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Film Clips
AUGUST 3, 1998:
 DÉJÀ VU. Director Henry Jaglom skates down
the border between profundity and hokum in this exploration of
true love versus compromise. Stephen Dillane and Victoria Foyt
(Jaglom's watery-eyed, appealingly emotive wife, who co-wrote
the screenplay with him) star as a Brit and a Los Angelean who
seem to be natural soulmates, cosmically fated to be together,
and all that jazz. Too bad they're already entrenched in long-term
relationships. Though Jaglom's loose, cinema-verité style
is very much in evidence, he tries hard to make every step of
the romance follow a logical, understandable progression, which
gets to be a problem--he keeps using a nail gun on the kinds of
details where a thumbtack would suffice. (At a key point, Dillane
and Foyt actually exclaim to each other, "You're married!,"
"You have a fiancée!," "You're married!,"
"You have a fiancee!," revealing an embarrassingly wide
rift between cinema-verité and realism.) Then there's the
mystical "surprise" ending, which plays like an episode
of The Twilight Zone, as directed by Fabio. Jaglom may
be an old friend of Orson Welles (in fact, Déjà
Vu appears to be based on a memorable line of dialogue from
Citizen Kane), but an auteur he's not. On the plus side,
it's refreshing how the two jilted characters are rendered so
sympathetically (unlike in Sleepless in Seattle and similar
films), and the charmingly well-aged Vanessa Redgrave livens up
her every scene as a veteran free spirit. --Woodruff
JANE AUSTEN'S MAFIA! This latest venture from writer/director
Jim Abrahams, one of those responsible for bringing us Airplane!
(1980) and The Naked Gun (1988), fails to achieve the level
of satire present in these past successes. This film probably
makes sense if you're 9 years old, when the mere presence of bodily
functions and breasts actually provided some kind of cultural
commentary. Otherwise, Mafia! is but a lame parody consisting
largely of uncritical references to Casino, Showgirls,
and Forrest Gump, among others. A plot was difficult to
discern through the dizzying haze of flatulence, but it seemed
to follow a father (the late Lloyd Bridges) and son (Jay Mohr)
through their involvement with the mob, boobies, and pull-my-finger
jokes. The ending is surprisingly abrupt, but certainly the alternative
(a second puke montage?) is far worse.--Higgins
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Don't let the earnest, tony previews
fool you: This is a terrifying and brutally violent movie. Most
horror movies don't have a fraction of the gore, and anyone who
takes children needs to have his head examined. Naturally, since
this is Steven Spielberg in Oscar mode, it's gore with a higher
purpose: to render the you-are-there reality of World War II,
a historical turning point that most of us do indeed take for
granted. That it does. The plot follows the reluctant efforts
of a captain (Tom Hanks, doing a respectable job although I still
have a hard time taking him seriously) and his small crew (played
by a who's-who list of indy-film actors) to find a young soldier
for P.R. purposes. It's an unlikely premise, but it allows for
a tour through several common locations and situations during
the 1944 campaign to liberate France. The opening scene, which
depicts the troublesome Omaha Beach landing during the invasion
of Normandy, is a stunner: sharp editing, swift hand-held shots,
and gruesome attention to detail make it one of the most arresting
war scenes ever filmed. Over and over, Spielberg dumps the shock
and fear of death in your lap. The movie's furious "war is
hell" action lets up for occasional character development
and ambiguous incidents, which only make the returns to mayhem
that much rougher. Saving Private Ryan's primary fault
is that it's so much more jarring than it is moving; the film
comes considerably closer to experience than to dramatic art.
For some, this imbalance will probably be too much. If you have
no desire to understand how it might actually feel to be in combat,
you're advised to skip it. --Woodruff
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