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At the
Movies Dangerous lives
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
(adapted from Chris Fuhrmans popular novel) has been praised as a
thoughtful, growing-up-in-the-70s story incorporating humorous elements,
but it fails to transcend its Catholic school clichés. Its most
imaginative element is the action animation, whose developments roughly
parallel the boys lives, giving their adventures the flavor of comic book
heroes. In these sequences the arch-villain is the schools repressed math
teacher, Sister Assumpta (Jodie Foster), whose grim asceticism was mistaken by
some reviewers for true piety.
The high jinks of the two boys (Kieran Culkin and Emile Hirsch)
include the stealing of a huge statue of St. Agatha, though the school is
called Immaculate Conception. Jena Malone is affecting as a girl with a dark
secret, whom they both have a crush on, and Culkin writes the poem with which
Hirsch impresses her, a good touch.
The boys adventures turn dangerous, leading to an
emotionally sobering ending, but the movie leaves too many loose ends. What I
found especially disappointing is that it makes no significant use, positive or
negative, of its supposed Catholic framework.
The big action hit of the season is
Steven Spielbergs Minority Report, set in the year 2054. A lot of
fascinating hardware and software has been designed for this future world, in
which crime in Washington, D.C., has been virtually eliminated through the
department of pre-crime, an operation directed by John Anderton (Tom Cruise).
Pre-crime relies on Pre-Cogs, beings who float in a tank and can predict when
and by whom a crime will be committed. I didnt understand the process but
was impressed when Cruise stood in front of a blank video screen and gracefully
moved evidence around with his hands. Once he has the information he needs, the
excitement becomes more conventional as Anderton races to get to the murder
location just seconds before the event occurs.
Spielberg presents such haunting images that you may find yourself
more involved than you want. Anderton is passionately convinced of the
rightness of pre-crime because he believes pre-crime could have saved his young
son, a loss that occurred just months before it went into operation. But when
the system produces a billiard ball with his own name on it as a future
murderer, he runs for his life.
In his desperation, Anderton kidnaps Agatha, one of the Pre-Cogs
(Samantha Morton), who leads him to investigate a long-closed murder case and
tries to get him to understand that the system he has served is not perfect.
Agatha sees images of a drowned woman and a man in a black ski mask, clues to a
mystery that concerns Anderton as well as herself. Above all, she insists that
he does not need to commit the murder that has been predicted; he still has a
choice.
Minority Report is based on a short story of Philip K.
Dick, whose bleak fiction was also the source of Blade Runner and
Total Recall. Spielberg shares some of Dicks paranoia, but
turns it largely into entertainment. Nevertheless, Spielbergs movie is a
timely reminder of the primacy of free will during these days of powerfully
invasive government.
Easily the best of the recent films
is John Sayles Sunshine State. An independent moviemaker who
manages to get his work fairly well distributed, Sayles always takes an
in-depth look at a particular environment, draws characters who are credibly
complex, and reveals a deeply humanist strain in the way the sociopolitical
implications of his narrative are unraveled.
Here his subject is Delrona Beach (south of Jacksonville), a de
facto segregated, seacoast town that has attracted the attention of greedy
developers, understood principally through an in-depth look at the history of
two families, the Temples, who are white, and the Stokes, who are black.
Sayles civics lesson is laced with humor; Sunshine State even
has a hilarious Greek chorus as Murray Silver (Alan King), a millionaire
developer, pontificates to his golfing partners about what a paradise they have
created.
Although Sayles gets uniformly fine performances from his large
cast, Edie Falco makes the most vivid impression as Marly Temple, the wryly
witty manager of her fathers rundown motel-restaurant. Her present
boyfriend is leaving her to pursue his dream of being a professional golfer,
and she is attracted to Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton), a landscape architect
working for a developer who wants to buy the motel in order to demolish it. The
movies most emotional scenes, however, are between the widowed Eunice
Stokes (Mary Alice), an unyieldingly respectable figure in Lincoln Beach, the
middle-class black community, and her beautiful daughter Desiree (Angela
Bassett), who is making her first visit home in 25 years. Desiree, who went
north at 16 after becoming pregnant, is an actress in infomercials, and has
brought her anesthesiologist husband, Reggie Perry (James McDaniel), with
her.
Meanwhile a local pageant, Buccaneer Days, is being launched by
Francine Pickney (Mary Steenburgen), in a marvelous turn as Southern woman at
her worst. She solemnly announces the pageants bogus attractions at the
same time her husband Earl (Gordon Clapp) -- whom she refers to as my
rock-- is trying unsuccessfully to commit suicide.
Sayles sympathy is obviously with Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs), a
longtime activist who wants to get Lincoln Beach to organize against the
developers. But he is never didactic, weaving these and other intriguing
characters in and out of the ongoing action. With its incisive and entertaining
dialogue, wide range of well-acted characters, and avoidance of both suspect
melodrama and pat conclusions, Sunshine State may be Sayles
best picture yet.
Road to Perdition, which drew
huge opening day audiences, is already being talked about as a potential Oscar
winner. Tom Hanks is cast against type as Michael Sullivan, a Depression-era
enforcer for elderly mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), but its emotional
center is the relationship between Sullivan and his son Michael Jr. (Tyler
Hoechlin), who is also the narrator. Director Sam Mendes (American
Beauty) begins with a pretentious prologue in which the 12-year-old boy
stands in front of a large lake and asks, how can one decide if ones
father was a good man?
After a brief scene at home in which Sullivan is established as a
family man who says grace before meals, there is the first set piece, a
boisterous wake at Rooneys home. We see the strong ties between Rooney
and Sullivan, an orphan whom he had brought up, and Newmans rasping voice
and effortless charm are on exhibit as the old man shoots craps with
Sullivans two boys. Young Michael precipitates the action because he saw
his father with a gun and wants to know what his job is. By hiding in his
fathers car he becomes an eyewitness to a scene in which Rooneys
trigger-happy son Connor (Daniel Craig) impulsively murders one of his
fathers lieutenants.
Afraid that the boy might talk, Connor tries to set Sullivan up to
be killed, and rushes to finish off the son himself. He arrives at the Sullivan
home ahead of Michael Jr., shoots the mother -- and in his confusion, the
younger brother Peter. When Sullivan returns and discovers the bodies, there is
a cry of horror, and soon the two Michaels are on the road. Hanks looks grimly
bent on revenge, while torn apart by the fear that the boy will follow his
fathers path. Young Michael learns to drive, providing some comic moments
in an otherwise gloomy movie, and continues to read his Lone Ranger
comic book.
Road to Perdition is based on a graphic novel by Max
Allan Collins (who worked for years on Dick Tracy), and Mendes has
deliberately aestheticized all its elements, including most of the killings.
His interest in them seems like that of Harlen Maguire (Jude Law), a sinister
character added by screenwriter David Self. A journalist-assassin whose real
love is photographing the dead, Maguire stalks Sullivan and his son all through
the second half of the film. In similar fashion, the director gives more
attention to Thomas Newmans symphonic score than to the natural sounds in
the background of the action.
There is immense talent at work here, but it remains a movie in
which Perdition is just a town in Illinois. Conrad L. Halls burnished
interiors and weather-dominated outdoor scenes exist too much for their own
sake. The constant presence of water -- lapping at the lakeside, dripping under
the coffin at the wake, pouring from the skies during a Chicago shootout -- is
simply another component of the films stylization.
Joseph Cunneen, NCRs regular movie reviewer, can
be reached by e-mail at SCUNN24219@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, August 2,
2002
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