The Gab Whisperer

Werth: Hi, Wise!

Wise: Hi, Werth!

Werth: Are you excited for the old classic that's returning to movie theaters this weekend?

Wise: Are you referring to The Evil Dead?

Werth: Yes... and Robert Redford's in a new movie too.

Wise: Oh, The Company You Keep, Redford's latest directorial effort where he plays a former sixties radical with a new identity who goes on the run when reporter Shia Labeouf begins sniffing around his past. 

Werth: Redford's been pretty picky about what film projects he'll do of late. His last trip to the big screen was 2005's stinker Lions for Lambs.

 
Wise: He also kept himself busy off-screen directing a film about the assassination of Lincoln.
 

Werth: One of Redford's films was assassinated in 1974. Directed by Jack Clayton and adapted by Francis Ford Coppola, the third film version of F. Scoot Fitzgerald's Jazz Age bible The Great Gatsby stars Redford as wealthy entrepreneur/con man Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as his long-lost love Daisy Buchanan. Going over the plot feels silly, since I know everyone had to read the book in high school, so instead I'll gab about how the film is as disappointing as a glass of bad bathtub gin.

Wise: There's no such thing as bad bathtub gin, just bad mixer.
 
Werth: I'm going to Charleston around the great books vs. movies debate by saying movies based on iconic literature can be successful if they either nail the visuals that the book evokes or re-imagine them. Gatsby does neither of these things. 

The parties and the people in Fitzgerald's novel are so vivid, that it's shocking to see that cinematographer Douglas Slocombe shot everything with a bland, fuzzy wash that makes the entire picture look like a Seventies Olan Mills family portrait. Perhaps Slocombe was going for the idea that Fitzgerald's world was dreamlike, but what he winds-up with is a film that lacks visual depth. 

The party scenes shot on the finest lawns of Newport, Rhode Island, in particular, lack color and energy and evoke forced fun rather than a decade that is burning itself up with the ecstasy of champagne and short skirts. 

Floating about in designs by Ralph Lauren and Oscar-winner Theoni V. Aldredge, Redford and Farrow use their best assets to bring Gatsby and Daisy to life, but their screen personae get in the way of fully realizing Fitzgerald's doomed lovers. Farrow captures the child-like, dreamy quality of Daisy, but she doesn't bring the necessary mercenary flapper mentality to the screen. 

Redford looks the part of an unbelievably handsome man searching for something he lost, but Redford's frank, earthy qualities that made him a superstar in the late Sixties and Seventies clash with the calculating, dishonest enigma that is supposed to be Gatsby.

Wise: Gatsby's no Sundance Kid.

Werth: The film does have some bright spots. Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker is sultry and sensuous, like a frosty temptress who might melt you, but never herself. And Karen Black is perfect as Myrtle Wilson, her imperfect beauty and innate cheapness making this gas station mistress as tragic a figure as she should be. 

Clayton gets the visuals right for the Valley of Ashes and the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelberg, capturing elements of the fantastic that exist in the minds of Fitzgerald's readers. But the green light at the end of Daisy's dock isn't bright enough to make this film the definitive depiction of The Great Gatsby. We'll see how Baz Luhrmann does with it.
 

Wise: Redford had better luck directing and playing the title role in The Horse Whisperer (1998).  As Tom Booker, a strong, silent type with a penchant for healing traumatized equines, he's called upon by Annie MacLean (Kristin Scott Thomas), a New York editor who believes that his methods are the only chance her daughter Grace (a young Scarlett Johansson) has to recover from a serious riding accident.  

Annie and Grace move to Montana with Grace's troubled horse Pilgrim and embark on a journey of self-discovery.  Along the way and with Annie's help, Tom begins to address his own past traumas . 

Werth: Did he not get the pony he always wanted when he was a little boy?

Wise: The film never quite finds the correct balance between Tom's cowboy stoicism and the more emotional drama of Annie and Grace.  Still, there are some great performances, particularly by Redford who epitomizes male tortured beauty.  

Kristin Scott Tomas is fantastic in whatever she does, although she's hampered here by an unfortunate, although period appropriate haircut, that in retrospect makes her look less like hard-edged career woman and more like a Wilson Phillips superfan. 

Werth: Hold on for one more day, Kristin.

Wise: Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest have small, yet pivotal roles in the film as part of Tom's extended family.  Scarlett Johansson doesn't have much to do besides look sullen and haunted which she does adequately, but whenever the script calls for more emotion, she begins to perform something more like a Theda Bara impersonator, although without the subtlety. 

The main reasons to see the film are Redford and Scott Thomas's performances, plus the gorgeous cinematography by Robert Richardson who captures both the harsh angularity of New York as well as the gorgeous yet forbidding Montana landscape.  The Horse Whisperer isn't one of Redford's best, but it does have an addictive quality to it that makes it a familiar pleasure to return to.  

Werth: Kind of like returning each week for a brand new Film Gab.

Wise: Wild horses couldn't keep me away, although too much Scarlett Johanssen might. 

 

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Gab But Were Afraid to Ask

Wise: Howdy, Werth!  Are you excited about Woody Allen's latest, To Rome With Love?  

Werth: Am I? It's going to be so much fun watching Alec Baldwin stutter and soliloquize, and I don't mean his performance on David Letterman.  

Wise: Woody Allen is one of our greatest filmmakers, responsible for some of the best films of the last forty years.  

Werth: There are a few stinkers.  But you're right.  Whatever mistakes Mr. Allen may have made in his personal life, he is truly one of the great directors of American cinema. One of my favorites is 1984's Broadway Danny Rose. The film opens with a gaggle of comics kvetching at the Carnegie Deli when one comic relates the funniest "Danny Rose" story.

Wise: Does it open with, "Two Presbyterians, a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar?"

Werth: Danny Rose (Allen) is a former Catskills comic who is a personal manager for a wild array of variety acts: a blind xylophonist, a one-legged tap-dancer, and the Jascha Heifetz of musical wine glasses.

Wise: Sounds like one of your cocktail parties.

Werth: Danny's best act is a mediocre Italian crooner, Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte) who is getting ready to sing his signature song "Agita" for a big performance that could bring him back to the big time, courtesy of Milton Berle.

Wise: Uncle Miltie knows quality.

Werth: Lou can't give his best performance unless his mistress Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow) is present, so Danny gives his client the personal touch by driving out to New Jersey to get his squeeze and bring her to the show. Only Tina isn't so anxious to come.

Wise: A mediocre Italian crooner? Who could blame her?

Werth: So Danny pulls out all the stops to convince Tina to come see Lou—and in the process winds-up being chased by hitmen through the wilds of New Jersey after he is mistakenly fingered as Tina's boyfriend.

Wise: That's happened to me a couple times.

Werth: The movie is a nostalgic joy—with amazing, seemingly real characters who populate a performance culture long gone. Mia Farrow is a revelation—practically unrecognizable as a gum-chewing, big-haired Jersey girl who believes you should stick it to the world before it sticks it to you. 

And Allen does something unique in the annals of his neurotic characters: he comes off as lovable. The whiff of the judge-y intellectual is nowhere to be seen in Danny. He is a hard-working, eager beaver who's willing to go to the mat for his clients, but who never seems to get his reward in the end. The whole film is shot in black and white with Allen's intimate, cunningly casual camerawork making this world feel like a piece of verite, while at the same time cloaking it in the nostalgia of Italian novelty songs. 

It's a love-letter written to the by-gone era of variety showmanship, by a man who bridged the gap between that era and modern comedy... and someone who can appreciate the genius of a gunfight in a helium balloon warehouse.

Wise: In The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, an inept waitress in Depression-era New Jersey stuck in a loveless marriage to Monk (Danny Aiello).  To escape her dreary life, she retreats to the local movie house where she spends hours fantasizing about the glamorous lives of the characters onscreen, especially Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), a dashing archaeologist in the titular film.  

After a particularly disastrous day at the diner, Cecilia is fired, but instead of going home and facing her husband's abuse, she returns to the theater.  The character Tom recognizes her, and after a brief conversation, he steps off the screen to join her in real life.  

The film, bereft a major character, comes to a chaotic halt, but Tom and Cecilia embark on a romantic adventure in New York, only to be interrupted by Gil Shepherd, the actor who plays Tom (also Jeff Daniels), who insists that Tom return to the confines of the picture.  In the end, Cecilia must decide between the fictional world of Tom and factual world of Gil. 

Werth: I pick the world with Zoe Caldwell as The Countess!

Wise: At first, the overt fantasy may feel uncharacteristic of Allen, but as the film progresses, it begins to seem barely a step beyond the usual golden-tinged nostalgia that sweetens so much of his work.  The breezy pace of the dialogue helps prevent the plot from running aground, although it's the performances that really make this picture shine.  

Edward Hermann and Hollywood vet Van Johnson plays denizens of the cornball film-within-a-film with a playful orotundity, while Allen regular Dianne Wiest has a ball playing a hooker attempting to seduce straight-laced Tom.  

But it is Farrow who does most of the heavy lifting here, crafting a performance that is both melancholy and gilded by the madcap pluck characteristic of the films she adores.  

Werth: He shoulda never left that girl... for her daughter.

Wise: Daniels also turns in fine work in his dual roles, creating two distinct characters that happen to be the same person.  Allen began shooting the film with Michael Keaton in the roles, but after a week he decided that Keaton's performance felt too contemporary and replaced the actor with Daniels.  Daniels earned a nomination for Best Actor, nimbly treading among his early comic scenes before arriving at his devastating final one. 

Werth: And if all of this isn't enough Woody Allen for you, Film Gabbers, Annie Hall is showing at Film Forum starting today. So enjoy Woodypalooza!

Wise: And come back next week for more Film Gab...

even if we use words like "Woodypalooza."