An Unusual Place To Be

Much as we may try to do something about it at times, we are who we are. Just as the people in James L. Brooks films are all exactly who they are the first time we see them. And so much of the time they’re trying to be something more than that. They have no choice but to deal with the world, after all, which doesn’t always know what to make of them. His characters are messy, which they need to be in that world, and the way he freely examines who they are through all that messiness makes it clear that he has an undeniable love for almost all of them, no matter how desperate and screwed up they seem to be. Maybe they’re all just lonely, no matter how many other people surround them. They’re always very much his creation but the best examples feel real, as real as the busy newsroom of BROADCAST NEWS still feels. Through the way he portrays these people and that world it feels clear that he knows who they are, even if he hasn’t figured out all the answers that they’re looking for any more than they have, any more than we have. Because the thing is, we want things to be the way we want them to be. And that’s not the way it is right now. Maybe the best we can hope for is progress as we find our way through and try to make any changes happen, overcoming some of those obstacles we place in our own way and try not to get too bogged down in things like fear and regret. Maybe I’m better now than I was a few years or a decade ago, even as there’s still so much to worry about. I’m still trying to be better. I still sometimes need to convince myself to believe in the possibility of good things happening if I help make them happen.

As for the film that is BROADCAST NEWS, as far as I’m concerned this is the one that Brooks got right more than any of the others. Even if we don’t know all the mechanics of the news world these people work in, we understand who they are and it all feels totally genuine. I’ve wondered if part of the incentive of making the film was to explore the world of television journalism in a way that was believable unlike THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW which Brooks was one of the main creative forces of and which, great as it still might be, never managed to seem like an actual newsroom. Not that anyone ever cared. Of course, for all I know it’s exactly what putting on a local Midwest news show in the ‘70s was like but I doubt it. So BROADCAST NEWS, released at Christmas 1987, was an attempt to actually explore these people who interested Brooks so much at that moment in time, when few things in journalism felt as prestigious as the network evening news and something like CNN was there but hadn’t yet taken over the way it would or even when a network news show was actually about news and not something like a promo for a film being released by the same corporation or a weekly murder show. Those things can be compulsively watchable but, of course, the character of Aaron Altman would hate me for saying that. Please don’t tell him.

When local news anchorman Tom Grunick (William Hurt) meets network news producer Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) after she gives a speech at a seminar they’re immediately attracted to each other but when he comes clean to her about how little he really knows about the news he reports on she becomes cold towards him, only to learn shortly after that he’s accepted a position as correspondent with the Washington bureau she works at. Jane’s best friend is network correspondent Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks) who is extremely intelligent but also pines for her even as their relationship seems so easy. When Tom starts work his lack of intellect means that he doesn’t exactly fit in but his ease on air and the way he delivers the news makes him increasingly popular with the network and as his position continues to grow Jane becomes more conflicted about her own attraction to him while Aaron, learning about possibly budget cuts to come, starts to become worried about losing both his job and Jane all at once.

Still rewatchable, still close to perfect, BROADCAST NEWS is like a warm bath to return to no matter how many times you’ve seen it and yet what the film is warning about makes it all feel darker and sadder today than it ever has. If it ever seemed too mild a portrayal of the media, a calmer younger sibling to NETWORK, it doesn’t anymore. It does what only the best films do. It grows. It changes. It changes as we change and grow older, seeing the characters for all their flaws making them less likable than we thought at first until we circle back around and finally understand how much we really are like some of them. It’s a film where you wake up one day and realize how much of it is true. I still feel this, no matter how many times I watch it. After all these years, it’s clear that BROADCAST NEWS remains the best James L. Brooks film as well as one of the best films of the late ‘80s, the purest expression by the writer-director (along with his collaborators; certainly Polly Platt’s name in the credits jumps out now) of what he wants to say about people and the world they want to be a part of with seemingly unlimited pages of the best dialogue ever. The film was immediately, obviously great when it first opened. It’s gotten better as the years have passed. It’s funnier. It’s sadder. The characters seem deeper, richer, the message feels sharper as it feels more desperate to be watching it right now with everything around us. What the film does in showing them who they are deep down makes it about people fighting with their intelligence to fit with what the world wants them to be and the actors are fully a part of this, giving some of their best performances while living up to the exacting quality of the material which is all in the service of asking the key question of how important it is to have someone whose main talent is being good on television with no other significant qualities. And how that affects our own perception of what it causes to happen.

Brooks is exploring the idea of what television represents and how we respond to it but opening the film with a look at the main characters as kids makes it clear how much it’s really about them, allowing for a few broad laughs but it also makes the point in showing what they always were and where they were going to end up, that it was all inevitable and they’re not going to change who they are. The way they clash and sometimes even make sense together helps to make them more believable as they face off and challenge each other to decide who is more wrong than the other. All this makes BROADCAST NEWS one of the best romantic comedies ever as well as containing the best characters in a romantic comedy ever, always unique, always aware of their shortcomings, knowing that none of these stories can possibly end just because the lead couple make up, kiss and the credits roll. The film always knows that these people are just trying their best even at their worst and Brooks clearly loves how flawed they are along with how they question themselves. The only person who doesn’t question himself is the one in charge of the whole news bureau, the one who only seems to care that being a good boss is about intimidation. He’s the worst person in the film and when he can’t intimidate someone anymore, he’s powerless. Just as it should be. Just like we should remember sometimes.

Brooks is so clearly fascinated by the minutiae of all this, even as he keeps the focus on the people and why they’re this way, why they’re attracted to this world of journalism, which goes beyond politics and the simple reporting of the news. It’s what sets Tom Grunick apart from them at first but it’s also what sets him on the road to success beyond what any of them have been able to achieve. He’s a journalist who’s not really a journalist, let alone one who knows anything about ethics and if he doesn’t know how the profession really operates, he clearly knows how the world works and what it really cares about. He believes in what it can all be, just in his own way, knowing how to play the moment in a way that also helps him in the long game. Maybe the people already there at the Washington bureau think they know how things work but he always seems to know what he’s doing and how that affects others. It’s all about the performance to him and what he knows is to make the story he’s reporting on about him and the emotion he's feeling where he’s always the main character.

Sensing what Tom might represent almost from the start, Aaron Altman is defensive about it and he can’t seem to be anything else, as if he started off thinking that being the smartest one in the room was all you ever needed and even as he knows the truth can’t entirely walk away from that idea because if his intelligence doesn’t matter then nothing does. The basic Albert Brooks character, so perfect in the films he directs himself, now plays as a little abrasive in what is a softer story but even this makes sense, less likable than he should be just as the more likable Tom is ruthless at what he wants but knows to smile the whole time he does it. Aaron doesn’t have the X factor of camera presence that his rival does and even when he mocks Tom’s use of alliteration at one point it’s hard not to think that even the alliteration in his own name always sounds slightly awkward no matter how many times you hear it. Great for reporting the news but just not great for television, he’ll always feel like he needs to prove himself and the way he tries to do this with no one else in the room while the special report is going on without him is just about my favorite moment in the whole film. Tom is the one who correctly believes that what makes him successful is making news he reports on not about the information but the performance, it’s the only way to get people to care about whatever it is, making the story he reports on a tale of pure emotion where he’s the lead character. Through this, it feels like people in the media took Aaron’s sarcastic “Let’s never forget, we’re the real story” to heart in subsequent years and simply followed Tom’s lead.

Caught between them without realizing it, Jane is the beating brain of the film, always wanting to make the rules for the room and setting her own schedule down to the microsecond, including her ritual of crying in the morning when no one is around. Jane always wants to be the one in control and all those details make her what may be Brooks’s best creation ever in how she’s written, how she reacts to people, never wanting to let them off the hook if they’re not following the rules that she’s laid down in her own head. Her relationship with Aaron is like a double act, everyone in the office probably knows about them, and it’s almost like the romance part of what they have isn’t necessary. But of course it is. She gets her pleasure from the job along with her gleeful geekiness in things like noticing the ‘wrong missile graphic’ in a competitor’s report and she knows that there’s nothing she could ever be as good at which makes her unable to do the math at how much she’s drawn to someone who doesn’t live by any of it.

But to go along with the screwball feeling that comes out of these personalities, the film never loses sight of the fact that it is a comedy, not even when all this causes pain. The best moments, particularly the race to finish that piece at the last minute, provide the rush of what this job can be, as if to Jane and Aaron if there isn’t that stress, it can’t really be news. From the famous Joan Cusack run to get the tape to the control room which is a tremendous display of physical brilliance to the sheer interplay between the various characters trying to figure out just what Jane’s relationship with Tom really is and the highlight of Aaron’s disastrous night as anchor is the best possible payoff to what he wants. It’s all a joy, with the rhythm of the incessantly memorable Bill Conti score always ticking away through the emotions. The depth of the film is knowing what it’s like to be inside someone’s head, be more connected to them than you ever thought possible, feeling that attraction to them while avoiding the truth that it doesn’t always go together. Brooks understands these people deep down just as he also understands what keeps them apart.

The canny structure to the script is dictated by the characters as well, wisely introducing them as adults away from what will become the main location and once the story settles down in D.C. is always about the decidedly non-tourist spots of the location shooting, not counting the glow of the Jefferson Memorial during Tom and Jane’s date, add to this, they keep away from those places and only go to where they know, the “place near the thing we went that time” as Aaron puts it in one of the films best examples of shorthand between two people. But it’s also Brooks’ direction that feels so intricate, the sort that all too often gets easily dismissed since this is merely A Film About People Talking but something like his staging of the party while moving from one point of view to another is so elegant in its clarity and how it moves from one section of the party to another is undeniable. And the long stretch detailing the special report anchored by Tom gives the film several of the best split diopter shots ever, joined together to show Tom and Jane joined together, the visual representation of the great sex Tom is talking about no even knowing about her finger hovering over the button connecting to him on the floor, practically caressing it. Brooks was the one director that year of a Best Picture nominee not to get a nomination himself, the year that THE LAST EMPEROR mostly swept things, even though cinematographer Michael Ballhaus did get a nomination and together the two make each shot of a piece with each other, all flowing together beautifully. Brooks’s plotting in his script goes perfectly with how he directs it all, confident in the staging of scenes and how he lets the pauses make the film settle down when mere behavior overtakes things and it can’t just rush through moments anymore. You feel this sense of craft through the way each of the sections of the film are willing to take their time to just have the characters exist, especially when it stops to have Glen Roven and Marc Shaiman perform the new news theme, where the film seems like it’s not doing anything but it’s really doing everything and is simply enjoying itself.

Watching the film again now, I found myself thinking about Tom more than ever, whether he’s just a nice guy with his own take on things or something worse. Back in the nineties when Entertainment Weekly ran an article with the headline, “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” it was Tom Grunick I thought of thanks to Aaron’s big speech about what he represents, very aware that each man could each be the Devil in his own specific way, even as such an idea seems so quaint now. On this viewing I found myself asking, is Tom a sociopath or is he just good on television? These days, is there a difference? If he were the former, he probably wouldn’t be so insecure around Jane at the start, even if no one believes him. When he does what he does in cutting together his date rape piece, he doesn’t know it’s anything wrong. He approaches everything he does, whether his work on air or sex after hours with the same amount of confidence and maybe gets uncertain about what he knows but the level of neurosis displayed by Jane and Aaron is something totally foreign to him. And his immediate affection for Jane feels genuine, maybe because she’s the only one who sees right through him, as if he thinks that somehow it might make him better. But it’s clear that he can never change that much. More than that it’s like he sees the way things are going and how he can be a part of it, staying likable on the surface and a total blank underneath, even if he only partly understands why. Aaron sometimes seems like he doesn’t know how to be likable but he’s smart, he gets the job done and knows how important his job is. What Tom knows is that the media reports what it wants and there’s no reason he shouldn’t be the one to deliver the message. The film isn’t about what the message is as much as it’s asking about who delivers that message, the answer of which can be turned into something insidious.

When Jane gives a speech early on it quickly turns into her trying to connect with an auditorium filled with local broadcasters who barely care warns of this and feels a little too real right now, like someone from Generation X (like myself) trying to convince someone from Generation Z even some millennials (like all those weird young people) how important the movies are. How important all sorts of things are. Trying to convince them how important those feelings are that can make such work great. Going through her notecards reading, The Danger, The Hope, The Dream, The Question. They might all mean the same thing. “THIS IS IMPORTANT TO ME!” Janes screams at Aaron, as if realizing for the first time that her feelings can’t be programmed on a schedule the way she always thought. “How do you like that. I buried the lede,” Aaron says himself when proclaiming his love. When your feelings get in the way, doing the job you’re so good at suddenly doesn’t seem as important. Writer-director Brooks understands these people are feeling deep down and what keeps them apart and it makes them so genuine right from the first instant they appear so when the layoffs come, it’s like we’re getting to see the last episode of a long-running series we just tuned in for. It feels like a film made by someone who knew that the end of a certain way of doing things in this world was coming and one thing that stood out to me on this viewing was how the word ‘layoff’ isn’t used as much as the much blunter ‘firing’ when all those people are let go from the Washington bureau. The language has changed to sell the reality just as Tom Grunick would want it to be. The technology used to produce the news has changed by now, the truth under it all hasn’t.

At the end the three main characters are the same people they always were, just older and their relationships keep spinning while everything else in the world moves on. And it’ll all keep going for as long as it goes, past the end credits, up to now when these questions are still being asked. With this film, Brooks is asking questions more important than he ever thought to ask again. Later Brooks films (specifically SPANGLISH and HOW DO YOU KNOW; as of this writing, I’m still waiting to see ELLA McCAY) are never uninteresting but feel like the work of someone who was trying to figure out what the film was about while making it and they never quite seem part of the real world. This one does, as much as their behavior becomes a specific look at it all. It’s what makes it feel true, it’s what makes it hurt. It’s what makes it this good. The technology used to deliver the message has changed by now but the truth under it all hasn’t. We’re still screwed up, after all. That was inevitable. BROADCAST NEWS ends with two of the characters agreeing to be at work together and two of them operating still as friends away from it. Which one will matter more in the long run goes unspoken.

William Hurt finds the way to play someone who isn’t smart but make people believe he is, the perfect way to trick people and pulls off the perfect balance of not revealing how much he’s working the system in all this, just about the strongest use of his leading man persona that he ever achieved. Albert Brooks is the ideal casting for this version of his own persona, at least partly himself (or, at least, who we think he is) to display all that desperate arrogance so there’s not a false note shown the whole way through, going for the abrasiveness but letting down that veil when he needs to. Holly Hunter is the one who’s the revelation, with only RAISING ARIZONA and a few others behind her at this point, and she is remarkable, putting a spin on deceptively simple lines of dialogue that you never saw coming and so much more just in her body language, the way she flinches when Aaron professes his love to her as if she’s thinking, please don’t ruin what we have that was always unspoken. Whole volumes could be written just on what she does without saying anything in this film which is always a remarkable thing to observe. It’s an excellent cast, all natural and unique like Robert Prosky and Lois Chiles plus the great Joan Cusack is especially good as Jane’s assistant, a year before her first Supporting Actress nomination for WORKING GIRL, but she deserved one for here too. Peter Hackes, who plays the network executive in charge of the bureau, was mostly a correspondent himself and here plays someone so colorless that he can’t seem to say anything in a genuine way, all done with a hollow, colorless style that makes him perfect to play such an empty person. To single someone else out, I can’t help but fixate on the presence of Frank Doubleday, best known as Romero in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, here playing the role of the mercenary interviewed by Brooks for a story and how he serves as the bridge between these two films that I love so much. And, of course, Jack Nicholson, the big star who is mostly kept off camera and usually seen on monitors, taking the moment to consider what he’s just seen after Tom’s tear but when he walks into the room to play the role of the big star finally all too happy to meet the man he can tell will be his successor one day.

Once a long time ago I asked a friend who worked at News 4 New York about the big plot turn in BROADCAST NEWS involving that extra camera angle to catch Tom’s tear rolling down his face. Was it something he was surprised by? He replied that he caught the use of another camera angle in Tom Grunick’s date rape story but didn’t think of it as a plot point so much as just one of those movie things that brushes past a small inaccuracy. This could open up the question of why Holly Hunter’s character didn’t catch it at first herself but never mind. I’m sure that there are any number of things in BROADCAST NEWS that don’t have much to do with the reality of a DC news office in the ‘80s but so much of it feels right that it doesn’t matter either. The ‘seven years later’ epilogue makes me think that when Tom walks away at the end he’s heading off to anchor network coverage of the O.J. Bronco chase. That was the future, after all, just as much as he was. Looking to the future to fix what isn’t broken is maybe the only thing that changes. Not us. We’re already set. Thinking about it now, I can’t help but imagine that the Washington media was flattered by this portrayal of how clever they are but didn’t pay attention to any of the warnings. And over the years it’s become even clearer that they still won’t, no matter how often they set aside some time to cry in the morning.

Everything Is Temporary

You need to believe that things can change. And hopefully they will. There’s a framed picture of my father nearby on a bookshelf that I look at often which shows him in front of a poster for MOONSTRUCK that he had hanging on a wall. Beyond simply knowing that he always liked the film, I never asked him about this. I might not have gotten much of an answer anyway, but it always seemed clear that it was a favorite and maybe he identified with it as a comedy about Italians who lived in New York, maybe one that didn’t feature Italians who lived in New York involved in organized crime. But I’ll never be able to have this conversation with him. The point is that because of this my father comes to mind every time I see MOONSTRUCK, thinking about the happy ending that he didn’t get to have. But I remember my father. I remember the good things and the bad. And I know that things can change, things I wish I could share with him now.

But you never get all the answers, especially when it comes to questions you have about your parents. Some of those are likely things you wouldn’t want to know anyway. But my father did love MOONSTRUCK which is a wonderful film, one of the very best romantic comedies but it feels like so much more than that containing a beautiful screenplay by John Patrick Shanley that finds so much life in every single line of dialogue along with direction by Norman Jewison that feels close to miraculous in getting the tone it’s going for absolutely right. MOONSTRUCK makes me think of the past. It makes me think of my family, just as it makes me think about any possible connections that I may have to those family members who fell out of my life long ago but something of that is still inside of me, some feeling of passion and trying to understand what all this is about. It’s a film about realizing that the answers you may never find don’t matter. What matters is accepting all the absurdities in life and embracing them, particularly when it results in a form of love that you never saw coming, knowing all the madness will never be fully understood anyway. The answers you do find are there and they matter to you.

Loretta Castorini (Cher), a Brooklyn woman in her late thirties who lives with her parents in the family brownstone is proposed to by boyfriend Johnny Cammerini (Danny Aiello) right before he gets on a plane to Sicily where his beloved mother is dying. He asks Loretta to invite his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage), who he has not spoken to in five years, to the wedding. At home she informs her parents, Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) and Rose (Olympia Dukakis), of the engagement while assuring her mother that she likes, but doesn’t love, him so there is no chance of her getting hurt. The next day she goes to find Ronny at his bakery and learns about his hatred for his brother, going back to the accident that caused Ronny to lose his hand in a bread slicer which led to losing the woman he was going to marry. After going up to his apartment to talk things out, Ronny soon kisses Loretta and takes her to his bed. The next day, Ronny promises he will never bother her again if she agrees to accompany him to an opera at the Met that night which she agrees to, but she can’t keep ignoring what is really happening between the two of them. And as Cosmo is sneaking around with another woman, Rose has her own encounter with an NYU professor (John Mahoney) that helps her understand the meaning of her marriage and what her husband is looking for.

Some years back after watching the film again I tweeted, “The last fifteen minutes of MOONSTRUCK take place in a kitchen.” This was meant to be a simple observation of amazement at how beautifully those fifteen minutes leading to the end worked, the film not needing to go anywhere else to tell the story while still feeling fully, richly cinematic but some seemed to think that I was jokingly slamming the film for doing this. Let me state for the record that I wasn’t in the slightest. Because MOONSTRUCK feels pretty close to perfect in how it takes such a simple story based on simple feelings with such a long stretch of the film set in a simple place like a kitchen and infuses it all with this feeling of full-fledged opera with all the complications that comes with it, while making each and every single line of dialogue both distinctive and sometimes so perfectly funny you can’t imagine that character saying anything else. The film is about love as well as how that love gets into us and infects us in the best way possible, making us want to cherish every second of that completely unexpected feeling.

There’s a sense of fate to it all, felt right from the start, through the opening credits that foreshadow the night at the Met to come, right up to the cheeky director’s credit over a body in a funeral parlor. MOONSTRUCK is tightly plotted yet it still finds a way to luxuriate in every single scene in its 102 minute running time no matter how brief, almost as if the plot doesn’t really matter when compared to all those emotions but of course it does, which adds to the overall effect while defying simple description on a rational level. And all this makes it feel completely glorious. Watching the film has always been enjoyable to me but it also somehow feels designed to mean more as time goes on and our hearts become more open to the mysteries that it delves into. Maybe at this point in my life I’m a little like Vincent Gardenia’s Cosmo myself, sitting up late at night listening to my own version of Vicki Carr records and wondering if I can find a way to evade death for as long as possible. But I also find myself understanding how it feels to be affected by the beauty of the moon, thinking that everything in life was already set but then something comes along to make it all so different, realizing how much love there is to find in it. The plot kicks off when the uptight Johnny proposes to Loretta, getting down on his knees in that Italian restaurant where she advised him against ordering the fish, but it also happens because of the moon and the feeling its appearance puts in the air when she goes to find Ronny at his bakery, in ways that can’t be rationally explained. It’s a plot that can’t rationally be explained but those sort of passional emotions and feelings are often so irrational anyway, so it all makes total sense.

The way that plot unfurls feels simple yet as complex as trying to understand all those distant memories where you’re not sure why your parents behaved as they did, the caring they had for you mixed up with all those very adult emotions you know they had but wouldn’t share. Loretta has no expectations of love, not since her first husband was hit by a bus as she so flatly puts it in a way that can’t help but be somehow funny in its deadpan way. The only expectations Ronny has is of his own ferocious anger, becoming greater with every loaf of bread that he bakes in that basement, the way Cage is introduced without seeing his face as if he were a mystical beast. All that it takes is for them to meet. The film is filled with moments that barely seem like they should fit yet they all do, character moments from people we never see again yet in those few seconds they reveal all the joy and pain in their hearts, the couple in the liquor store arguing over whether the husband is a wolf, the way Vincent Gardenia sells the couple on the glory of copper pipes in their home or the way the bakery employee played by Nada Despotovich gets a moment to talk about how much she loves Ronny but it’s something that he’ll never know. The way Olympia Dukakis opens her eyes and immediately asks, “Who’s dead?” speaks volumes, an awareness that no good news ever comes late at night. Even the way the waiters fret about Johnny getting down on one knee because he’ll ruin his suit. It all unfolds like a fable you’ve never heard yet it all seems inevitable. The coming together of Loretta and Ronny happens before you think it will, but the film doesn’t waste any time just as it doesn’t waste any time getting to the sight of that giant moon which gets everyone including the dogs in that mood, as if Ronny sees no point in wasting any time. As far as he’s concerned, by this point in their lives they’ve wasted enough time already.

But through all of that, there’s one particular moment in the dialogue stays with me. Well, many moments do in a film where every single line is just right, all the dialogue exacting yet flowing beautifully. But there’s that one line where Louis Guss, delightful as Rose’s brother Raymond (his wife Rita is charmingly played by Julie Bovasso who also served as the film's dialogue coach helping with the Brooklyn accents; Guss is also the one in THE GODFATHER who said, “I don’t want it near schools, I don’t want it sold to children, that’s an infamia.”), says to Cosmo over dinner, “I never told you this, because it’s not really a story…” when recounting his tale of seeing the moon long ago and the inflection in his voice as he recounts this very personal memory hits just the right chord for me. We all live in our lives, keeping our own secrets that aren’t really stories, those nights we need to forget and remember way too often, thinking it’s all set dealing with the scars that we have and how we can’t get past the hurt they caused. The old woman putting a curse on the plane becoming a reminder of siblings holding things back from each other just like Johnny and Ronny. But Loretta doesn’t believe in curses. She does believe in luck based on what happened with her first marriage but is still a sensible person, sensible in her work and what she wants to spend money on, even the depiction of passion she expects from a proposal is totally steeped in pragmatism. Which, of course, is the opposite of passion, but that’s what she wants, content with her grey hair until the time comes to turn it full on black to make her appropriately stunning for that night at the opera, a true Cinderella transformed by the moon. She even admits that she doesn’t get the opera at first when they go to see “La Bohème” but it’s the pure sense of intense emotion that gets to her and finally makes her open to what Ronny has to say when they’re out there shivering cold on the street.

Writing about all of this is like attempting to find a rationale in that madness, as impossible as trying to put that real feeling of love felt between two people into words that make sense. But simply put, every moment of MOONSTRUCK feels beautiful to me. Every shot is something I want to live in. I want to eat all the food, I want to walk down the street wearing a big winter coat to protect me against the cold like the one I had way back then in New York, it makes me want to go to the opera at the Met for the first time in my life. And in Norman Jewison, a director who I always respected due to his general body of work more than ever felt any sort of passion for, it’s a perfect fit. He understood the absurdity and how all that makes it even more human. He’s not Italian, but he gets the heightened feeling of the story mixed in with the operatic feel that comes out of it which is so necessary, the cold felt in the New York street is always tangible and never turns those feelings into a joke. And the way Jewison makes use of the space in the house is also memorable, giving it such a lived in and genuine feel to see how the characters interact with each other in a place that really does feel like their home. From the outside, the NYU professor is awed by it, exclaiming, “It’s a mansion!”. Rose’s response of “It’s a house,” is the perfect reply for a place she knows as well as anything and from the inside it’s the place to live where the family makes the most sense. And the visuals from cinematographer David Watkin add to the magic with the close-up of Cher’s face with a single tear going down during the opera seeming otherworldly and more hauntingly beautiful than she ever looked in any other film. You have to accept certain things in life, something which John Mahoney’s NYU professor has never been able to do and never been able to grow up, old as he already is and seemingly playing the same scene with a student in that restaurant presumably over and over, always knowing that the same end is going to happen once again. And it’s in Ronny’s big speech played with every ounce of fire by Cage in the freezing cold where he convinces Loretta of his love as if without ever knowing it, he was waiting all along for her to appear before him in that basement. Bookended by Dean Martin singing “That’s Amore”, it’s a film that loves all these people, loves all the food, loves every place where it’s set, loves life, loves love as much as it knows how absurd all these things are. Without the absurdity, that love wouldn’t be there.

The way the film pauses in the early morning light for Loretta taking what has become that iconic walk down the middle of the street kicking a can and still in the glow of the previous evening, a moment of reverie that becomes the perfect way to lead into the scene where the entire family comes together, like it or not. And in those fifteen minutes at the end, set in that kitchen with oatmeal being served and the whole family turning up in a way that feels completely ridiculous yet totally natural, so the ending needs to take place there in this room that says family more than any other. That passion needs to be felt for the right reasons. You can’t create this. You can’t force that feeling into being out of nowhere. We are here to ruin ourselves in search of joy, as Ronny says. Part of that is the dream to somehow keep death away which can’t happen so, in a way, falling in true love is accepting the end. Accepting how fast all this is that we live. Accepting what that feeling can really be. The moon, which also made a key appearance in Shanley’s own JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO in a scene where Tom Hanks upon seeing how big it is expresses profound thanks for his life (not long ago I found myself rewatching that entire film just for this scene), is the sign for this. Our dreams are in there. Our regrets are in there. The ability to find beauty in it and make our lives better from that is what’s found in there. We think we know what our lives should be. But then things happen. And it’s like those who came before are laughing at us. They know how absurd we are. They know how ridiculous that pain can be. And they know that what’s happening is always what was meant to be. Maybe someday we’ll know it too. As Cosmo correctly says to Loretta, everything is temporary.

Any shot of Cher in this film feels like a miracle as well. Whatever else you want to say, this is a Cher performance, like her work in Mike Nichols’ SILKWOOD and Peter Bogdanovich’s MASK, where there’s not a trace of what we think of as Cher in her Oscar-winning performance and this feels vulnerable in a way that the others really aren’t. There are silent moments that she has, just watching the way she responds to others, which might have been as responsible for her Oscar win as much as anything, but through each screwy line of dialogue she takes this character and infuses it with every ounce of level-headedness, confusion and joy, turning it into something unforgettable. Playing against her, Nicolas Cage takes the automatic madness coming from his screen presence, and makes it feel completely right in this New York world, confronting the heightened dialogue in a way that takes each word spoken to its full potential, but he also transforms the lines with every ounce of fire in his big speech reaches to the height of that operatic feel. Just looking at his eyes when he gives Cher a certain look while inviting her to come inside with him, he doesn’t need to do anything else. All that passion is there, Cage correctly hits the ceiling with it, and yet the happily calm way he says “I would love some oatmeal” to Rose near the end in a way that says he’s not moving from this room might be my favorite moment of his in the whole film. Vincent Gardenia, Oscar-nominated, is also a joy and the way he uses his fingers in service to the grand points he needs to make in his arguments becomes a true marvel. Olympia Dukakis, Oscar winner, plays so much in just her looks at people and the way she drills in with her best lines to cut someone down has a power to it, the laugh that comes out of the moment unavoidable while feeling totally clear how much she means what she says. In his few scenes, John Mahoney cannily takes the surface level of charm coming off his NYU professor to use his smile in a way that doesn’t quite mask the character’s lack of understanding what he’s missing out on while the way Danny Aiello speaks the line, “I’m calling from the deathbed of my mother” on the phone call to Loretta somehow becomes one of the funniest things ever spoken in a movie. Also memorable is Fiodor Chaliapin as Cosmo’s father for the way he handles all those dogs as well as how he spits out the lines that he has with defiance, especially at the end when he tearfully declares, “I’m confused.”

As of this writing, I’m approaching the third anniversary of the night my mother died. It was late Thanksgiving night. And, of course, since the date when it happened and the actual holiday don’t always match up this means that most years it’ll feel like there are two days to mark the anniversary. Leave it to my mother to pull off that neat trick. Less than six months later, I met the woman who I plan to spend the rest of my life with. And right now, it feels like something that was always meant to be. Maybe I’ll even propose to her in a nice Italian restaurant, or at least maybe Musso’s. And hopefully that’s what sometimes happens in life. After all, if you’ve never collapsed sobbing on the sidewalk over someone you’ve been in love with, then what’s the point of any of it? If you’ve never been wracked with guilt over something involving your parents long after they’re gone, are you even human? Maybe it’s even possible that you’ll find your way out the other side of that darkness to a form of happiness you never imagined. Released at Christmas 1987, MOONSTRUCK is one of the films from that year which could likely be called perfect, up there with the likes of ROBOCOP and BROADCAST NEWS which put together could make for a good triple bill. They’re not only the funniest films of that year but they understand so much about the absurdity of it all, each in their own way. And so much of what happens to us is about just trying to figure out what it all means, the things MOONSTRUCK seems to know and understand. As for answers we’ll never get, maybe my dad simply thought it was a funny film with enjoyable characters, nothing all that complicated. But I still suspect there was something more to it than that, something connected to his own memories of the past and where he came from. Maybe there’s a secret about something that he never told me. But if you look up at the moon and think about all the possibilities still to be found in that magic it suddenly all makes sense. The people who loved you and are no longer here will laugh with joy. For once, you know what they know. And maybe then you can live the rest of your life finally able to understand.

A Sense Of The Real World

1990 was a pretty good year, at least if we’re just talking about the releases of GOODFELLAS, GREMLINS 2 and TOTAL RECALL. But that’s what wearing rose colored glasses gets you. Other parts of the twelve months didn’t go so well but I don’t want to talk about family memories and let’s also not bring up certain SUNY schools, especially if they’re located in Purchase. But we may as well move on from that for the time being. In June of that year things were looking up when I was hired on a major film shooting nearby but that wasn’t such a great experience either and I wound up working less than a week on it. The film, for anyone who remembers it, was Paul Mazursky’s SCENES FROM A MALL starring Bette Midler and Woody Allen. Detailing the satirical destruction and reconciliation of a marriage all within the confines of the enormous Beverly Center, the film was shot in several places to accommodate leading man Woody Allen who was making this rare starring appearance in a film he didn’t also direct and, of course, he didn’t like traveling too far from New York. There was location work at the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut (that’s where I worked) which has a decent similarity to the real thing, extensive studio work at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens as well as a little bit of exterior filming at the actual Beverly Center in Los Angeles so they at least got Woody out there for a few days. Simply put, this is a film mostly set in one location that was shot in three states and runs under 90 minutes. Which may be a more interesting fact about the film than my briefly working on it.

It would make sense to say that I don’t have particularly fond memories of the experience, but to be honest enough time has passed that I honestly don’t have a lot of memories of it at all or maybe I’ve just blocked much of that time out. No reason to dwell on things after a certain point. The experience of being present for the filming of an early parking garage scene is still vivid in my mind and when I watch that extended dolly shot (which begins at 13:53, in case you have your copy of the film handy) the sensations of that excitement come rushing back. Also, Woody wanted Snickers bars in his dressing room. But a lot of it is a blur to me now, lost to time, and the fact that it wasn’t the greatest experience doesn’t really matter anymore. Even the few names I can recall of the people I was working under aren’t listed in the credits and I’m certainly not, even with the surprisingly large number of production assistants in the end crawl, so it’s almost like it never happened. In a way, the film itself now seems a little like something that never happened, partly because of one of the names above the title but also because it’s one of those Paul Mazursky films that has been forgotten about by the entire world all these years later anyway. But all this is in the past. And, for the record, I don’t have any animosity towards the director. He had other things going on. The film doesn’t really come together in the end partly because of its own slightness, a concept for a film that in the end maybe wasn’t enough of one. Still, you don’t get films like this anymore, a dialogue heavy, character-based comedy-drama about actual grownups released by a major studio made by an auteur in the style he specialized in, even if the resulting film isn’t his best. The more that time goes by, it feels kind of amazing how we ever got films like this at all.

Sports lawyer Nick Fifer (Woody Allen) and wife Deborah Feingold-Fifer (Bette Midler), a well-known marriage psychologist whose new book has just come out, have just seen their two kids off on a ski trip for the holidays and are ready to celebrate their sixteenth wedding anniversary with a dinner party that night. Heading out to the fashionable Beverly Center to get some quick shopping done and exchange their anniversary gifts, over some frozen yogurt Nick reveals news of the affair he recently had to Deborah. She reacts with understandable anger and declares their marriage over, but they soon reconcile and are ready to start celebrating again. But just as they’re beginning to relax, Deborah reveals a surprise to Nick about her own recent past and her own secrets that she’s been keeping from him.

The satire found in the films directed by Paul Mazursky feels so specific to the time when they were made that addressing this becomes unavoidable when revisiting them. No matter how good BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (great) and BLUME IN LOVE (not quite as great, with an extremely problematic plot development) are, each film is so fixed in the time it was made during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s they almost feel like they’re set on another planet now when compared to what the world has turned into. But not only does this add to their effectiveness in portraying people who are trying to understand the moment they’re living in, the films are still so sharp and funny in their characterizations that they remain fascinating and at their best feel true. Mazursky’s AN UNMARRIED WOMAN released in 1978 is very much locked into the time and place it was made but still plays beautifully, a portrayal of loneliness that comes out of betrayal fighting to break through to the other side that may be his best film. His 1986 comedy DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS, both funny as well as a monster hit at the time, is much broader and doesn’t feel like it has much to say outside of the immediate 80s context but there’s still a lot in there to enjoy. Like that film, SCENES FROM A MALL, which opened in February ’91 (one week after THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS; it came in sixth), is also a Touchstone comedy starring Bette Midler set in, or at least near, Beverly Hills around the holidays, but this one tales a more serious, low-key approach to what it’s looking to make fun of.

Written by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky, all these years after SCENES FROM A MALL was made it feels like a look at a married couple who are more well-off than they ever want to admit, stranded at the beginning of the new decade in the middle of all their wealth in a marriage that seems perfect at first when we meet them and they’re alone together, but of course it isn’t and the truth is eventually going to come out. They’re trapped in their own insular world, the only political references they make feel out of the distant past as if the ‘80s has made them not pay attention to any of that anymore, and the only solution is to keep shopping while waiting for the next calamity to occur, unaware of any of troubles in the city to come over the next few years. I haven’t stepped inside the Beverly Center in a long time and never liked it very much anyway but here it’s the hot spot in town, a stopping point for every possible type in the city and where countless people working retail jobs can only hope they don’t get in the middle of all this.

SCENES FROM A MALL got pretty much dismissed at the time and didn’t even reach $10 million at the box office. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything good about the film, but the real problem now is that it only seems half-formed. The joke of the two main characters admitting their indiscretions, splitting up and getting back together multiple times over the day, unable to leave this massive place, is the basic ‘Bergman but funny and in a mall’ idea of the whole thing which feels a little forced and though each of the two leads do some surprisingly good, natural work within their inherently unlikable characters the material never really becomes strong enough and begins to feel like the same beats happening again and again. The funny stuff needed to be funnier and more biting, the serious stuff needed to be more dramatic and believable so what’s there falls into a no man’s land somewhere in between, missing a joke that something like the Steve Martin vehicle L.A. STORY which opened just a few weeks earlier seemed to pull off maybe because it was going for broader laughs and the social commentary could come naturally out of that. The continuous jokey nature of Woody Allen, of all people, praising L.A. over New York/wearing a ponytail/saying "ciao"/carrying a surfboard/shouting “Where’s my fucking Saab?” is a little thin to base an entire characterization on but looked at now everything involving Woody that doesn’t have the feel of some sort of in joke, like him obsessing over the color of his stress gum or the way he harangues a stranger into buying a copy of his wife’s new book, plays much more naturally.

The film keeps a bemused distance from its characters but also appears to understand them even as it thinks they’re being silly, buying and re-buying that sushi for their big dinner party over and over again, going from one place to the next in the mall as if living several entirely new versions of their marriage all in the same day, the idea being that Midler’s psychologist can approach the idea of what happens to a marriage analytically but when confronted with the emotions of her own life she’s at a loss. It’s all part of the natural way of things when living in L.A. according to this film, just not the one that I’ve ever known. Some of the moments that work best are mainly in a naturalistic way that comes out of the flow of their conversations but not enough of this sticks the way it should, there are moments where it feels like the film might be building up to something, whether a joke or maybe some sort of dramatic revelation but all they do is talk some more, no big laughs and no particular biting drama so it feels like a sketch of a movie.

Everything the two of them might possibly want is right in front of them to purchase and they still can’t figure out what they really need from each other so the mall feels like a version of purgatory that they can’t leave, going from one store to another, one restaurant to another for more drinks and it probably was what the Beverly Center was like then but still reminds me how the place always seemed kind of dull. I always preferred the outdoor Century City mall back then (totally redesigned some years back and it’s horrible now), which had a better vibe, better movie theater, better celebrity watching, even the food court was better. Set during the holidays with lots of decorations and Christmas music heard all around the mall so let’s call this a Christmas movie, but the portrayal of the Beverly Center just feels too mild although the two-level set filmed at Kaufman Astoria Studios is extremely impressive and likely very expensive. It does come off a little as a record of what L.A. was like then, even the extras seem to have the right look to them, but it’s all done in a way that feels too listless so it’s not a particularly interesting record of the time and even the opening shot of Los Angeles looks like an overcast early morning that could itself be a comment on what the town really looks like or they just didn’t want to wait for a nice sunny day to film it. The multiplex at the mall has PREDATOR 2, ROCKY V, THE GODFATHER PART III plus SALAAM BOMBAY! which is playing to a nearly empty house in its third year, so I guess the topical humor is that everything is either a sequel (Disney wouldn’t let Mazursky use their own THREE MEN AND A LITTLE LADY?) or an arthouse film which is about as mild a satirical comment as you can get, on the level of the overall “It’s L.A.! Everyone has car phones!” take the film has on the city. Incidentally, the movie theater at the Beverly Center, which had many more screens than portrayed here and is now long gone, was lousy too.

Although, since it’s part of that sequence, if you want to see Woody Allen going down on Bette Midler in a movie theater where the film being shown just had a Criterion 4K announced and is directed by the mother of the leading mayoral candidate for New York City, this is the film for you. SCENES FROM A MALL is almost entirely a two-character piece, with the closest thing to a third being the running joke of an ever-present mime played by Bill Irwin, so a certain amount of repetition is unavoidable, with some phone calls to never seen characters breaking things up. Their kids are only seen at the start and pretty much every single other person with dialogue is a bit player at the mall. Oh, and Fabio is in there too. If anything, a Paul Mazursky film like this can at least be separated from all the other (less personal, more profitable) wacky comedies that came out during the heyday of Touchstone Pictures with a little more individuality and compared to anything now this one almost feels like an art film plus it’s definitely more expensive than something like this would be today. Removed so far from its context, the result is not at all uninteresting, just a little too slight and feeling in need of another rewrite to get some more laughs as well as some truly insightful observations mixed in there along with the therapy speak and rationalizations, the talk that leads to more talk as these two try to figure out why they even got together in the first place. Some of the dialogue does catch the rhythm that can only happen between two people who are very familiar with each other and its portrayal of the mall as a microcosm for all of life in this upscale world isn’t a bad one so I suppose I can admire the film’s purity, to steal a line from Ian Holm in ALIEN, but it’s not enough. The script isn’t on the level of Mazursky’s best work even if it does fit in with the other versions of foreign films that he spent some of his career making (like WILLIE AND PHIL, also not one of his best), digging into his own version of Bergman along with fanciful moments like Woody Allen emerging from smoke wearing a snazzy Italian suit as the Nino Rota theme from Fellini’s AMACORD plays, a moment that could just as well have come from one of Woody’s own films, just like the Cole Porter and Louis Armstrong selections that also play on the soundtrack. The film even opens and closes with an iris in the shot, which feels like a possible Jacques Demy tribute.

Maybe the Paul Mazursky aesthetic made the most sense from ’69-’78, where it felt in tune with the cultural wave of either New York or Los Angeles so the slightly shaggy and loose nature of his plotting fit in perfectly with the time but here it never feels connected enough to the real world. The two leads actually do have chemistry and when they fight it’s believable, it’s just the material comes off as a little too surface level so the end result plays like it’s caught between what wants to be an introspective, if comical, examination of a relationship and the Bette Midler laff riot that the studio most likely would have preferred. Mazursky made a surprising number of films that touched on infidelity, yet his own marriage lasted over sixty years, his wife is even in this one playing a woman at an information desk, although this is one where both halves of the couple are responsible not just George Segal or Michael Murphy. The shot near the end where after a public fight between the two everyone in the mall crowd walks off until it’s just the two of them standing there which really says it all in a much more concise, and cinematic, way showing how in the end it’s just the two of them to work out their own problems like it or not and even though the film goes on for a few minutes longer it feels like the proper concluding point to make.

In addition to wishing the writing was even sharper or maybe that something else would happen and if there was a way to get around the inherent repetition in things like the two of them fighting while going up one escalator then fighting while going down another, it didn’t happen. Another character appearing would help break up the monotony and it would make sense for them to run into someone they know but most likely the decision was made that the film really had to be just about just the two of them which makes sense but for a movie that runs only 87 minutes, with end credits that roll earlier than that, it feels longer. To be completely honest, I don’t mind the film as much as I did then, maybe because I can appreciate what it’s going for and can understand the idea of a fight that never ends a little better. If Woody was going to do a movie for the paycheck, which from various accounts is what was happening here, he could have done a lot worse. The film almost becomes an artifact of a much earlier age the way BLUME IN LOVE feels now but the material doesn’t stick as well and there’s a hollowness to the whole thing. The real joke of the film is about how thinking that simply talking out the problems can make them go away but sometimes you’re just stuck with each other, nothing to do but keep talking but it all leads nowhere since you’re going to stay together anyway, so what’s the point. It’s a healthy way to look at things, but not enough substance for a film to get to the ninety-minute mark.

It's still a little surprising that Bette Midler never appeared in an actual Woody Allen film but here they go together extremely well, with chemistry that does feel effortless. The material is a more naturalistic key for Bette Midler to play in than in some of her other Touchstone films at the time, but that broader tone comes out when she screams at her co-star, especially with a lot of people crowding around. And up against that Woody’s own performance plays surprisingly naturalistic now, seeming willing to play the material that goes against his persona so the way he says the name ‘Springsteen’ sounds surprisingly genuine coming from him and he brings the right energy to the ongoing argument. When the two of them stand together silent near the end it really does look like a married couple who know everything about each other and the only thing they can do is stay together.

The prominence of the Beverly Center in the city likely lasted until around 2002 when The Grove opened up nearby, right next to Paul Mazursky’s beloved Farmer’s Market. Feeling more like Disneyland than a regular mall, since The Grove was outside it was a much more pleasant place to be and except for during the holidays when it gets really crowded doesn’t have the same feeling of being trapped like in the Beverly Center. Besides, when you’re in southern California don’t you want to be outside anyway? Maybe the much lower-budget version of this film made today would be set in a nice house with everything just getting delivered by Amazon and nobody else being bothered. The Stamford Town Center has, no surprise, gone through its own tough times recently but is now apparently the largest indoor pickleball center in the country which sounds like something that Paul Mazursky would utilize in a film if he were still around to make it. The later COAST TO COAST, actually Mazursky’s final film which he made for Showtime in 2003, is largely a more interesting version of what SCENES FROM A MALL explores, written by TWO FOR THE ROAD and EYES WIDE SHUT’s Frederick Raphael and though it’s hampered by a moderate budget forced to present a road trip across the country filmed entirely in Toronto, the marital drama between stars Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis has a good amount of bite to it. It can be found for free on some of the streaming sites, so keep an eye out. Years later when attending a career tribute that was likely Paul Mazursky’s final public appearance, I found myself thinking that it was very possible I was the only person there who had been on the set of this film, however briefly. Much of his career was spent taking a bemused look at the tensions between couples that are always lying under the surface, like it or not, but he understood the strength that enabled such people to stay together if they could accept certain things about each other. The films remain interesting even, maybe sometimes especially, with their flaws, but at their best those tensions have a real spark. SCENES FROM A MALL may be part of a bad memory for me and the film is never good enough to overcome that but I suppose we all need some of those memories since they helped make us what we are and what we want to be. Just like some of those relationships do.

How Far You Want It Bent

It’s now well over thirty years since the blockbuster success of THE FIRM, which seems crazy to think about both in terms of how much time has gone by but also how a film like this was once the big July 4th weekend release, June 30, 1993 to be exact. And when it was made, THE FIRM was clearly designed to be a hit. An adaptation of a runaway best seller, the biggest star in the world, a respected director, some of the best character actors around plus a crew of screenwriters who were likely punching below their weight considering the material and anything less than a giant smash would have been considered a failure. For the now much-missed director Sydney Pollack this was his follow-up to the colossal failure of 1990’s HAVANA, a movie that no one has ever had much excitement about, then or now. But in response to what happened there he clearly recognized that what he needed to do was get back on the horse and make a movie that people wanted to see, doing the things that he did, if not best, then at least very well. 1993 was a big summer with JURASSIC PARK plus the likes of SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE and IN THE LINE OF FIRE but THE FIRM was bigger than all the ones without dinosaurs, at least until THE FUGITIVE opened a month later, marking the start of the run of John Grisham adaptations to follow over the next few years. Francis Ford Coppola’s film of THE RAINMAKER may be the best of that batch, finding a surprising amount of pure emotion and empathy in the material but THE FIRM is very likely the most purely enjoyable in a Chinese takeout sort of way. And I suspect the people who made THE FIRM knew that it was Chinese takeout but they made it really good Chinese takeout, at least for the night you watch it, preferably with some really good Chinese takeout which seems fitting considering how much the two lead characters yearn for their days back in Boston when they used to order Chinese takeout. Now I’m in the mood for some Chinese takeout, maybe to eat while watching THE FIRM again.

The sense of class and quality that Sydney Pollack generally brought to his films feels like a lost art now, even when they don’t come together. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of all of them and maybe I shouldn’t discuss my true feelings about Best Picture winner OUT OF AFRICA, not to mention HAVANA. But even in cases like these, there’s a feeling of pure craft to his body of work and a sense of careful consideration brought to the material that’s undeniable. No one trying to make an equivalent of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR these days is doing it as well as he did. THE FIRM definitely isn’t THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR but it is an enjoyable popcorn movie with just enough depth to give the drama some teeth. With his films, no matter what the ostensible plot is, the director almost always seemed most interested in the relationship between the man and the woman at the heart of it all, as if to say that if Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in CONDOR weren’t going to connect to each other then there was no reason to ever care about the CIA coverup of oil shortages, that if Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange weren’t going to walk off arm in arm at the end of TOOTSIE then that entire scheme for dressing up as a woman wasn’t going to mean anything. Through each of these films he was always more interested in the people than the plot, that’s the sort of conflict he excelled in exploring. While THE FIRM always knows that it’s the thriller element which everyone is interested in, Pollack uses the love story between the two leads as a sort of north star to always circle back to and locate an emotional center. It may be something that sets the film apart from the source material but the basic idea behind that does give it a needed emotional heft. That sort of human connection is why Sydney Pollack was hired for these things, after all. And the film is still a well-crafted piece of work. Which, along with being a big box office hit, I guess you could say is all it was ever supposed to be.

Harvard Law student Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is at the top of his class and being recruited by all the top firms around the country but the one that really catches his eye with their offer is the smaller Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis. Convincing his wife Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn) that this is a place where they can make a life together, the two are soon moving to Memphis where they’re greeted by a new house and car plus long hours for Mitch as he studies for the bar exam under the tutelage of mentor Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) but Abby can’t shake this feeling that there’s something off about the whole setup, especially when a few associates of the firm are killed in a boat accident down in the Cayman Islands. Mitch is suspicious enough to hire a private detective who once served time in prison with his brother Ray (David Straihairn), who he keeps secret from his new employers, to investigate. But it all comes to a head when the FBI approaches Mitch with the truth about the firm, that it is a front for the biggest mob family in Chicago. Mitch tries to figure out what to do but when he is shown photo evidence of a tryst that he had with a beautiful woman down in the Cayman Islands as a threat he realizes that he and his wife’s lives are in danger so he soon begins to take action, devising a plan for the two of them to escape free and clear.

Is this the film that introduced the world to the concept of Tom Cruise Running? There’s probably some earlier photographic evidence, but I can’t think of a film where it seemed as crucial as it does here here, whether chasing after his wife Abby or racing away from the bad guys, a few sequences that feel like the key visual images of the film so maybe this is the birth of the defining image of Tom Cruise, Movie Star. And this feels appropriate since it’s the breakneck pace of THE FIRM that always comes to mind, a film which moves so fast that it feels like it was made by people who never got a chance to sit down. THE FIRM began shooting in November of ‘92 and wrapped in March before its release at the end of June, and even if that schedule didn’t inform the pace of the film, it still feels like it always wants to keep moving nonstop. That short schedule was part of the reason for the lengthy running time of 154 minutes and even with how much narrative ground the film is trying to cover summer movies in 1993 were almost never this long. At the time of release Sydney Pollack was even quoted as saying, “It’s like the old line, ‘I would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time.’ If I had had another two months, I would have made a shorter picture.” Plot points go by quickly, dialogue is spoken at a rapid pace and it’s always racing forward to the next moment as if you’re going to miss something if you look away.

But it’s the director’s awareness of what each scene needs to be and how the story needs to keep the film moving that holds all this together even when it’s not always clear just why something is happening or who is being talked about. An underrated part of Sydney Pollack’s skill as a filmmaker was how he used the anamorphic frame, especially in something like THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR which is very likely even better than you remember, a film where every shot becomes something intricately connected to the whole and it all flows beautifully. He backed away from the widescreen style in the ‘80s to a standard 1.85 ratio which I always imagined had to do with getting annoyed at seeing something like TOOTSIE panned and scanned on TV. I still think a wider frame would have lent some extra cinematic juice to OUT OF AFRICA, not that it mattered with the Oscars, it would have helped HAVANA, it would have helped his remake of SABRINA. It was like if Sydney Pollack wasn’t shooting a film in Scope, that somehow robbed him of the key inspiration for how to stage each scene leading to a dullness to each shot so it all just becomes a version of bad television. It would also have helped THE FIRM but it doesn’t feel like this matters as much since the film always feels like it’s fighting against this, to keep things continually moving even when the scene is just a few characters sitting in an office. It’s a good-looking film photographed by John Seale, with even a few split diopter shots tossed in, but it’s never trying to be an elegant looking one, maybe because instead of trying for intricate composition it’s a case of using the frame to tell the story in the cleanest way possible. One of the best purely visual moments of the film is locked in with that suspense, which has hitman Tobin Bell running, again with the running, after the monorail where he has already spotted the unknowing Cruise during the Mud Island sequence (out of curiosity, I looked the location up to find out that this monorail hasn’t actually operated since 2018 and likely won’t again which is too bad for anyone looking to take THE FIRM tours in Memphis), a nicely done beat of suspense that becomes not only about the chase but about the location being utilized as well.

For that plot which never wants to rest, (screenplay credited to David Rabe and Robert Towne & David Rayfiel, based on the novel by John Grisham) the film takes what might have been pages of droning on about tax law which it turns into dialogue that it manages to make colorful and to the point, as if what’s needed is to find just the right amount of crackle to keep the scenes engaging. The film clearly knows that it’s really about Mitch and Abby from the start when the first thing he talks about in his interview with the firm is his wife and the plotting is canny even in small ways like how it delays Gene Hackman’s entrance later than you’d expect so he’s not first seen as just one more face in a crowd of lawyers. Since all this moves so fast it feels like a valid question just how much sense the plot actually makes but it sure seems active enough to make us think it does. Forgetting the novel, which I read decades ago and I’m not reading again now, I’m not sure why a law firm inexorably tied to the mafia would need to go to the extra trouble of overbilling clients as well but, of course, I’m not a lawyer so I’m not the person to answer this question but it’s clear that the reason it’s there is to give the main character a way out when he needs to think of one. When asked about why he became a lawyer in the first place, Mitch McDeere talks about being afraid of what the government can do to anyone so along with what the mob can do makes this film that much more about one man looking out for himself and his wife which is a theme but not one the film spends much time on.

The book ends with the main character blowing up everything he’s been running from and fleeing with the money, holding onto a few key secrets but leaving his life behind. The movie, looking for relatability to characters who are put in impossible situations, is about regaining his life of normalcy and finding “a way through” as opposed to a way out as he puts it, regaining the trust that was lost in the marriage and by following the letter of the law which is the greater victory. Does this change the book? Yes. Do I care? Not really. This isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald, after all. It’s not even Tom Wolfe. At the end Mitch McDeere declares that all this got him to think about the law again, which sounds good for a completion to his character arc but there was never much evidence that it was something he forgot about during all that studying for the bar exam anyway. The real goal of the film is finding a way for the two main characters to rediscover how much they mean to each other so the piano that is prominent in the David Grusin score can reach its crescendo and we know they’re going to be ok.

But the film remains enjoyable, as well as rewatchable, partly due to the pace, partly due to the colorful dialogue and how it moves the plot forward in ways that are both active and suspenseful, even as it rushes through plot points that come from the book it can’t dispense with, the way Gary Busey is eliminated almost immediately after he’s been introduced. The Memphis flavor of the setting feels a little obligatory but it’s there, with the location filming, the tangent about Holly Hunter’s ex-husband Elvis and all those ribs being barbecued at the welcome party. A few points when Mitch admits certain things to certain people before you’d expect him to give the impression of stuff happening but also feel like they’re trying to keep a character being played by Tom Cruise proactive through all the plot machinations as much as anything. He also does a series of somersaults with a kid on a colorful Memphis street and no one seems to think this is at all strange but of course it’s obviously there to set up his skill at being able to escape when he’s on the run later on, so presumably he spent time in gymnastics in addition to pre-law, not that it ever feels like it mattered. Either way, the film moves so fast that even at this early stage there’s barely a second to even think about it. Even the sense of weather that goes all through the film, the feel of passing seasons add just the right texture to each of these settings so whether it’s the fall leaves in Memphis, the snow in DC or the lush nights in the Cayman Islands it all works.

Sydney Pollack also finds ways to give each of these actors their own moments so they stand out, the way Gene Hackman gets one of the best speeches in the film about tax law which he practically just spits out without effort, which doesn’t really have much to do with anything but it does make us think that serious matters are being discussed. Even when they just get a few minutes the actors have a chance to make an impression, like Holly Hunter’s terror when she seeks Mitch out, the way Hal Holbrook isn’t playing the head of the firm as a bad guy at all, the bluster of Ed Harris threatening Mitch but especially the amazing scene of Wilford Brimley’s firm security chief playing against type to let his folksy demeanor become instantly terrifying as he lays down the law for Mitch, showing him the photos taken when he made love to the girl on the beach, using the phrase “kind of intimate acts, oral and whatnot” to describe their activities which alone probably justifies the film’s entire existence. There’s still the sense that all this barely holds together. What is the time frame of the movie once Mitch and Abby move to Memphis? Months? Weeks? This doesn’t really matter either.

There’s the feeling that the people making this movie were so infused with the idea of bringing quality to what is basically an airplane potboiler that you imagine them spending a few days trying to decide if there was a way to get around the hero cheating on his wife only to finally decide the plot depends on that. In the book Mitch never tells Abby about the woman on the beach, played enticingly by Karina Lombard, but in the film about bringing the two of them together it feels necessary. The rush to get the film done in time for the summer release makes it feel like some of the pacing didn’t quite get perfected, the way some scenes feel like they’re cut away from before actually finishing so actual human interaction gets lost at times. For one thing, after so much time spent on whatever is going on between Abby and Avery Tolar, it feels like there needs to be a final moment with Gene Hackman when he’s last seen but the film doesn’t pause for that beat. That piano-heavy score by David Grusin probably seems even more eccentric now than it did at the time but it adds immeasurably to both the pace and the mood of the film, giving the film its own personality with the main love theme almost making you think that this could have been in a ‘70s Sydney Pollack film as well as keeping the mood of conspiracy in the air. It’s all a reminder that in 1993 it was still possible to for a film like this to have a score that had some actual personality to it, thanks to all that piano along with one suspense track clearly modeled after the John Williams “The Conspirators” cue from JFK which was all the rage in any sort of action/thriller during that decade.

That music is a key part of the last hour’s excitement with all that running around and when Tom Cruise finally hits Wilford Brimley repeatedly with his briefcase (well, there’s a symbol) it’s hard not to wish he’d do it a few more times. Tom Cruise also plays the big scene with Paul Sorvino that follows as if he’s exhausted from all that running but can still hold the scene together so what he says seems to make sense. Maybe I still have some questions, but the film seems confident that all this will work out. The way the film comes back to the two leads at the very end makes it clear that it was always about a guy who wanted money and the life that comes with it but then has to realize none of that matters if he doesn’t have the woman he loves, which isn’t anything particularly revolutionary but it gets the job done. The final lines between Cruise and Tripplehorn do feel a little like of one of the esteemed writers working on this, whether Towne or Rayfiel, pulled it from a file of unused romantic dialogue that they always liked but it turns the moment into a relatable scene of connection for two people who came close to losing each other and realized how much they didn’t want to. It keeps that sense of class and respectability going until the credits roll. THE FIRM is a thriller with less substance than it maybe wants to admit but it becomes a movie about a man who rediscovers the two things that matters the most to him, his wife and the law, taking his life back and becoming a person again instead of the yuppie asshole that the world wanted him to be. It feels like the right ending and a reminder that THE FIRM isn’t close to being the best movie that Sydney Pollack ever made but, looking at it again right now at this point in time, it does feel like a movie.

It’s also a Tom Cruise movie and his performance becomes all about his eagerness to achieve this life with his naivete front and center until he realizes that he’s in over his head which of course turns into that very Tom Cruise-like determination to overcome all this. If the film can’t take a breath, then he can’t either, convincingly charging through all that rapid-fire dialogue as fast as possible that always holds the focus of the film together. In the case of Gene Hackman, at the time of release the thing that was talked about was that his name didn’t appear on the poster since Cruise was the only one who could be above the title; he does get above the title billing on the actual film. Looking at it again now it feels like this has been hiding in plain sight as one of his most underrated performances with the way he brings a confidence and looseness to the character in order to find the humanity in this material that no one else is looking for, cutting deep to find the real emotional damage within that he would never admit. When Hackman says, “That’s even better than getting even with him,” it’s the best moment in the film. Jeanne Tripplehorn, the one he’s talking to there, brings just enough of an edge to what is of course basically the wife role on paper and the way she grounds each of her scenes gives it the relatability it needs, playing it so you believe she makes that trip to the Cayman Islands. She’s also the one with the lines that matter near the end and because of her the moment works.

It always felt like each John Grisham adaptation was cast like a disaster movie filled with recognizable faces and this is one of the best including Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, Hal Holbrook, Ed Harris, Wilford Brimley, Tobin Bell, Jerry Weintraub, Karina Lombard on the beach, the uncredited Paul Sorvino and probably somebody else I’m forgetting. LAW & ORDER star Steven Hill, one of the leads of Sydney Pollack’s first feature as director THE SLENDER THREAD in 1965 and very well-cast here as someone who doesn’t seem intimidated by Tom Cruise in the slightest, appears as FBI Director Denton Voyles and this was his last film appearance. The voice of Sydney Pollack himself is heard briefly on a phone call, not exactly his performance on the phone as Faye Dunaway’s boyfriend in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR but it was a nice surprise to discover this recently.

THE FIRM was a summer movie featuring adults which, believe it or not, still wasn’t an entirely strange thing at the time it was released, so don’t tell me we haven’t been going backwards. It wasn’t even a prestige film going for Oscars so the two nominations it got were Supporting Actress for Holly Hunter and David Grusin’s score. If he hadn’t just won the previous year for UNFORGIVEN, it’s not a stretch to imagine Gene Hackman getting in there as well. And I keep thinking of this as a summer movie, a summer movie that I wish still existed, the sort where two people see it in an air-conditioned theater, enjoy themselves, then go off to have dinner where not much time is even spent talking about the movie. Of course, movies like this can be made but it doesn’t mean they’re going to which, if you ask me, is a problem even if Sydney Pollack sadly isn’t around anymore to make them. Feeling more like a popcorn movie than anything else he made in his career, Sydney Pollack knew not to make The FIRM more than it is, but he did bring it just enough class and intelligence to make it more than it might have been, the sort of film that once regularly got made and now no longer is. It’s still nice to remember that it happened.