Indie Films Have Made Inroads, But Big Blockbusters Still Reign
With movies such as “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Dead Man Walking” and “Sling Blade” earning Oscar attention the past few years, American independent cinema has reached the mainstream.
Films once relegated only to the film-festival circuit - and, subsequently, to the Magic Lanterns of the world - finally were being booked into suburban multiplexes. Until recently, a new era of film appreciation seemed to be upon us.
Note the key word “seemed.” For chances are good that the success of “Titanic,” now more than $400 million and counting, will put a stop to any growing embrace of smaller film.
Still, there always will be a market for serious, independently made movies. There are a lot of theaters out there, even in Spokane, and there’s room for more than the next “Titanic,” the next “Palmetto,” the next “Flubber.”
Just keep this in mind: If big doesn’t necessarily mean bad, then small isn’t a given good. More than a few examples of independent product are merely interesting, albeit greatly flawed, movie experiments.
Take two of the films that become available on home video this week. Both have good as well as bad points, and each garnered a range of critical acceptance.
“Eve’s Bayou,” for example, made some critical Top 10 lists for best films of 1997. “The Myth of Fingerprints” made some worst-of lists.
I rate them both only slightly above average.
“Eve’s Bayou” is filmmaker Kasi Lemmons’ fictional memoir of 1962 Louisiana. Her protagonist, 10-yearold Eve (Jurnee Smollett), competes for her loving father’s attentions with a neediness that, ultimately, she believes causes his death.
But there’s much more going on than a pre-teen could possibly understand. Her father, as played by Samuel L. Jackson, is a respected doctor who specializes in giving his women patients extra special attention - if you know what I mean.
“Eve’s Bayou” ends up being a study of family connections, and disconnections, much of which is intriguing. But Lemmons can’t just stop there. She has to add some portended deaths, a bit of voodoo and an overheated performance by Diahann Carroll. The sum of all this merely detracts from Lemmons’ simple but powerful central theme: Innocence is corrupted when it is propelled too quickly into the spidery maze of adult compulsion.
“The Myth of Fingerprints” also is intensely family-oriented. Directed by Bart Freundlich, it involves the pain that is passed down in even the most normal-seeming families.
But normalcy, clearly, is relative. For as protagonist Warren (Noah Wyle) returns home at Thanksgiving for the first time in three years, we slowly but gradually see what pushed him away. It comes out in the family’s inability to communicate, and it comes out in each family member’s idiosyncracies - from the hostility of a sister (played by Julianne Moore) to the controlling manipulations of a father (Roy Scheider).
These performances comprise most of the film’s power. Conversely, the film’s greatest weakness is its inability - or unwillingness - to give enough information about why these people are the way they are.
It’s one thing to adopt a title for your film that seems to say that longing and sadness don’t always have obvious origins; it is a fact many people in therapy can’t point to any overt circumstances (sexual abuse, rape, physical or mental disability, etc.) as the cause of their emotional suffering.
It’s quite another, however, to effectively portray the mostly invisible fingerprints of emotional abuse that condemns many people to lives of quiet desperation. On this level, at least, Freundlich fails.
Eve’s Bayou
Rated R **-1/2
The Myth of Fingerprints
Rated R **-1/2
The week’s other major releases:
Peter Pan
***-1/2
Originally released in 1953, this Disney effort was a product of that studio’s golden era. Based on the J.M. Barrie play, it features some of Disney’s most pristine cel animation. And as storytelling, it almost stands up to the 1960 live-action Mary Martin version. Not rated (but equivalent to a G).
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
(no stars)
There are at least two reasons why you might be tempted to see this wretched little exercise in would-be horror. The first is its cast, which includes Matthew McConaughey (“Amistad”) and Rene Zellweger (“Jerry Maguire”) in their pre-star days. The second is simple curiosity. After all, this Tobe Hooper-inspired series began well, with the cult director’s 1974 on-the-cheap flick offering chills and nausea in equal parts. But even Hooper couldn’t make the first sequel work, and by the time the third installment came around, a certain jokiness had set in. The jokes are still around this time, too, but they do little to defray the misogynistic, violent images that aren’t so much horrible as they are simply sick. There’s no storyline to follow, hardly anybody to care about, no point to speak of and, ultimately, the film just ends as if the cast and crew just got tired and quit. All you have instead is a bunch of running and screaming and the trademark growling of that gas-powered butcher’s helper. The result is boredom, a horror flick’s kiss of death. Rated R (for wretched).
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