executive spot at Universal. (The studio or the park?) We never
see Guy writing his own stuff (he doesn't have time), but he
does suggest changes to a promising script being shopped around
by senior vice-president Dawn (Michelle Forbes). Guy's big brainstorm
is to get a hot new John Singleton-type director (T.E. Russell)
to commit to the script, and the grateful Dawn seduces Guy. This
part of the movie is cloudy. Do Guy and Dawn really feel for
each other, or are they just using each other? Huang doesn't
tell us. Michelle Forbes has glamour and a smart, deep voice,
but her features don't open up to the camera -- she's as opaque
to us as she is to Guy.
Frank Whaley, playing a hapless schmoe doing ten things at once,
doesn't have anything specific to play except masochism and then
sadism. All the studio stuff, it turns out, is flashback. Huang
cuts from the main plot to a present-day framing device in which
the crazed Guy ties Buddy to a chair and tortures him -- savaging
his hair, his face. This may be cathartic for Huang, but it's
largely unpleasant for us, especially when Huang out-Tarantinos
Tarantino by using an envelope as an instrument of torture. The
humor turns brutish and rancid. The ending is "true,"
I suppose, but it leaves us with nothing. Swimming with Sharks
is another vengeful acid-bath telling us how vicious Hollywood
is (does anyone not know that by now?). It's a persuasive argument
for aspiring young filmmakers to stay out of the shark tank,
but that's all it is. Huang can't get enough of the scenes in
which Guy mutilates Buddy. Once Huang cast Kevin Spacey, he should
have rewritten the script to reflect the real, human monster
Spacey gives us. Nothing Guy can do to Buddy is as horrible and
disfiguring as what Buddy has done to himself.
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