Glenn Heath Jr.
Part fable, part Science Fiction, Joe Dante’s Explorers contains a simplistic and childish worldview, pushing it’s potential weighty material under a mountain of pubescent melodrama. The story of three kids (Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, and James Presson) who build a spaceship from the blueprints of a dream, might be Dante’s least interesting picture. The film completely loses its footing when the trio ascend into the heavens following their call to adventure, only to find their alien counterparts.
It’s an interesting premise – the parallels and connections and miscommunications between two groups of kids from different planets converging over mass entertainment – but the execution continuously disappoints with the dated set design and special effects. Being a big budget blockbuster, it’s understandable why Dante relies on the most modern technologies of the time, but a more subtle approach to this sequence would connect better with the coming-of-age narrative of the first half.
Explorers has a lot to say about negative imagery, repetition patters of television, and human fear of the unknown, but the main characters feel too young and naive to realize the gravity of these implications, making their journey somewhat moot. Dante’s best films create a binary between the adult world and that of children, showing an inherent generational conflict between innovative progress and repressive stasis. Explorers lacks such a dynamic theme, except on the fringes when Dante cuts away from the children and briefly references their clueless parents. For the first time, Dante’s critiques don’t feel warranted, or fair, as if his target is too vast and vague to give a human face.
Shot on the Universal set that now permanently calls itself Wisteria Lane, Joe Dante’s The ‘burbs uses its seemingly peaceful suburban locale as a hunting ground for snoopy neighbors and secretive activity, where passive aggressive tactics and hidden agendas produce a wonderfully dark cinematic mosaic of collective doubt. Dante is a master at blurring genres and tones and The ‘burbs ranks as one of his strangest mixtures, gracefully walking the line between slapstick comedy and horror film.
A small group of male neighbors (Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, and Rick Ducommun) awake from their mind-numbing routines when The Klopeks move in and raise concerns with their odd activity and complete isolation. The opening act is especially brilliant, introducing each character with a flair for the theatrical, isolating their strengths and weaknesses through sly camera movements and music parallels. In a film like The ‘burbs, space plays a crucial role, so the proximity between houses, lawns, and the connective street seems to constrict as the story progresses. Figurative and literal skeletons reside beneath the ground, within walls, even in car trunks, giving the film plenty of social subtext along with scary thrills. Even in the most benign residential spaces, shady dealings grow like weeds.
The ‘burbs subverts genre conventions by masking dark themes within confined locales, forcing the viewer to think about the horrific grey areas constantly surrounding us. In all of his best films, Dante uncovers the wars of everyday life; between people at odds, ideologies in conflict, and expectations of closure. Corey Feldman’s punk teenager Ricky knows best watching the entire finale from his front porch, flanked by slacker friends, loud music, and lawn chairs, only to proclaim, “We’re here to watch the show.” For Joe Dante, youth often equates to wisdom, and adulthood only spells distress and toil.
For me, it’s impossible to discuss Gregory Nava’s brilliant El Norte, a sweeping saga of two siblings fleeing social repression for the States, without first mentioning Alambrista!, Robert Young’s treatment of a Mexican worker crossing the border into California looking for a better life. Stylistically the two are as different as night and day – Nava invokes magical realism as a template to heighten the horrors of the journey north, while Young depends on absurdist and surrealist elements to illuminate the brutal nature of his hero’s trek. But both films see the same contradictions, abuses, and tragedies inherent in the Latino struggle within the American capitalist machine. The sacrifices these outsider characters make, both physical, psychological, and moral, deepen the complexity of their situation without demonizing the American collective. The real villain of both films is the situation itself, where people are put into impossible scenarios, forced to choose one family member over another, a job over love, personal survival over familial growth.
Nava’s film in particular displays a devastating sense of clarity in regards to the tragedy of it’s characters Rosa and Enrique, a brother and sister exiled from their Indian village in the lush, foggy mountains of Guatemala by the threat of a fascist Military regime. El Norte begins with the destruction of their family, the direct cause of Rosa and Enrique’s plight, graphically displayed when their revolutionary Father is ambushed by soldiers and beheaded to invoke collective fear. It’s almost Herzogian when Enrique finds his father’s head hanging from a branch, the dead eyes staring back with the menacing epic backdrop overwhelming the frame. Nava introduces both the themes of regret and pragmatism in one stunning moment.
As Rosa and Enrique travel through Tijuana, then up to Los Angeles, the journey is expectedly rough – they’re double-crossed by a Coyote, then forced to crawl through horrific miles of sewer pipes to pass into America (the film’s most memorable and frightening scene). But more importantly and unlike Young’s film, El Norte shows the siblings make good on their opportunity in Los Angeles, learning English, working somewhat rewarding jobs, only to have the illusion of their success crumble under the prejudices of their surroundings. This dichotomy makes the film a two-pronged attack on the immigration issue still raging today. On the one hand it’s hell on Earth to get to America, but exponentially worse when consumed and defeated by the petty jealousies and betrayals of your own brethren in the same situation. In this regard, El Norte indicts a certain negative sensibility more so than any superficial groupings of race or social status. Rats come in all shapes and sizes, all creeds and colors, and El Norte shows how debilitating the disease of doubt can be.
The art of listening has never been more essential than in Louis Malle, Wallace Shawn, and Andre Gregory’s masterpiece My Dinner With Andre. The structure – two old friends catching up over dinner – is deceptively simple in nature, but the subtext of their words and responses resonates a great deal of complex emotions and nuances. Shawn’s prologue through the grimy streets of NYC gives just enough information to lay the current physical and mental landscape of his life, tapping into the collective angst of a man just trying to survive from day to day. But when Andre shows up, all pre-conceived notions seem to melt away, disappearing into the textured walls and shadows of the restaurant, and the film opens up for the possibility of discourse to emerge. The two men cover a range of philosophical highs and lows, revealing a shared sense of identity as fractured artists even when their ideas are as different as night and day. My Dinner With Andre creates a dichotomy between the rush of everyday life and the calm, slow ballet of concise communication in a specific temporal space, as if it’s necessary to section off time for human interaction in order to respect your own existence. No matter what you believe, going it alone, keeping your voice hidden from the world defeats the purpose of being human, and the surprising clarity of honestly sharing something special with a friend or a loved one becomes universal, even essential to our own survival. Life resides in the pauses.
Before the comedic and weighty social commentaries My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Stephen Frears dealt with the hierarchical power struggles of fringe characters on an instinctual level in his sun-drenched Gangster film The Hit. Traditional genre archetypes – the hit man, the mole, the apprentice – are boiled down to the barest essentials, then thrown together to simmer under the harsh heat of the Spanish landscape. This scenario pits each character against the element of time, whether it’s John Hurt’s veteran assassin attempting to teach Tim Roth’s naive upstart or Terrence Stamp’s stool pigeon facing inevitable death, all vying for control of a botched kidnapping that ripples outward and seemingly touches all aspects of the locale. Frears also wonderfully juxtaposes the blinding light and endless openness of the desolate countryside with the dangerous and dark menace of Gangster film motifs, most importantly betrayal. The Hit takes on an ambiguous, almost metaphysical stance toward the weaknesses of its characters, men and women traversing a deadly path riddled with deception and sudden pin point violence. Fate catches up with you in the end, but you’ll see it coming a mile away.
If anything, Peter Weir’s uneven but ambitious film The Mosquito Coast offers a glaring reminder of how good an actor Harrison Ford can be. No doubt that in the past decade Ford’s star has fallen to almost inconsequential status, a shame considering he was once a rare movie star who could lose himself in great character roles. As Allie Fox, a brilliant but misguided inventor who shuns mainstream American life and takes his family to live in the jungle, Ford brings a combination of manic charm and subtle unease to a character on the brink of self-destruction. Allie relishes in his own genius and can’t imagine why anyone else would listen to dissenting opinions, a tragic flaw that reveals the insecurities and manias brimming beneath his dashing good looks and eccentric charisma. It’s a complete performance ranging from distilled moments of reflection to brutal outburst aimed at those who love Allie the most; his dedicated family. The final scene resonates with a calm sense of dread and regret for both Allie and his oldest son played to perfection by a young River Phoenix, a moment drenched in sadness toward what could have been. The film itself becomes consumed by Ford’s performance and offers little else in terms of dynamic narrative threads, however this one man show contains enough scene chewing for multiple films and offers a surprising counterbalance to Ford’s other great performance of the 1980’s in Witness, not surprisingly another Peter Weir film.
