Andrew Worsdale : Movie of the week
Love and Death on Long Island, a wryly observed romantic comedy, stars John Hurt as fuddy-duddy writer Giles De’ath. He works with a fountain pen; eats his meals at the same time every day; doesn’t have a television; hasn’t seen a movie in 20 years (he calls them “the pictures”) and he’s tweedy, widowed and de-sexualised.
But one day when he accidentally buys a ticket to Hotpants College II (he wanted to see an EM Forster film) he becomes obsessed with the teenage star, Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley of Beverly Hills 90210 fame).
He haunts video stores, renting all the star’s previous titles (initially not realising that you actually need a TV set as well as a VCR to watch movies at home) and even assembles a scrapbook of cuttings from teenage fan magazines.
But infatuation from a distance isn’t enough and De’ath flies to Long Island to stalk his prey.
In the beginning one sympathises with his mission and may be amused by it. There’s some logical madness to his quest. But the film is far too clever to play a melodramatic or sappy card and by the climax one’s not quite sure if he’s just a selfish though likeable old codger who, through his pursuit of an ideal, has inadvertently stumbled into the 20th century.
The piece, adapted from British film critic Gilbert Adair’s novel, is beautifully handled by director Richard Kwietnioski, who is known for his short- film work. He started out as an experimental “queer” film-maker and among his credits are The Ballad of Reading Gaol with Quentin Crisp narrating the Oscar Wilde poem about life behind the bars of a Victorian prison.
Another award-winning short, Alfalfa, reworked the Queen’s English into an alternative alphabet of gay slang: C is for clone, I is for invert and R is for rim, etc. The film deals with language and the witty nuances of meaning implicit in words that only gay people grasp immediately.
Another short of his, Actions Speak Louder than Words, had six deaf performers devising staged pieces based on their experience of the intersection between gay and deaf cultures, and the highly politicised nature of both. It includes a beginner’s guide to sexual signing.
What unites Kwietnioski’s early work is its heavy emphasis on formal experimentation. Most of the films work as collages, with optical effects, titles whirling across the screen and an imaginative use of colour intercut with black and white.
With Love and Death on Long Island he has moved into the mainstream. The cinematography by Oliver Curtis is muted and realistic, the score, by Richard Grassby-Lewis, is unobtrusive and perfectly integrated. Kwietnioski acknowledges the move to a less experimental form.
“I had to do a lot of very peculiar research for this project,” he told Hollywood Online recently. “I went to my video store and rented every single Porky’s film, and I saw lots of things with titles like Lemon Popsicle and The Last American Virgin and discovered they’re actually quite intriguing at a certain level, in the way that genre films can be trying to do something without quite realising it.”
The story echoes Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, which had a dying German composer falling in love with a young Italian boy while on holiday in Venice. “The writer Adair almost always takes a story that already exists and does something different with it so people have said, ‘Is the film a sort of rock’n’roll Death in Venice?'” Kwietnioski says, “But I wanted to make something that people would get even if they’d never heard of Death in Venice.”
In Luchino Visconti’s film of the Mann novella the composer’s final glimpse of his love object happens on the crowded Venetian beaches, while in Love and Death the first meeting between Giles and Ronnie occurs on the deserted beaches of Long Island. A sense of yearning for lost youth is shared by both films, despite the geographical differences.
It’s a deft and surprisingly intelligent piece of work that is perfectly dry and unassailably touching. What’s more, Hurt, in one of the finest performances of his career, is perfectly droll in the lead, turning the erstwhile old fogey’ into a three-dimensional character. In spite of his unnatural tunnel vision it’s impossible not to like the man and feel genuinely touched by his transformation through irrational love.
The film is an examination of popular culture (the notion of art versus mindless entertainment), a buddy picture and a “fish out of water” story, but it doesn’t take any cheap shots. Kwietnioski’s style might be too dry for some but it is imbued with deep insight and a vibrant, heartfelt sense of humour.
He should be welcomed into the mainstream with open arms.
Also opening this week
Jackie Brown. Only four people die by violence during the course of Quentin Tarantino’s surprise film, where character is everything. He chooses to adapt Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, a novel about complicated scams set in the world of minor-league gun-runners and uses the unfashionable southern Los Angeles districts with a pungent authenticity. And by changing the skin colour of the main character from white to black, he is able to saturate the film with the Seventies soul-music sensibility appropriate to the character of Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), a flight attendant in her mid-40s. In many respects this is a chamber piece, a portrait of unsuccessful minor criminals (Michael Keaton, Michael Bowen, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda and Robert de Niro co-star), but its intimacy allows Tarantino to show that there is more to him than flashy stunts, smart dialogue and a feel for the zeitgeist. – Richard Williams
Mr Magoo. The cartoon series created in 1949 comes to life in this inept comedy with bald-pated Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling near-sighted millionaire. He gets involved in trying to recover an enormous ruby stolen from a museum. The lead villainess (Kelly Lynch) is a ruthless kung-fu ace. (The movie is directed by Stanley Tong, who helmed many of Jackie Chan’s movies.) But the writing is limp and the jokes unfunny. The creator of the original, Chuck Jones, who based the character on his elderly next-door neighbour, must be horrified by the results. – Olivia Strange
US Marshals is a kind of sequel to The Fugitive, and at times a blatant rip-off. This high-octane action picture has Tommy Lee Jones returning as Federal Marshal Sam Gerard. This time he’s on the trail of a state department covert operative (played with energy by Wesley Snipes) who, during a routine assignment near the United Nations, is forced to kill two other agents in self- defence. He’s set up as a fall guy but manages to escape after the federal jetliner he’s being transported on crashes. Filled with many of the same gags andset- pieces of the 1993 film, it is still a decent-enough thriller and director Stuart Baird keeps a firm and assured hand on all the derring-do. There are some nice cameos from Irene Jacob as Snipes’s girlfriend, Kate Nelligan as Jones’s boss and Robert Downey Jnr as a state department agent. It’s a formula, but it works. – Andrew Worsdale