Return to the June 1997 A&E Preview Cover

Arts & Entertainment Preview -- June 1997 B Y   E L L A   T A Y L O R Baring It All at the Country House Other than to showcase a lovely Victorian country house, there was no compelling reason to bring Terrence McNally's talky hit play, Love! Valour! Compassion!, to the big screen. Still, Joe Mantello, who directed both the stage and the screen version, has fashioned a funny and affecting, if visually undemanding, film out of a work that's 90 percent banter and 10 percent philosophy. Alexander and the original cast (McNally himself wrote the screenplay.) The original off-Broadway cast returns, with the addition of Seinfeld's Jason Alexander, to play a group of gay men who gather for three Chekhovian weekends at the idyllic home of a choreographer friend. At least two of the men have AIDS, yet Love! Valour! Compassion! is more a rumination on the quandaries of love and friendship than a disease movie. Love in the shadow of AIDS, McNally suggests through the struggles of these men, is as fraught with human frailty as love outside it, though the disease compels a special inventiveness of the human spirit. McNally is candid about the specifics of gay culture--Alexander in particular gives a wonderfully flamboyant performance without ever lapsing into cliché--while underscoring the universality of the men's troubles. Granted, the playwright creates a rather pat moral universe with a well-worn conceit of twin brothers (both played by Tony Award-winning actor John Glover), one good, one bad. The evil twin is a direct descendant of the tortured men in The Boys in the Band, one of the first openly gay mainstream movies. Yet the pride and sympathy with which McNally treats his characters reminds us how far gay life and gay film have come since that bitterly self-lacerating film. Gold Standard Several years ago the director Victor Nunez made Ruby in Paradise, a small pearl of a film starring Ashley Judd as a young working-class Florida woman trying to make her way in the world. Nunez's latest film, Ulee's Gold, doesn't quite achieve the serene, elliptical assurance of that movie, but it comes close. Set in the tupelo marshes of the Florida panhandle, the movie stars Peter Fonda (lined, stooped, balding, and a far cry from Easy Rider) as Ulysses Jackson, a righteous but unforgiving beekeeper who's far happier among his honeycombs than around people. Ulee at peace tending his beehives Still, Ulee cares for his two granddaughters, Casey (Jessie Biel) and Penny (Vanessa Zima), who were left alone when their father, Jimmy (Tom Wood), went to jail and their mother, Helen (Christine Dunford), ran off with Jimmy's fellow thugs. When Ulee is called upon to retrieve the doped-up Helen from Jimmy's former accomplices, who have their own agenda for Ulee, his orderly, hermetically sealed life falls apart. Ulee's Gold doesn't need the heavy plotting or the symbolic Greek names (Ulysses, Penny, Helen) to prop up its project, which is to observe the density of Ulee's temperament in what he says and doesn't say, and what he does and doesn't do. In Nunez's work character is all, and though his people are always troubled, a deep repose that slows the heart works its way into his stories (there is real joy in watching Ulee move about his beehives) and brings to the moviegoer the same equivocal peace achieved by the characters. Ulee's Gold is a lovely film about a family repairing itself, and about the dignity of labor. Stayin' Alive, Japanese Style More often than not, dance movies are morality plays about the extraneous passions--love, lust, the drive to win--that people invest in performance, and how those involved are brought to love the activity for its own sake. The dancing duo So it is with Japanese writer and director Masayuki Suo's Shall We Dance?, a quietly goofy film (no Strictly Ballroom, this) about a suburban married accountant with a severe case of midlife ennui who signs up for ballroom-dancing classes in order to get closer to a beautiful but remote teacher with troubles of her own. You can see the crisis and the redemption of each coming a mile off (both must learn that life is with people, not with fantasies), but it hardly matters. The strength and charm of Shall We Dance? lie in its details--Suo's wry and puckish observation of the incongruities (and similarities) between the restrained formality of Japanese culture and the garish formality of ballroom dancing and its underlying commentary on the corrosive role of shame and embarrassment in Japanese life, both private and public. Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly. Go to ... Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.