Reviews

I had the good fortune to attend a world premiere tonight at the Chicago International Film Festival. I had no idea when I bought the ticket that it was a world premiere, nor did I know anything about the film other than what I could glean from the festival's summary. But this is the kind of film you go to a festival to find. It's a small, deeply felt, honest, and thoroughly engrossing movie about matters at the core of life. "The Be All And End All" is a very funny comedy, which is fairly amazing considering that it involves us in a story that from a distance we wouldn't find funny at all. It finds emotional payoffs without being too formulaic, and it gives you characters you care about.

The plot summary may well convince some people they wouldn't want to see this film, and this story may hit too much of a nerve at times for some. It's the story of a teenage boy from Liverpool, Robbie Wallace(Josh Bolt) who is diagnosed with a fatal illness, and decides that his last wish, what he wants most in the world, is to have sex. He is a teenage boy, after all. Naturally, he can't ask the medical establishment or his parents to help him with his wish, but his best mate Ziggy(Eugene Byrne) is determined to help his mate, in his words, "go out with a bang." As you may guess, arranging the details of this tryst prove rather difficult. It's hard enough being a teenage boy and wanting to ask a girl in your class out to a movie-- imagine trying to set this up, and you'll have some empathy for Ziggy's predicament.

In a less-intelligent movie, we'd only focus on the kids, and the hilarity of sexual misadventures, and we'd get an exercise in funny bad taste. Here, though, even with the current of sorrow that runs throughout the film, what we get is a joy. We can see that Ziggy really would go this far for his best friend, not simply because of the strength of Eugene Byrne's remarkable performance(according to the director, this kid has never acted before), but because the story gives us real insight into his life at home-- his father walked out on his family years ago, while he and his mother have reached that point nearly every teenage boy reaches with his mother at some point where neither talks to the other well about anything. We see the pain Robbie's parents are going through, not through long, histrionic scenes, but with looks, silences, bad choices, and one genuinely shocking moment of emotional explosion. We can see the decency in a children's ward nurse(Liza Tarbuck) who learns what's going on pretty quickly, and has decisions to make on exactly what she can allow. In short, we get a movie we can believe in, one that makes us laugh and moves us in equal measure.

I hope this film gets a wide release, and I hope it finds the wider audience it deserves. I was grateful to see it.

There's almost no point in commenting on "The Big Lebowski"-- there's no way of summing up exactly what makes this movie so tremendously entertaining to the people that get it, and there's no way of convincing the people that don't that they're just stark raving mad. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to say something here, as I've insisted on several occasions that friends and relations watch this film, and no one I've recommended it to has complained yet.

I have a theory, which is probably complete hooey, about the genesis of this film. For years, the Coen brothers had made well-reviewed films that were usually overlooked by the Academy. Once "Fargo" broke through and earned them their deserved degree of industry acclaim, the Coens had a degree of freedom they'd never really had before. So, when they went to make a film to follow up what was considered a masterpiece, they chose the silliest subject matter they could come up with-- a noir comedy starring a unemployed stoner named Jeffrey Lebowski, a business tycoon of the same name, a porn king, a feminist conceptual artist, a wayward young wife, a buddy who can never get a word in edgewise, a gang of German nihilists, and a best friend named Walter Sobchak, who doesn't so much have flashbacks to the Vietnam War as he simply refuses to acknowledge that the war ever ended. Oh, and I left out the bowling pederast named Jesus.

Never before, and never since, have the Coens made a film with this much sheer, unadulterated glee. As has been said many times in earlier comments, John Goodman's performance as Walter is an award-worthy amalgamation of loyalty, hyper-rationalism and homicidal rage. Jeff Bridges, as the unemployed Lebowski(he prefers "the Dude"), has never been funnier(the scene where he tries and fails to throw a cigarette out of his car window is especially brilliant) as he aimlessly navigates the Dude's way through a kidnapping plot that is anything but routine. The Coens pepper the script with some of the sharpest dialogue they've ever come up with, and they're fearless in simply following their storytelling instincts wherever they lead. Any film that includes a musical sequence set to Kenny Rogers and the Second Edition and features both Julianne Moore in a Viking costume and Saddam Hussein as a bowling-alley attendant has more than its share of guts.

Do my comments explain why this film has become the cult classic that it is? Of course not-- if I could write that well, I'd have written "The Big Lebowksi" myself. At one point, the film's narrator, a cowboy played by Sam Elliott(darn, left him out too) is trying to describe The Dude, and he says something like, "The Dude was...man, I lost my train of thought." It's ridiculous as narration, but it's also instructive-- this is an entire movie that quite often loses its train of thought. And it's all the richer for it.

In fact, while it is well-acted, it isn't at all a successful film in my opinion, because it bails out on a storyline it doesn't have the guts to follow through on. Let me explain this in detail, because I want to be clear about this-- the people who made this film are exceptional artists(especially its late, great cinematographer Conrad L. Hall), and they're certainly not careless people. But in this case, I think they blew it.

The very first scene of this film shows a videotape recording of a girl being asked by her boyfriend if she would like him to kill her father. She replies, "Yes. Would you?" Now, why is this scene there? It is repeated and shown in its full context later, in which the boy later says, somewhat unconvincingly, that he was kidding. But in showing this scene twice, the movie creates a very real expectation in any viewer who is reasonably well-versed in the mechanics of the mystery genre.

That's what "American Beauty" is, ultimately-- it is the story of a murder, and of a murder victim. You can tell a murder story in many ways, but usually they're just variations of the following two plotlines. You can either make the story about finding out who the killer is, or you can make the killer known early, and make the story about hunting that person down. "American Beauty" sets up the expectation, by repeating that scene, that Lester Burnham, who tells us in the first scene he'll be dead by the end of the movie, will be murdered, and that these two kids will kill him. Part of the intrigue of watching "American Beauty" after the repeated scene is in learning how much you like both Lester Burnham and his daughter and her boyfriend, and in hoping against hope that the result the movie has promised won't happen. But then, it doesn't. The movie bails out, and pins the crime on the one wholly unsympathetic character in the movie, a character that has little or no dimension until the end and no real motivation to commit the crime he does.

"American Beauty" cheats the audience out of the family tragedy it promised from the very first frame, in order to give us an easy villain to hiss. How am I so certain "American Beauty" went wrong? In an interview with "Creative Screenwriter" magazine, screenwriter Alan Ball said that in his original draft, the kids committed the murder, but in the aftermath of several killing sprees by American teenagers, he and the studio thought that was just too hot a button to press in this story, and so they changed the ending. With this film's obvious intelligence and style, I would have liked to have seen it follow through with its intentions, and give us the tough, tragic story it wants to tell. But it doesn't, and thereby, as good as it is in many moments, it fails.

No disrespect to the achingly elegant prose of E.M. Forster, but the last chapter of his novel simply cannot compare to this film's last shot, of a pair of lovers in a pensione in Florence, finally with their view of the Arno. As for the rest of this brilliant adaptation, it is populated with actors so perfectly cast it's as if they'd been invented for the roles-- Julian Sands as the Edwardian bohemian George Emerson, Helena Bonham-Carter, radiant as Lucy Honeychurch, Denholm Elliott, once again stealing every scene he's in, and Daniel Day-Lewis as the priggish Cecil Vyse, in a performance so self-consciously stiff he looks as though he were taken off the cover of the New Yorker. It's romantic, funny, stylish and impassioned. I first saw this film when it was released, and even at a young age, I knew I'd fallen in love. Twenty years later, I'm still in love with it.