The news that Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous has won a best-movie Golden Globe does not surprise. One is puzzled, though, that it won in the comedy/musical category, when it is a fine dramatic piece that is also very funny and just happens to contain musical sequences. At any rate, I would have put it ahead of Gladiator, the winner in the drama category.
Based on Crowe’s own experiences before he became a film-maker and made movies such as Say Anything, Singles and the hit Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous tells the story of a precocious high-school kid who, through his own drive and ingenuity, gets to go on the road with a rock band in the heady days of 1973. William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is even younger than he looks, and he looks young — he has a sweet, round, soft baby-face and a fringe that practically screams naivety.
William’s jaunt with a middle-level band called Stillwater will be a kind of coming of age, as he plays junior journalist to their rock ‘n’ roll animals. He is the “enemy”, but who has a greater commitment to the truth? As his observer status erodes, William finds himself drawn into the mad life of a band on the road – and Almost Famous is note-perfect when it comes to observing the dynamics of a group, with its shifting allegiances, sudden tensions and explosive moments. The band-fight scene and the death-defying acid-trip scene are dead right, as are countless other moments and details (though the tour-bus does seem suspiciously clean).
The members of Stillwater are slightly cari-catural, but in the way of men urgently performing their self-elected roles; this is a rock band not entirely confident of its prowess, trying extra-hard to be a rock band. Billy Crudup is attractive and convincing as the charismatic but flawed lead guitarist; it is a pleasure to see him in less torpid a state than he was in in Jesus’ Son. Kate Hudson deserves the Golden Globe she got for her sexy, touching portrayal of Penny Lane, who is not a groupie, oh no, but a “band aid”.
The movie is not as entranced by the rock life as young William is. William’s somewhat suffocating yet sympathetic mother (a bravura performance by Frances McDormand and her tight, twitchy, marvellously ambiguous mouth) provides a different perspective on the action, a point of view outside the hermetically sealed world of a band on tour. This is a triumph of good scriptwriting as well as a triumph of acting, making us like and honour someone we’d also be keen to get away from. In a smaller but pivotal role (the counterweight, in a way, to Mom), Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs. Hoffman always seems to bring an extra little charge to anything he’s in.
Crowe, who wrote as well as directed, delivers the narrative fluidly, juggling our sympathies with consummate skill. These are complex characters, and their complexity emerges with the story; character, in fact, is plot. The humour too is organic. Crowe is a master of warm but unsentimental humanism, qualities with which Almost Famous overflows.
A cookie fortune
Woody Allen Movie Of The Week
Still playing in the minor key of last year’s Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen has neatly tossed together the good-hearted comedy that is Small Time Crooks. He plays a rather dim-witted criminal whose cunning masterplans are surpassed by his wife’s skill at making cookies — and life takes a whole new turn into nouveaux riches. Tracey Ullman plays the wife, an hilarious parvenu desperate to get some culture, and Hugh Grant plays the art dealer who is allegedly going to help her do so. The movie has the simple structure of a morality tale, but into that Allen packs a stream of jokes, often in the form of whining, nagging monologues. The repartee, if that’s not too elevated a word, between Ullman and Allen is particularly enjoyable. And the more slapstick pieces, such as an attempted jewel heist, have a charmingly weary grace. We laugh at and with these people; at their bad taste and pretensions, with them as they deal with their swivelling fortunes. (The bad taste, by the way, is done superbly, by production designer Santo Loquasto and art director Tom Warren.) Sometimes you wonder about Woody the upper-crust sophisticate taking on these trashy crooks, but in matters of the heart he’s on their side — Shaun de Waal
Also Opening This Week
Boys and Girls. Freddie Prinze Jr plays a nerdish engineering student who has a long-distance relationship that doesn’t work and keeps on bumping into Claire Forlani, who has a whole lot of unsatisfactory one-night stands. From these two unfortunate clichés develops a highly suspect, platonic friendship. Prinze is not a bad actor and should graduate to more challenging and less coming-of-age films that contain, ah, sentences that, ah, never seem, ah, to complete, ah, themselves. Forlani looks like a taller, anorexic and less formidable Barbra Streisand but matches her perfectly, apparently, as an egotist. Prinze’s dorm-mate, played by the talented Jason Biggs, has a realistic way of dealing with his suburban angst — he lies about his identity — and Forlani’s mate (Amanda Detmer) has a brief flirtation with — horrors! — lesbianism. But, like most college affairs this one skims along the surface and that’s exactly where it stays. — Neil Sonnekus
Men of Honor is unashamedly based on the life of Carl Brashear and, therefore, gives its own plot away. He was the first African-American to become a United States Navy diver and, later, the first amputee diver in the US Navy in the Forties and Fifties. All it’s about is how Carl (played by the talented Cuba Gooding Jr) had to fight for his right to be what he wanted to be. Standing in his way was one Southern hick racist officer, Leslie Sunday (played by an effective Robert de Niro). The two men’s changing perceptions about each other and their respective love interests, Aunjane Ellis and Charlize Theron, are interesting if slow. But surely this is the stuff of a documentary, because in retrospect all this film is saying is that if you’re black you’ve got to eat twice as much shit to be accepted; and that ‘our” Charlize is one hell of an actress. — NS