Movie: About Last Night... (Edward Zwick, 1986)
What a bummer! And an unexpected one at that! I have liked, often very much, everything I've seen from David Mamet, both as a writer and as a director. But this is a completely tedious film that takes the laziest stereotypes about how men and women think about sex, love and relationships, exaggerates them to the wildest degree, presents this as authentic, and then laments the sad state of affairs. Its only highlight is the opening scene, which gives Jim Belushi a brilliant monologue he hits out of the park, He describes a one night stand to his friend Danny (Rob Lowe) with flippant cruelty, misogyny and callousness, proudly emphasising his uncaring insensibility. It's a great portrayal of a very specific kind of asshole that the film quickly shies away from, choosing to depict Belushi's Bernie as a confused oversexed idiot with women issues who deep down means well. He is contrasted with Elizabeth Perkins' Joan, a walking stereotype of a (boringly written) man-hating feminist. The film condescendingly/disingeniously doesn't hate either but pats them on their back for being their gender.
Joan and Bernie are actually the sidekicks to Danny and Debbie (Demi Moore), who fall in love, move in together and then have all kinds of contrived problems, based around their expectations of what it means to love and live together. Their fights are more believable then their courtship, as they have nothing in common except for sex. But the sex scenes feel perfunctory too, because the film wants to believe that sex is the only thing that can bring men and women together and wants to pretend it finds that disheartening. Mamet and Zwick keep building similar strawmen throughout the film, leaving Moore and Lowe understandably stranded. At certain points their performances get uncontrollably shouty, but it's unclear what else they could have done with this material, or how their characters could be anything but tiresome.
Ultimately, even the truest scene, the New Year's Eve breakup, is ruined, because of the film's unbending commitment to keep its characters in the narrow molds it has created for them. The scene wants us to side with Debbie against Danny, and to be seen as feminist for doing so, but seems unable to imagine that Debbie could prefer to be single rather than fight for 'love' in an unhappy relationship, or that Danny could have valid reasons for being unhappy. This being the 80's, the film does at least know to make scenes of desperate people running at night on brightly lit wet streets look appealing. Similarly, a shot of a naked Moore, standing partly in the shadow, partly in the light, is more charged than any of the sex scenes. And a shot in which Debbie and Danny are walking along Lake Michigan at sunset, with the skyscrapers of Chicago in the background, makes you want to be immediately transported to the same spot. As long as you don't actually meet any of the characters.
No comments:
Post a Comment