ken_gewertz

A very funny movie with excellent performances by a great cast. It reminded me of the wonderful screwball comedies of the 1930s. Behind all the frantic silliness there is a serious point about the moral value of truth versus fiction. The ditsy congenital liar and con artist Gwen turns out to be more honest and a better person than the prim and proper but ambivalent Becky who is more attracted to Newton when she thinks he's married than when he's single and available. And on a personal note, it was while watching the credits that I finally realized that Donald Moffat and James Cromwell are two different people!

I was a callow youth when I first saw this film and failed to appreciate its brilliance. I saw it as a message movie in which the condemnation of racial prejudice was sugarcoated by presenting it in the form of a whodunit. As an educated Northern liberal, I felt that I didn't need this oblique approach. I could take the truth straight. After all, I knew about the horrible racial situation in the deep South from listening to protest songs by Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.

What I failed to appreciate is what a superb example of move-making it is. The early scenes in which Sidney Poitier is pulled in for the murder of the rich white entrepreneur proceed with a rhythm and snap that is irresistible. He and Rod Steiger play off one another like opponents in a high stakes tennis game. The advantage keeps shifting from one to the other. The device in which two strong characters learn to respect and ultimately like one another as the result of a sharp struggle of wills is an old one, but rarely has it been used to such effect as here. It is little wonder that the film is so well crafted considering the team that collaborated on it. The cinematographer Haskell Wexler and editor Hal Ashby were soon to become important directors in their own right, but it is clear that at this stage in their careers these two major talents were willing to contribute to the synergy of the project, however eager they may have been to take the directorial reins themselves. This powerful cooperative vision is apparent all through the film but especially in scenes like the one between Poitier and Lee Grant in which the tension between emotion and convention achieves an almost balletic expression. Director Norman Jewison must have played a key role in distilling that vision from the Sterling Siliphant script and bringing it into focus.

The performances are all extraordinary, particularly that of Steiger, who richly deserves the Oscar he received for his efforts. I have to say though that while I found Pointier's performance powerful, I thought it lacked the depth of characterization that made Steiger's police chief so fully realized. Poitier is a man out of his element, but he does not convey much of a sense of the element from which he comes. The Philadelphia police force of which he is a part exists only as an abstraction. Aside from the brief phone conversation in which his boss confirms his identity then asks him to aid Steiger with the investigation, there is little in Poitier's characterization to make us feel that he is part of an organization, that he comes from a particular area of the country, that he has colleagues, family, and friends, that he has worked his way up from somewhere and has ambitions to go somewhere else, in short, that he is a specific human being, rather than an embodiment of intelligence and outraged dignity.

But that one caveat aside, the movie is still marvelous and holds up extremely well after almost 40 years.

A great cast, a fine director, and an opulent production cannot save this movie from its preposterous script. The veteran writing team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank must have been under tremendous pressure to soften some of Faulkner's themes, because it looks as if they threw his novel "The Hamlet" into a blender and then reassembled the pieces, adding Hollywood clichés by the handful to thoroughly re-familiarize the story. Thus we have the addition of the schoolteacher daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward)with hair in a tight bun who melts when Paul Newman kisses her. There's the contrast between the crude stud (Newman) and his sickly aristocratic rival, Richard Anderson, a motif that hearkens back to Bogart and Leslie Howard in "The Petrified Forest." The casting here is a little strange since Anderson is 6'4" to Newman's 5'9". Then there's the two rivals bidding on Clara's box lunch, a scene that borrows so heavily on "Oklahoma!" that you feel you've somehow stumbled into another movie. But what the hell, Oklahoma's not too far from Mississippi. They do that sort of thing all the time down there, don't they? All of this pales alongside the grimly happy endings that are slapped onto all the dark, Southern-Gothic story lines. Newman sheds tears remembering his terrible childhood, which softens Woodward's heart, and suddenly they are deliriously in love and ready to give Papa Varner the grandchildren he craves. After sadistically taunting and belittling his son Jody throughout the movie, Orson Welles as patriarch Will Varner suddenly forgives and embraces him because he set a fire and tried to burn his father alive! And Will finally gives in and agrees to marry his ditsy mistress Angela Lansbury, uttering the memorable final line, "I like life! I think I may just live forever." Which, I suppose, is what the Hollywood guardians of the national psyche imagined we all needed to hear back there in the last years of the Eisenhower era.

Released a few short weeks after Sept. 11, Zoolander became the target of "this is why they hate us" diatribes. I didn't see it until months later and immediately recognized what I can only hope I would have seen if I had watched it earlier--that this is a superb satire/farce. There aren't many movies that manage to be both silly and smart at the same time, and this is one. It is not only a send-up of the modeling and fashion industries, admittedly easy targets, but of our whole image-obsessed culture which commodifies love, spirituality, patriotism, heroism just as easily and unthinkingly as it does kitchen appliances. This is not a "stupid" movie, even though it is about stupid people and stupid situations. It keeps the targets of its satire within its sights at every moment, never letting that focus flag to pursue maudlin subplots, but at the same time, it is unfailingly hilarious, with marvelous comic acting, sight-gags, sets, and costumes. The screen is just packed with visual jokes at almost every moment. This is not a movie that anyone needs to be embarrassed to watch or enjoy. But it is also just plain damned fun!