The Times (16/Jan/1994) - Malice before thought
(c) The Times (16/Jan/1994)
- keywords: Academy Awards, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Marnie (1964), Tippi Hedren
Malice before thought
What do you get when you show violence and explicit sex among the thirtysomethings? A film Julie Burchill would not look twice at.
A long time ago, when films were categorised with the solid and sexy "U", "A" and "X" (the unimpeachable thrill of getting in to your first X film! Bliss was it in that dawn to be too young) instead of the horribly soppy and pedestrian "PG", "15" and "18", sex was either up in the air or writhing in the gutter. That is, if you wanted to see the dirty deed done for the price of a ticket, then you had to go and see boring foreign films; either arthouse rubbish or soft porn piffle, Ingmar Bergman or Sexy Swedish Schoolgirls (which sounds very much like the sort of thing Bergman's daughter Anna would have made the one who ended up as the sexy Swede in Mind Your Language!) Either way, these were not exactly what you'd call blockbusters only Big Girls (ie men) went to see the first and only Little Boys (ie men) bothered with the second.
But women are more than half the population, and it was the female audience that first made cinema-going a mass phenomenon. In 1946, there were more than 1,500m admissions to cinemas; in 1980 there were 86m. Accepting that sex had raised its ugly head and that there was no turning back, how did you use it to draw the much-needed, long-gone female audience back into the cinema? Certainly not by tempting them in with the mandatory gang rape, as film directors seemed to believe in the 1970s. But somewhere in the 1980s came the answer: the dirtysomething film. Rather as the pornographer Candida Royalle makes "pornography for women" by involving them in a domestic storyline and then throwing in a gratuitous bit of screwing in the shower, so the makers of dirtysomethings involve their audiences in domestic scenarios of marriage and Making It Trollope with trollops and then throw in a gratuitous bit of screwing in the sink.
Add murder and mayhem to keep the boys happy, and the dirtysomethings were off and panting. Like their contemporaries in the television soap, thirtysomething which overnight performed the unique feat of making being between the ages of 29 and 40 desirable; Zeitgeistian, even the protagonists were attractive, intelligent, usually married and mostly, though not always, childless. Before this, the only people to have sex in films were philosophers, whores and window cleaners but films such as Fatal Attraction, Final Analysis, Body Of Evidence, Unlawful Entry, Indecent Proposal and Consenting Adults were peopled by publishers, psychiatrists, architects, detectives, estate agents and lawyers; they were, in fact, the sort of people you'd find in an After Eight commercial. In a world grown tired of every type of sexual perversion, the idea that Straight People had sex was the freaky-deakiest of them all hence the success of the Gold Blend campaign.
Whatever, suddenly the screen was full of lawyers in love not to mention hot water, hot tubs and flagrante delicto. The dirtysomethings starred Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Kurt Russell, Madeleine Stowe, Kevin Kline and Demi Moore, usually had two-word titles (Madonna's much-mocked Body Of Evidence proved its lack of nous by having one word too many) and pulled in the punters like crazy. But while it was initially refreshing to see that people who eat radicchio have sex, too, these films quickly became boring and formulaic. For a couple of days at our house, we had fun making up alternative titles for dream dirtysomething projects Mistaken Identity, Justified Force, Without Restraint, Dry Run, Test Case, Conjugal Rights, Right Of Entry, Cause And Effect, Sleight Of Hand, Irretrievable Breakdown! With films such as these, you didn't really need to see them once you'd seen the title.
The attractive soft furnishings featured in these films certainly recaptured that elusive butterfly, the female audience, at first. But recent examples of the genre such as Consenting Adults and Sliver have done badly, both critically and commercially. It is becoming more and more obvious that the dirtysomethings weren't anything new at all; they were basically the sexual psychodramas, usually directed by Alfred Hitchcock, from the better years of Hollywood. They have nicer sofas and worse music, but we are basically in Marnie By Gaslight country once more two gorgeous love-buckets get hitched, and something wicked this way comes.
So why haven't the dirtysomethings held our attention our gaze, excuse my French in the way Hitchcock did for more than four decades? Well, they will insist on being soundtracked by horrors such as UB40 and Julia Fordham rather than masters of horror such as Bernard Hermann. Then there are the stars themselves; we know too much about them ever to find them really mysterious. Grace Kelly and Cary Grant both led pretty busy private lives, but they kept their nakedness covered; these days, they stick it on the cover of Vanity Fair. Watching modern actors trying their best to be enigmatic, it's really hard not to think: "Gee, that's Alec Baldwin I wonder if he's still going to those therapy sessions because of his `addiction' to El Kim!" or "Get a load of Demi Moore! Why I think I've seen her naked now more times than I've seen my spouse! I wonder if her and Willis's marriage is really in big shtup?" When a film insists, no, relies on the audience suspending disbelief for a whole two hours, such thoughts are not just distracting but downright deflationary.
And then again, you never saw Cary Grant and Grace Kelly screwing like mink in the sink. This was because directors in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s were not allowed to put sex (in its most literal form, though everything else was OK; "Would you like a leg or a breast?" Kelly, vis-a-vis cold chicken, to Cary Grant) in their films; because of this, they worked a damn sight harder to make their films interesting. Sex may well burn off calories but it makes people lazy, and none more than film directors. And it is the directors who must, in the end, carry the cannister for the decline of the dirtysomething.
It is a fact, pure and simple, that directors today are not as good as directors used to be. With very few exceptions, directors today are stunted, somewhat grudging men, usually with backgrounds in commerce and advertising, who make shallow, silly, graceless films. And these films appear at their shallowest, silliest and most graceless when attempting to confront two of the most crucial questions in the cinematic canon: sex and death. If Adrian Lyne had stayed making odes to carbonated drinks, we would probably all still consider him some sort of genius; on sex and death he's pure Pot Noodle.
It is well-known that Alfred Hitchcock, in the latter half of his career, made a point of putting himself into every film he made. What is less well-known is that Lyne and Co do this with the dirtysomethings; they're in there OK, you just don't see them. And all their grotesquely almost surreally bullying attitude to women is in there too. Such men display a "masculinity" so hysterically in crisis (real or imagined) that the slightest shred of criticism cannot be countenanced without a full-scale temper tantrum. (It is odd how it is invariably the men who consider themselves the most masculine who are these days the most hyper-emotional; I was brought up to believe that a Real Man is the strong and silent type. A bit of silence, especially, wouldn't come amiss from this lot.)
Susan Faludi, writing of Fatal Attraction in her stunning book, Backlash, has Lyne speak thus on Alex, the career girl who screws Michael Douglas and ends up dead for her sins: "They (unmarried career women) are sort of overcompensating for not being men. It's sad, you know, because it kind of doesn't work. You hear feminists talk, and it kind of fights the whole wife role, the whole childbearing role. Sure, you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman. My wife has never worked. She's the least ambitious person I've ever met. It's a terrific feeling. I come home and she's there."
For daring to take down and comment on the thoughts of this modern Titan (who has a grasp of our common tongue which more than qualifies him to write, as well as direct, his charming films), Faludi was paid back in the most pettish and, it must be said (at the risk of sounding priggish), unprofessional manner. In Lyne's first film after the publication of the book, Indecent Proposal (Glenn Close was killed, but Demi Moore was hired out for a million dollars; who says men can't progress?), we see a stereotypical "bimbo" receptionist sitting reading at her desk in the slimy lawyer's office. (All lawyers are slimy in films not like film directors, eh?) Her book? Backlash, natch. Ow! Kiss the girls and make them cry! Give that man a medal for sure, he'll never get an Oscar. The message is clear and drearily swagging: this is one Lyne you shouldn't cross, chick.
Indecent Proposal, despite its success (and that had more to do with two generations of women's fantasies about Robert Redford than anything else), was a shockingly inept film and probably the least adult "adult" film since some wise person took the toys away from Ken Russell. But when a great or even good director occasionally gets his hands on a dirtysomething, he can still pull something wonderful out of the bag or he could, a while ago.
In 1990, the great John Schlesinger made Pacific Heights a brilliant film, with a minute amount of sex and a cast that tipped a sly wink to Hitch-watchers: Melanie Griffith, daughter of Tippi Hedren; Hedren herself; and Schlesinger in a walk-on, say-nothing cameo. And a year before this, Harold Becker made the extraordinary Sea Of Love. In this film, 1980s cinema got the third girl in its hat-trick of great heroines; along with Ripley of Aliens and Sarah of Terminator, Helen of Sea Of Love was the first truly three-dimensional (mother, lover, suspected serial killer) big-screen woman for too long. I've said it before (and I'll say it again) but it is strange how often populist, "genre" cinema gives us real women while the "serious" cinema continues to portray them as either enigmatic Madonnas or sex-crazed loons but ciphers, at either speed.
Becker's latest film is Malice. His heroine is not Ellen Helen Barkin (probably the most amazingly sexy and sentient film actress of modern times) but she is a fair (in both senses of the word) substitute: Nicole Kidman. Becker follows Kidman's Law well here: cast her opposite Anyguy, or Anygirl (Dead Calm, Flirting), and she's great; cast her opposite her husband, Whatsisface (Days Of Thunder, Far And Away) and she's shocking. Here she is cast triangularly, like her face, with Bill Pullman and Alec Baldwin; together the three of them comprise the Second Banana equivalent of Pfeiffer Ryder Day-Lewis in The Age Of Innocence. That is, a cast so gifted and attractive that it is hard to imagine a better combo.
But what is wrong with this picture? Basically, the age it was made in definitely not, we may safely say, an age of innocence. The twist that comes at the end is so silly that it reduces to high camp all the previous tension which has come before; the film noir equivalent of Divine eating that stuff in Pink Flamingoes. Though the actual sex in Malice is minimal, the "secret" which we are not meant to tell anyone is para-sexual and as everyone knows, that's one of the worst sorts of sexual there is. And so you come out saying not "What a great film!" but "What an unbelievable twist!"
And surely the mark of a first-rate thriller is that you want to see it again and again, even after the cat's out of the bag. But Malice is all story and no cinema; not a single image you remember. The plot concerns an elaborate con-trick, but its real target is the audience, and you tend to come out of the cinema feeling as though you haven't been watching a film but instead trying for almost two hours to catch out a particularly irritating compulsive liar. If I want that, I can pick up the phone and call my friends; I certainly don't have to go out for it.
In the 1980s, the word "repeater" was coined to describe films such as Pretty Woman and Ghost, which a good percentage of the audience might go to see time and time again. There should be a word for the sort of film that completely loses all point once the ending is known. Disappointer? Disappearer? Whatever it is, Malice is one of them.
