Something New & the Same Old Merchant-Ivory

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The New York Sun

A new thing, in the movies as elsewhere in life, is a rarity, but I think I’ve stumbled on one. It is a new genre which we might call paranoid comedy. Paranoia is of course rife in Hollywood, and paranoid documentaries, thrillers, and political dramas are now almost the only kind there are. But until now comedy has remained mostly immune to its corrosive effects.


No longer. At least not to judge from “Fun with Dick and Jane.” Superficially this film resembles other sympathetic treatments of middle-class criminals, not least its original version, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda, of 1977. But where economic conditions in 1977 were at least fairly grim, today we are approaching what economists call “full employment.” Why are this Dick (Jim Carrey) and Jane (Tea Leoni) turning criminal?


That’s where the paranoia comes in. This film attempts to persuade us that, because virtually all the rest of the world is criminal, or complicit in crime, or else powerless to do anything about it, its heroes’ criminality is inevitable and justified. In the end they mete out a sort of vigilante justice as a way of empowering themselves against the vast and terrifying forces arrayed against them.


Dick works for a giant corporation called Globodyne that – but need I say more? We know already from all the other paranoid movies that nothing good is going to come to Dick from the giant corporation he works for – though, rather oddly it might seem, Dick himself doesn’t know it.Yet.


On the contrary, he thinks he’s in clover because he’s just made vice president for communications of Globodyne. On the strength of his promotion, he suggests to Jane that she quit her job to spend more time with their son, Billy, who has spent so much time with his nanny that his native language appears to be Spanish.


Nobody does boyish innocence – albeit boyish innocence now long since prolonged into middle age – better than Jim Carrey, though his little dances and songs of triumph at his promotion are laying it on a little thick, maybe. Of course, the more he rejoices the more certain we are of what is to come.


Globodyne’s CEO, Jack McAllister (Alec Baldwin), and CFO, Frank Bascom (Richard Jenkins), send the new VP on a television show called “MoneyLife With Sam Samuels” to talk about the company. There he is ambushed with questions about highly embarrassing financial shenanigans on the part of McAllister and Bascom about which he clearly knows nothing. We watch as poor Dick stammers and stumbles his way through the show while in a corner of the screen a graphic of Globodyne’s stock price plunges towards zero.


Why would his bosses set him up like this? What did they stand to gain from his and the company’s embarrassment and the collapse of its stock? Even more puzzling, how can it be that it is Dick who is said to be under threat of indictment for his part in a crime which he has just given the world such a spectacular demonstration of knowing nothing at all about?


But that’s paranoia for you. McAllister gets off scot-free with the $400 million he has looted from the company while Bascom gets a light, 18-month sentence and a $10 million pay-off for keeping his mouth shut. Dick, meanwhile, becomes the patsy because, well, because he’s sweet, funny, innocent Jim Carrey, a man born to be a (movie) patsy.


There is more paranoia in Dick’s in ability to find another job when Globodyne goes out of business. In the real world the economy may be humming along nicely, but in the world of Hollywood paranoia it’s always the 1930s, and Dick and Jane’s only choices are eviction and the soup kitchen or a life of crime.


Of course there is the third alternative of a job at Wal-Mart – sorry, that’s Kost-Mart here – but Dick, after giving it a brief try, prefers indigence, homelessness, and the chance of prison when he turns to crime. As anybody would.


And so another left-wing political base is touched as another giant conspiracy to impoverish the world is uncovered by the way. Likewise, the closing credits offer ironic thanks to En ron, WorldCom, ImClone, and Adelphia as a way of reinforcing the message that everybody in the corporate world is doing it, and doing it to us, or our surrogates, Dick and Jane.


Interestingly, the one exception to the rule that there are not, for most of us when we are job-seeking, hundreds of applicants for every position is the profession of acting. There really are demoralizing mobs of people up for every available part, as there apparently are here even for the kinds of executive jobs that Dick is applying for.


This fact just might help explain how it is that we are getting a movie about the evil rich from a guy making $20 million or more every time he steps in front of a camera. Someone like Mr. Carrey, who has experienced the precarious living typical of an actor, is more likely to think he has earned success when it comes and so look with contempt on corporate types who, it seems to him, all get rich without running the same risks.


It’s more paranoia, of course, but at least it is a bit more understandable paranoia.


***


A confession: I hate, hate, hate Merchant-Ivory movies. Probably, I should recuse myself from reviewing them, so much do I hate them. But now comes what is presumably the last of them – since Ismail Merchant died in May – and it perfectly embodies everything I hate about them.This means that those who, unlike me, love these films, will really love “The White Countess.”


Set in the international city of Shanghai in the late 1930s, the film adds to its exotic setting and highminded message an all-star cast, including a clutch of Redgraves – Vanessa, her sister Lynn, and her daughter Natasha Richardson – as well as the great Ralph Fiennes and the even greater John Wood, who is given hardly anything to do. What could be more appealing to Merchant-Ivory fans, of which I am not one?


Did I mention, by the way, that I hate Merchant-Ivory movies?


One reason is that they are pure vehicles for emotion, and emoting, in which there is seldom much in the way of incident or plot. In “The White Countess” nothing very much happens until war breaks out in the final reel, and even the war is only there to get the static characters moving a bit.


The rest of the plot consists of Mr. Fiennes’s character, a distinguished American diplomat called Todd Jackson, risking his savings to bet on a horse, thus winning enough money to open his own “ideal bar” or night club in Shanghai.


Then he opens it.


Then a Japanese man called Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada) helps him add “political tension” to the mix at his ideal bar by bringing in a few Chinese communists, a few Chinese nationalists, and a few Japanese “businessmen” like himself, who are really the advance scouts for a Japanese invasion and takeover.


And, er, that’s about it.


Almost all the rest consists of two strands of emotional demonstration. The first consists of complaints from the noble Russian relatives of Ms. Richardson, the eponymous countess, about how she has disgraced the family by becoming a taxi-dancer in the dives of Shanghai and her saintly endurance of same.


The second consists of Mr. Fiennes, a blind man who, along with his sight, has lost his wife, his daughter, and his ideals (the latter articles having been lost after his efforts to bring about world peace through the League of Nations have come to nothing), looking noble, vulnerable, adorable, and pitiable?


Now he wants nothing more than to be proprietor of the perfect bar, the ideal bar, which he calls “The White Countess” after its “centerpiece,” Ms. Richardson’s Countess Sophia. To his intuitive sense of such things, she provides the perfect “balance between the erotic and the tragic.”


Not coincidentally,that is exactly the balance that James Ivory, who directed from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, is trying to create in his film. But the erotic fizzles out pretty early on, and the tragic is way too self-conscious. Jackson and the countess are not real people; both are merely paragons of noble suffering and disillusionment.


In the end, like all Merchant-Ivory films, “The White Countess” ends up being about how awful our ancestors were,all but a few noble and maverick souls like Mr. Jackson and the countess Sophia, that is. And of course the genuine and down-to-earth lower orders, of whom we see very little apart from a Jewish refugee called Samuel Feinstein who lives downstairs from the countess’s family.


That family, in particular, comes in for quite an authorial trouncing on account of their stifling sense of respectability and decorum, their obsession with class and honor, and their contemptible lack of frankness and openmindedness about sex.The picture ends with the countess’s young daughter (Madeleine Potter) being saved from the dreadful respectability of her relatives for the way more fun bohemian life of her mother and nice Mr. Jackson.


Yet the film, also characteristically of Merchant-Ivory, really lacks the courage of its convictions.The countess is just a taxi-dancer. Though the awful family insists that “God will punish her” and that “she might as well be on the streets” if she ever offers her clients anything more than a dance, we never see it.And when she becomes the “centerpiece” of Mr. Jackson’s bar, he promises her that she won’t even have to dance – much.


There is a repeated belaboring of the point about how a young business associate of Mr. Jackson’s, unlike him,”fails to see what there is to see” and how, in particular, he can’t see the beauty of “all this” – meaning the bar. Mr. Jackson is blind, you see, while the young associate is apparently sighted. Get it?


Unfortunately, the beauty of the bar rather escapes me as well; nor is there very much of an attempt on Mr. Ivory’s part to display it.There is some dancing, some singing, some jazz, and some “political tension” but not much to distinguish the place from any other nightclub so far as the viewer is concerned.


Even the countess’s duties as centerpiece seem to involve her in little but sitting around and smiling. She is beautiful enough, perhaps, but that doesn’t make “all this” beautiful, too – unless, perhaps, she is seen through the eyes of a visionary blind man in love.


For it is not giving anything away to note that the tragic blind man and the tragic countess are bound to “hook up,” as their grandchildren might indecorously have put it, in the end. As this comes nearly two hours and twenty minutes after the atmospheric but otherwise uneventful beginning, it’s not a moment too soon either, unless you like such posturings a lot more than I do.


jbowman@nysun.com


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