|
 Of
Ice and Men
By
Ann Morrow
The
Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition
Directed
by George Butler
Renowned explorer Sir Ern- !est
Shackleton, whose ill-fated attempt to become the first man
to cross the Antarctic was overshadowed by World War I, was
the ultimate team player, keeping his 27-man crew from succumbing
to infighting and insanity through nearly two years of unrelenting
peril. Undoubtedly, Shackleton would have nothing but admiration
for the documentary The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary
Antarctic Expedition. The film achieves an enthralling
narrative power through the combined efforts of director George
Butler (Pumping Iron), screenwriter Caroline Alexander
(adapting her book of the same name), historian Roland Huntford
(a natural-born dramatist) and expedition photographer Frank
Hurley, whose film footage and photographs give The Endurance
a thrilling verité.
At one point, drifting helplessly in a lifeboat and surrounded
by nothing but ice, hunger and despair, one of the men notes
in his diary that the explorers witnessed sights of exotic
beauty. Many of these sights were captured by Hurley, who
was brought along to document the voyage for commercial gain
should the expedition be a success. A survivor of two near-fatal
attempts to reach the South Pole, Shackleton knew better than
anyone how slim the chances for success would be. Yet the
“last great journey of the heroic age of polar exploration”
quickly turned into a disaster beyond even his experienced
imagination. For viewers of this harrowing adventure tale,
the obstacles are almost beyond belief.
Less than a day’s sail from the Antarctic shoreline, Shackleton’s
ship, The Endurance, was trapped in solid ice by an
unexpected plummet in temperature. After 10 months of grueling
deprivation, with only their beloved sled dogs to alleviate
the monotony, the sailors were forced to abandon ship when
pack ice crushed the schooner like tinderwood. Almost as pulverizing
as the ice was the demoralization of utter failure. Hurley’s
film snippets give way to haunting still photos and then stark
snapshots as the situation grows more dire and Hurley relinquishes
his equipment. But being stranded without hope of rescue is
only the beginning of the expedition’s ordeals, which are
evocatively narrated by Liam Neeson.
Actors reading from the crew’s remarkable diary entries bring
their hardships to life, and convey Shackleton’s indomitable
optimism as he makes one life-or-death decision after another.
The Irish-born leader eventually embarked on a hopeless mission:
to cross 800 miles of dangerous, uncharted ocean in an open
dinghy and land on a forbidding island. The story, which makes
A Perfect Storm look like a tempest in teacup, has
been told many times, first with the theatrical release of
Hurley’s film footage in 1919. But it’s a legend for a reason,
and one that is even more riveting in the age of recliner-seat
travel. Butler cuts straight to the chase even while enriching
the tale with new information and brushes of lyricism, such
as the present-day shots of sea birds in flight that underscore
the expedition’s tortuous attempts to escape from the ice
floe.
The crew’s astounding tenacity and courage is intensified
by the deft psychological portraits of individual members,
augmented by the reminiscences of their descendents. “Authority
meant nothing to him,” says the grandson of Henry McNish,
a carpenter who mutinously challenged one of Shackleton’s
strategies. But McNish’s rebellious nature had a silver lining
of ingenuity, a crucial factor in the outcome of “the greatest
boat journey in modern maritime history.”
The soundtrack of keening pipes and ominous drums adds immeasurably
but unobtrusively to the film’s moody, mythic ambience. The
survivors were not greeted as heroes by war-torn England,
and Shackleton died without ever reaching the South Pole.
Yet as The Endurance triumphantly proves, some achievements
are infinitely more memorable than success.
Woman
to Woman
Kissing
Jessica Stein
Directed
by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
New York City is full of eligible bachelors, but Jessica Stein
(Jennifer Westfeldt) can’t seem to get a date. Well, not a
decent date, anyway, as she suffers through a parade of geeks,
schmucks and self-involved losers unable to even make pleasant
dinner conversation. Jessica is sliding toward 30, and her
loving, annoyingly insistent mom (Tovah Feldshuh) is putting
on the heat regarding marriage. What’s a nice Jewish girl
to do? In this picture, she tries dating women.
Hooked by finding a favorite quote from Rilke in a Village
Voice “women seeking women” personal ad, Jessica makes
a date with Helen (Heather Juergensen), an assistant director
of a hip modern-art gallery. Jessica assumes she’s strictly
lesbian, but Helen is just plain horny, and placed the ad
because she’s bored with her current string of male lovers.
(In one of the script’s many nice touches, the German poetry
was strictly a gimmick dreamt up by one of Helen’s male friends.)
Jessica immediately tries to bail out, but Helen, intrigued,
keeps the drinks flowing until the two hit it off.
Not enough to immediately fall into bed, however. Jessica’s
sexual skittishness is a joke the film almost drags out too
long, but the payoff is worth the wait. (It is also a nice
character detail that is unfortunately, and conveniently,
forgotten later in the film.) The prurient should not get
too excited; it’s where the two finally have sex, not
the sex itself, that’s so satisfying. From this point on,
it’s all about love and family. Will Helen’s downtown friends
accept her dating an uptown straight girl? Will Jessica’s
traditional middle-class family accept Helen?
Talk about a “high concept” idea for a movie. It’s also somewhat
daring, a romance between two women who are not self- identified
lesbians. The idea that sexual preference and emotional intimacy
might not be set in psychological concrete is upsetting and/or
preposterous to a great percentage of the population. (It
even seems to scare the filmmakers.) The two leads also happened
to write the film; Juergensen and Westfeldt obviously were
aware of the trouble they were courting, and deal with one
or two of the prickly political issues head-on.
Unfortunately, they shy away from offending anyone—except,
possibly, those who feel that the filmmakers aimed for the
level of Woody Allen in his Annie Hall period, but
only ended up outpacing the Nora Ephron of You’ve Got Mail.
Still, there are almost enough real moments of humor (and,
occasionally, pathos) in the screenplay to balance out the
atrociously cookie-cutter ending.
—Shawn
Stone
Judd
and Jury
High
Crimes
Directed
by Carl Franklin
Claire Kubik is in quite a pickle. Not too long ago, she thought
she had the perfect life: She was on track to become a partner
at her law firm, and she and her doting husband were doing
their darndest to make a baby. But then hubby got busted,
and she discovered he had another life before they met. It
seems he’s a former Marine who went AWOL and forged a new
identity to evade prosecution for murders he insists he didn’t
commit. Claire decides to defend her husband, but to do so,
she’ll have to navigate the labyrinth of military justice,
with which she’s utterly unfamiliar.
And so begins High Crimes, a competent but mostly forgettable
thriller directed by unpredictable journeyman Carl Franklin,
whose résumé includes everything from the atmospheric mystery
Devil in a Blue Dress to the disease-themed weepie
One True Thing. As has been the case with most of the
director’s pictures, High Crimes is intelligent, well-acted
and more or less compelling, but it wants for specialness.
For no particular reason, this movie reteams Ashely Judd and
Morgan Freeman, who costarred in a similarly average thriller
called Kiss The Girls a few years back. (Never mind
that Freeman already reprised his Kiss the Girls character,
detective Alex Cross, in a Judd-free picture called Along
Came a Spider.) Judd plays Claire with the same steely
resolve and reined-in vulnerability that she’s brought to
a handful of other performances as wronged women, and Freeman
breezes through his clichéd role as a recovering-alcoholic
lawyer. As in the picture itself, there’s not much in these
performances we haven’t seen before.
The movie does boast an entertainingly twisty plot, penned
by screenwriters Yuri Zeltser and Cary Bickley from Joseph
Finder’s novel. Once Claire discovers that her husband (Jim
Caviezel) isn’t the man she thought him to be, she ventures
into a netherworld of conspiracies, cover-ups, assassination
attempts and military skullduggery. Franklin produces plenty
of All the President’s Men-style suspense while keeping
everything tame enough that the movie received a PG-13 rating
even with car chases and assaults and gunplay.
Because the movie is almost entirely driven by Judd’s character,
pretty much everyone else operates in her shadow, including
Freeman, whose best moments occur during a late-movie sequence
showing his character at risk of falling off the wagon. Only
Adam Scott, endearing as a green U.S.M.C. lawyer who helps
Claire, makes a real impression among the other players, and
it’s particularly odd to see Amanda Peet—groomed as a star
after showy turns in movies like The Whole Nine Yards—reduced
to playing curvy window dressing as Claire’s ne’er-do-well
sister.
—Peter
Hanson
Somethin’
Stupid
Big
Trouble
Directed
by Barry Sonnenfeld
Big
Trouble is one of the most consistently funny comedies
in some time, but it’s not an especially good movie. Rather,
it’s a somewhat random series of goofy gags held together
by a fish story of a plot, and it benefits from the presence
of several wonderful comedians. It also benefits from the
fact that 85 minutes after the first frame pops on the screen,
it’s all over. Sometimes, brevity is the savior of so-so comedy.
Based on a novel by syndicated humorist Dave Barry, the movie
was supposed to be released last fall, but it was tabled following
Sept. 11 because of a plot twist involving a bomb brought
on board a plane. Aside from the actual scene of crooks smuggling
the bomb through airport security—which will strike every
viewer as false and might even make some folks queasy—nothing
in the movie is particularly offensive.
Ostensible lead Tim Allen plays Eliot Arnold, an ex-columnist
who now works in advertising. He spends part of the movie
trying to improve his relationship with his mischievous teenage
son (Ben Foster), part of it romancing the sexy mother (Rene
Russo) of one of his son’s friends, and part of it racing
to stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Miami. Every other
character enjoys a similarly hectic agenda in this fast-moving
farce, much of which takes place on one insane night.
Some of the characters who drift in and out of the titular
big trouble include a pair of jaded cops (Patrick Warburton
and Janeane Garofalo), a corrupt business executive (Stanley
Tucci), a pair of moronic small-time thieves (Tom Sizemore
and Johnny Knoxville), two big-city hit men who hate Miami
(Dennis Farina and Jack Kehler), and a dippy homeless man
with a thing for Fritos (Jason Lee). Four or five other characters
get just as much screen time as the aforementioned ones do,
but you get the idea: Sonnenfeld cuts back and forth between
a dozen different subplots so that whenever the pace of one
storyline slackens, he can liven up the movie by shifting
to a different locale and a new crisis. The director’s aptitude
for deadpan delivery, screwball pacing and complex logistics
serves Big Trouble well.
As with those in Barry’s columns, the jokes in this picture
are obvious and occasionally absurd, but they’re organic to
the outlandish subject matter. Notwithstanding the couple
of moments when things get excessively silly—such as when
escaped goats cause problems during a traffic jam—Sonnenfeld
takes Barry’s lead and ensures that the jokes grow out of
the characters and the situations they create. What’s more,
the director seems to share Barry’s joy in skewering the stupid.
So if marveling at the human capacity for idiocy is your idea
of fun, Big Trouble should keep you chuckling for 85
brisk minutes.
—P.H.
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