Tools
dir. John Sayles
Opens Fri Oct 3 at the Metro and Uptown.
As we exited the screening of the new John Sayles film, my friend said to me, "Only two of those six women would make bad mothers: Maggie Gyllenhaal [Jennifer] and Marcia Gay Harden [Nan]. The rest were normal."
"Yes, but all had problems," I said, adding Lili Taylor (Leslie, single and sick of relationships), Mary Steenburgen (Gayle, recovering alcoholic), Daryl Hannah (Skipper, fitness-obsessed), and Susan Lynch (Eileen, part of Boston's close-knit Irish community and unable to conceive) to the list of potentially unfit mothers waiting out the red tape and bureaucracy of adoption in an unidentified Latin American town. It's sad that we have to judge who should have a baby and who shouldn't. Then again, adoption is as much as a crapshoot for the adoptive parent as it is for the adopted baby--neither entity has yet to take form. And that is the heart of Casa de los Babys.
Stranger Personals
Viewers learn about the women solely through their conversations with and about each other. I suspected Harden's Nan, a righteous, awful bitch whose mother raised her with the same tough sense of propriety, would make a wonderful, nurturing mother--but not before originally sharing the rest of the women's opinion that she'd be a child's worst nightmare. Gyllenhaal's Jennifer married while still in college, and at 24 has been through all of the fertility procedures; whether she's here to adopt or to hide from her life is never quite clear. Taylor's Leslie, a quick-witted book editor, doesn't make enough money to raise a child in New York, but that's of little matter to her, because she was raised with little money in the city. Actually, most of the central characters in Casa de los Babys don't matter--there are mothers all over the film, either wanting, relinquishing, or enduring children. A single scene between a Spanish-speaking maid and Eileen, who speaks only English, addresses the universal language of longing and the sense of failure all women may feel whether they manage to become parents or not. In the end the audience is left to wonder what will happen, and I guess that's the point Sayles is trying to make: It's a crapshoot. KATHLEEN WILSON
Taking Sides
dir. István Szabó
Opens Fri Oct 3 at the Metro.
Taking Sides asks the big questions: Can art be separated from politics? Is any given individual responsible for the actions of a society? And is each one of us not guilty, in some way or another, of a crime against humanity? The film involves a celebrated German conductor named Dr. Wilhelm Furtw...ngler (Stellan Skarsg'rd) who was beloved by Hitler, and enjoyed power, prestige, and the pleasures of numerous women during what was for many the worst 12 years of the 20th century.
After the war, the doctor is questioned by Steve Arnold (Harvey Keitel), a major from the American Denazification Committee who is assigned to implicate the conductor in the orgy of evil that consumed central Europe. The doctor claims he is an artist and his duty is only to music, not politics; the American more or less calls him a lying motherfucking Nazi cunt. Neither one moves from his position. The American yells at the German; the German yells at the American.
Taking Sides was written by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote The Pianist. This appears to be the sole reason the film found distribution--like Love the Hard Way, which was released this summer and starred Adrien Brody, it is riding on coattails. CHARLES MUDEDE
Mambo Italiano
dir. Émile Gaudreault
Opens Fri Oct 3 at the Harvard Exit.
The décor at Buca di Beppo takes more of a stab at intelligent humor about Italians than this played-out "comedy" does. The premise, as if it even matters, involves an old-world Italian couple who just "can't get used to this cuckoo American world of ours" and want their two adult children to live with them forever. The plot thins when their son, Angelo (Luke Kirby), falls for his best friend, a sexually confused cop named Nino (Peter Miller), and the should-they-or-shouldn't-they-come-out-of-the-closet conundrum ensues.
Mambo Italiano is aiming for the camp side of the comedy spectrum, but the film plays out more like a bad prime-time TV show than anything that'll make you laugh--ironically or not. Worst of all, it seems only Angelo's papa, Gino (Paul Sorvino), is able to keep his accent together throughout the film--the rest of the cast seem to forget at times that they're supposed to be in a bad Italian American situation comedy and not a bad just-your-average-American one. JENNIFER MAERZ
New Suit
dir. François Velle
Opens Fri at the Metro.
Robert Altman's film The Player is a dark comedy about how the movie industry is not bothered in the least by its lack of respect for writers. The reason the movie works is not because of its scathing criticisms of the Hollywood machine, but because there's an honesty in the satire that makes you believe Altman is capturing how Hollywood really thinks.
New Suit is also a comedy about the conflict between business and art, but it is totally dishonest and ultimately slight. An idealistic screenwriter (Jordan Bridges) moves to L.A., where a beautiful agent wannabe (Marisa Coughlan) takes a liking to his nice-guy naiveté. Soon enough, he's a bottom-rung player on the Hollywood scene. Frustrated by the lack of good scripts that he sees being passed around town, while noticing that nobody ever seems to really read them to begin with, he pretends he's read the hot new script. Can you see where this is going? Yep, a bidding war erupts for this fictional script, leading him to a moral dilemma of no import.
Loosely based on the fable "The Emperor's New Clothes," New Suit thinks it's skewering the hypocrisies of Hollywood, but in actuality, the movie is just as deluded as the people it's sending up. Altman made The Player based on his experiences in Hollywood. This movie is based entirely on inexperience. ANDY SPLETZER
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