Three mainstream movies opened in Baltimore last Friday -- "Basic Instinct" (Tri-Star), "Shadows & Fog" (Orion) and "Company Business" (MGM) -- and they had two things in common.
The first was that, by one of those meaningless coincidences that make the world so interesting, each features a minor actor named Daniel Von Bargen -- he's an internal affairs officer in "Basic Instinct," a vigilante in "Shadows & Fog" and a CIA station chief in "Company Business." Von Bargen is very good in each of them, a brusque, tough-looking authority figure, who may have a career as a character actor ahead of him. Welcome to the movies, Mr. Van Bargen.
The other thing the three movies have in common, and it's a coincidence that may not be meaningless at all, is that each one stinks. Welcome to the movies, Mr. and Mrs. America.
"Basic Instinct" is a wretchedly plotted, overacted, overheated mess; it was driven to a $15 million opening weekend on the strength of a year's worth of protest by militant gay groups that made it the most visible movie since "JFK." Why do I suspect the fact that it is reputed to have some of the hottest sex scenes this side of NC-17 didn't hurt it, either?
"Shadows & Fog," on the other hand, was created by Woody Allen, America's most beloved auteur, a director who has been pampered by his studio for years, given large budgets and extraordinary artistic freedom, and unprecedented critical support.
"Company Business," on still a third hand, is a formula buddy-picture of the sort that Hollywood had been knocking out honorably since at least the Thirties. It stars two well-known performers (the ever-likable Gene Hackman and the charismatic TC Mikhail Baryshnikov), directed by an old hand (Nicholas Meyer) with more than a few hits to his credit.
To me, the weekend represents a failure at all levels of the American professional film industry: at the top, where an elite filmmaker has stumbled wretchedly; in the middle, where the formulas have stopped working; and in the gutter, where even the most basic instinct for storytelling seems to have dried up and blown away, to be replaced by cheesy porn that can have no effect but to divide men from women and gays from straights. And it is particularly galling as it happens just before the annual orgy of self-celebration, the Academy Awards.
What is going on? Have they forgotten how to make movies out there?
This is a question a critic hears and sees more and more these days. Ordinary citizens, if they should happen to recognize a critic at a screening, ask him (that is, after they ask him how many movies a week he sees) what's wrong with Hollywood? How come they don't make them the way they used to?
And it's a question critics wonder about. I can barely remember the last time I saw a Hollywood movie I really loved, flat-out loved and wanted to see again. Today, the most nourishing film experiences are found in the Charles, this town's brave little art-rep house. It just so happens that in the last three or four days I've also seen some real movies there: "Overseas," the French film, and "Pepe le Heros," from Belgium. Then "Let Him Have It," a British film. And the best movie I've seen this year may be "The Vanishing," a Dutch movie, which played at . . . the Charles. Oh, and I did see a movie someplace other than the Charles: "Cabeza de Vaca," a Mexican film, which the Baltimore Film Forum will be showing during its festival. How is it? It's
terrific.
Now it just may be that the Chuck has had a lucky run and Hollywood has had an unlucky run, but I suspect it's something more.
What's driving Hollywood these days appears to be less and less the urge to make solid, profitable, respectable pictures; in a terrible way, the business has become a great deal like the publishing industry (or the publishing industry has become too much like the movies) in an absurd quest for the single, liberating hit, a best-seller, if you will. If it connects, the money is endless, the power to make more movies expands exponentially; moreover, there's now an expanded linkage of profit-taking possibilities: novels, novelizations, VCR sales, laser disc sales. The money seems literally endless.
And, in its way, hit fever explains each of the three movies that opened this weekend, as it does the movies that you'll see for years to come -- unless you see them at the Charles or the Baltimore Film Forum.
"Basic Instinct," which probably will be a hit, was cynically conceived as a maximum money cow. The only thing it does well is earn money, and in that grudgingly narrow arena, it has to be recognized, but not respected. It was assembled out of "proven players": Star Michael Douglas has the "sexual drama" market cornered, after his appearance in the runaway hit "Fatal Attraction" (a movie itself machined to be a hit, to the extent that its legitimate ending was dumped in order to tack on something from a horror movie). Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch director, bullied both the hyperviolent "RoboCop" and the ultramegahyperviolent "Total Recall" into the $100 mil hit category; he's a master of the squishy-wishy. And screenwriter Joe Ezsterhas had a solidly sordid sex-crime hit in "Jagged Edge." How could these guys go wrong? The answer is, they couldn't and they didn't.
As for Woody Allen, I have lost all patience. Sorry. This guy has had a sweetheart deal unrivaled in American film culture; he has more money and freedom than any filmmaker since Orson Welles got his one-and-only shot at RKO in 1941. Welles turned out "Citizen Kane." Woody has turned out "Interiors," "Alice," "Radio Days," "September," and even his two successful movies -- "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors" -- were spotty.
Excuse me, would it be too much to ask this guy to make a funny movie now and then? His poor studio, Orion, has gone into near bankruptcy bankrolling his movies, and has gotten back in return virtually nothing.
What drives them? Love of art? No -- the whiff of a hit. Allen validated a career for himself and an endless bankroll with "Annie Hall," and he's never come close to it since. If Orion goes down the tubes, he'll switch to another studio without looking back.
Then there's poor "Company Business." What a mutt! What a misbegotten blob of a movie! The less said and the more quickly forgotten, the better. But it's an example of the kind of star packaging that frequently dominates the movie-making decisions: Hackman is a wonderfully likable, avuncular figure; Baryshnikov is enigmatic, charismatic, cute, and at one time seemed on the verge of a major screen career. Did nobody read the script? It makes no sense, it has no clever touches, it has no drive and no punch line. It's all tedious setup, in locales (picturesque Europe) that have come achingly familiar. It's a concept for a hit, not a movie.
It's time someone said to Hollywood: You ought to get back into pictures.