the 1980s - the 1990s - film reviews - theater reviews
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April 10, 1995 No Photos
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STANLEY KAUFFMANN ON
FILMS
MODEST FLAME, VIOLENT FEVERArtistic daring takes different forms. Usually it's through unconventional material or style--sometimes both. Circle of Friends (Savoy) dares in still another way: by being utterly conventional. It risks a familiar situation, predictable developments, absolutely predictable good people and bad people. It places all its reliance on charm.That's a dangerous bet, particularly with a film set in Ireland. To be charming in Ireland is like being histrionic in Italy; if you're going to make it an issue, you'd better be particularly good at it because it's a national characteristic. Well, Circle of Friends wins its bet. Against considerable odds. Just glance at the story. Andrew Davies' s screenplay, from a Maeve Binchy novel, is about a girl who is an ugly duckling and who remains one but who nevertheless gets the swan. Benny (Bernadette) is the least attractive of three girl friends in a Kilkenny village, but it's Benny who, at first and at last, wins Jack, the handsomest boy around. Not without travail, of course, including the pregnancy of Nan, the prettiest of the girls, for which Jack is falsely held responsible. And not without a drooling suitor for Benny- -Sean, who works for her father and who, while pursuing Benny, is also robbing her father. But all ends well, of course, with just enough incredibility to make it a quite satisfactory tale. The telling of the tale is smooth, except for some of the editing. Benny and Jack both go to Dublin to Trinity College. She has to come home by bus every night, as her parents order; Jack stays in town. And every time we shift from the Kilkenny village to Dublin, or back, the editor gives us a shot of a bus or a car on a country road. It gets a bit mechanical. The filmmakers might have trusted us after a while to understand that we were in one place or the other. But the people, except for the ratty Sean, are lovely. I don't know Binchy's novel, but the dialogue--fresh and frank and earthily witty- -kept reminding me of Edna O'Brien's early novel, The Country Girls. (The film is set in 1957, which is just about the period of O'Brien' s book.) The director, Pat O'Connor, who did A Month in the Country with Kenneth Branagh, has chosen his cast well and has tickled the best out of them. Minnie Driver, known on bbc-tv, is Benny, and she does that difficult but rewarding thing: she plays a girl who thinks herself homely and who is in fact no beauty, and still she makes us understand completely why the male catch of the neighborhood would want her. Chris O'Donnell, who plays Jack, must be irritating to a lot of young Irish actors. He's American, born in Illinois, familiar here as Al Pacino's young pal in Scent of a Woman and will be Robin in a forthcoming Batman. O'Connor chose him over native possibilities and had him coached in the right Irish accent; and O'Donnell more than persuades. Benny's two close friends are the appealing Geraldine O'Rawe and Saffron Burrows. Poor Alan Cumming has the drudgery of playing Sean, drawn as so unsavory a wretch that even Dickens might have relented a little. Colin Firth is a different sort of dastard, the local Protestant gentry who has his will of a girl and, when she is "caught," tries to buy her off. Circle of Friends keeps its word. Like an old-fashioned theater program, it tells you early on who and what each of its characters is--and so they prove to be, enjoyably. Something more than a bonus is Kenneth MacMillan's cinematography. (He did Branagh's Henry V.) MacMillan does exactly what he's supposed to do with the Irish landscape: he makes us wish we were there. For some reason known only to him and his God, Dustin Hoffman has decided to be Harrison Ford. For instance, toward the end of Outbreak (Warner Bros.), Hoffman does the following in the course of one day: he flies by helicopter from northern California to San Francisco; persuades a government official to give him information about a freighter; by helicopter finds the freighter on a foggy day; jumps from the aircraft to the ship; fortuitously discovers a clue about an infected monkey; climbs back on the helicopter (we don't see this but it must have happened); proceeds to a home in California where he induces a little girl to lure the escaped monkey out of the woods; then transports the monkey back to a lab in a stricken town so that a serum can be prepared from the monkey's blood in time to save Hoffman's wife and the people of the town. I forgot to mention that Hoffman is a colonel in the u.s. Army Medical Corps, working on disease control. (His chief assistant, a virologist, happens to know how to pilot a helicopter and flies Hoffman around that day against orders, evading armed interception.) With all this bustle, Hoffman doesn't get the chance, or need, to act: he just does things, like Ford. The above is only part of a hyperventilated plot based on a threat that is much in the news these days: plagues, which may in certain hands be deliberately spread and against which there is no known defense. In speed of spread and of fatality, we are told, aids can't compare. As a prologue we are shown how an African village is bombed to bits because it is infected with a highly contagious virus for which no cure in known. With this forewarning, Outbreak pins its drama on a presidential order to do the same thing to a California town for the same reason. The hokum of convenient junctures and derring-do action doesn't do much for the seriousness of the theme. I couldn't help longing for- -at least as I remember it--Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950), in which two crooks kill an immigrant for his money and unknowingly catch a disease the man brought with him. The police thus have a particularly urgent reason to catch the criminals, who may unintentionally kill many more. I remember the Kazan film as more lean and taut and scary. This whooped-up screenplay was co-written by Lawrence Dworet who, after eighteen years of medical practice, has evidently decided (like Michael Crichton) to turn his experience to scare-flick profit. Another interesting point from the press notes. The director was Wolfgang Petersen, who made the far superior In the Line of Fire. Petersen studied film at an academy in his native Germany where one of his teachers was the exceptional cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Guess who shot this picture. I wish their collaboration--their first--had come out better. ~~~~~~~~ By STANLEY KAUFFMANN Inset Article FILMS WORTH SEEING Martha and I. Czechoslovakia before the war; the Nazi intrusion into a loving marriage between a Jewish doctor and his German wife. Rich with sad remembrance. (Reviewed 3/13/95) Mina Tannenbaum. Another Jewish story--after the war in Paris. A graceful, lyrical, shadowed account of deep friendship between two girls growing up. (3/27/95) Once Were Warriors. Ghettoized Maori life in a New Zealand city. The patterns are familiar, but the specifics are revealing. Fine acting. (3/27/95) Through the Olive Trees. An Iranian director investigates the lives of a young couple who have been in a previous film of his. Delightfully quiet, engaging. (3/20/95)
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