"Deconstructing Harry" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Ormonde Stillorgan, UCI Tallaght, Dublin; Kino, Cork; Omniplex, Galway
After the sweetness and light of his delightful souffle of musical and romance in Everyone Says I Love You, Woody Allen serves up a caustic cocktail of black comedy and undeleted expletives in Deconstructing Harry. An abrasive and provocative concoction, it evokes the acidic aftertaste of Stardust Memories, Allen's bitter 1980 tirade against audiences and critics who kept expecting him to be funny and refused to take his serious films seriously. The tone appears lighter than the intent of Deconstructing Harry, which is set over 24 eventful hours in the life of an immature, insecure Manhattan writer - aptly named Harry Block, given that he's suffering from writer's block. Played by Allen himself, Harry is a heavy-drinking, pill-popping personification of dysfunctionality, a foul-mouthed misogynist who is self-obsessed and sex-obsessed - and whose personal history includes three ex-wives, six analysts (one of whom he married) and assorted lovers and prostitutes.
To compound the insults of his infidelities, Harry has incurred the wrath of his former friends and lovers by thinly disguising them as characters in his novels and short stories; as the movie opens, an ex-sister-in-law (played by a raging Judy Davis) confronts him over his exposure of their illicit relationship. The narrative pivots on a day when Harry Block is due to travel to an upstate New York college to receive an honorary degree - an explicit homage to Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman, whose Wild Strawberries followed an elderly professor going to Lund for an honorary degree. There is another nod to Bergman when Death comes calling, dressed as in The Seventh Seal.
As Harry Block confronts his past, present and future, the narrative of Deconstructing Harry is intricately structured to cut seamlessly back and forward between its characters and their fictional representations in dramatisations of Harry's autobiographical stories. This device emphasises Harry's inability to face up to reality and his propensity to submerge himself in fact-inspired fiction as a way of dealing with that inability - just as he deals with his problems with the women with whom he is involved by getting involved with other women.
Once again Allen has attracted a stellar cast, drawing outstanding performances from Judy Davis, a revelatory Kirstie Alley, and the effervescent Hazelle Goodman as a tough-talking prostitute in shocking pink top and hot pants. The cast also includes Demi Moore, Elisabeth Shue, Billy Crystal, Mariel Hemingway, and, as an actor who - literally - goes out of focus, Robin Williams.
Peppered with sharp one-liners and visual gags, this vigorous, regularly hilarious comedy contains dialogue that is unexpectedly coarse for Woody Allen, and eyebrow-raising swipes at Judaism; the film's softer, more obvious targets for barbed humour include Hollywood, the media and Bill Clinton. While Allen nudges us to like Harry, if not to love him, he registers as an ultimately pathetic character who, at one point, bravely shows himself at his least physically attractive in a torn T-shirt.
Perhaps the most startling sequence comes when an ex-wife (Kirstie Alley) refuses to let Harry bring their young son to the degree ceremony and Harry goes to the extreme of kidnapping the boy. Nothing in Allen's most personal movies has ever prompted audiences to ponder on just how much of his work is rooted in autobiographical experience.
"Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil" (15) Nationwide
Woody Allen's fellow sexagenarian, the accomplished and almost equally prolific actor-director, Clint Eastwood, stays behind the camera to deliver a meditation on crime and justice, money and power, and sexual behaviour and social prejudices in Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. The film is adapted by John Lee Hancock (who scripted Eastwood's A Pefect World) from John Bernedt's book, which has been on the US hardback non-fiction bestseller list for the past four years.
The story's colourful and genteel setting is Savannah, Georgia where a New York journalist, John Kelso (blandly played by John Cusack), is despatched to write a 500-word article for Town And Country on the elegant Christmas party thrown annually by the prosperous local antiques dealer and property restorer, Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey). On the night of the party, Williams's volatile gay lover (Jude Law) is killed, and when Williams is charged with first-degree murder, Kelso is so intrigued that he stays on in Savannah to write a book on the case and its background.
"I am nouveau riche, but it's the riche that counts," declares the suave and smug Williams who lives in Mercer House, a vast home which covers an entire block and was built in 1860 by General Hugh Mercer, great-grandfather of the popular songwriter, Johnny Mercer. The movie's original soundtrack, an atmospheric jazz score by Lennie Niehaus, is punctuated by more than a dozen Johnny Mercer compositions, and the production enjoyed access to Mercer House itself, shooting in the room where the murder took place.
Many real-life Savannah residents feature in the film, including Williams's lawyer, Sonny Seiller, who plays the presiding judge in the extended courtroom scenes, while Seiller himself is played engagingly by the fine Australian actor, Jack Thompson. By far the most exotic of the human blooms Kelso encounters is the transvestite performer, The Lady Chablis, who plays herself in the movie's most exuberant performance, explaining that she got her name from a wine bottle and sashaying disruptively through a sedate dance for black debutantes.
Enthusing to his agent that Savannah is "like Gone With The Wind on mescalin", Kelso is wholly intrigued by the circumstances of the murder case and by the ambivalence of the locals, who draw a veil over Williams's discreet homosexuality while availing of his hospitality - and even more so by the gallery of eccentrics who populate the area and speak in folksy adages and euphemisms. "Saving face in the light of unpleasant circumstances is the Savannah way," Kelso is advised.
Berendt's book and Eastwood's film take their title from a cemetery ritual observed by Kelso and conducted by a voodoo priestess in the half-hours immediately before and after midnight, respectively the times for good and evil. In a movie that's more of a how-dunnit or why-dunnit than a who-dunnit, the good or evil nature of Jim Williams and the question of whether or not he acted in self-defence when he killed his lover, is the moral core of the story. That story's exposition is quietly understated in Eastwood's film, its tempo catching the unhurried pace of life in this quirky, easy-going town, the better to capture it in all its idiosyncracies and double standards. Unfortunately, like so many recent movies, it overstays its welcome; running for 155 minutes, it certainly could have benefitted from the excision of the superfluous love angle contrived between Kelso and a singer played by the director's daughter, Alison Eastwood.
"TwentyFourSeven" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Omniplex, UCIs, Virgin, Dublin
The 25-year-old Nottingham writer-director, Shane Meadows, follows his promising hour-long featurette Smalltime (shown by Channel 4 last night) with an absorbing first feature which takes its title from one character's line describing the tedium of daily life - 24 hours a day, seven days a week - for him and his unemployed mates in the British midlands. In their late teens, they are drifting into drugs and petty crime, and their future looks bleak.
In an extended flashback Meadows shows how their lives are transformed when a shabby, paunchy, middle-aged man (Bob Hoskins) renovates a disused boxing club and encourages them to work off their aggression in the ring. This is a familiar story, specifically recalling The Boxer in narrative elements, the work of Ken Loach in its social concerns, and the films of Mike Leigh in its improvisational gestation. Familiar as it is, it is told with cinematic assurance and a heartfelt sincerity which only rarely borders on the sentimental. Succinctly scripted and sharply observed, it is shot in strikingly textured black-and-white by Ashley Rowe. It elicits firm, naturalistic portrayals from its unfamiliar young actors, in particular drama student Danny Nussbaum as the central slacker, Tim, and strong performances from the adult players, especially Bruce Jones (from Loach's Raining Stones) as Tim's violent father. Bob Hoskins recaptures the spirit of his best 1980s work in The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa.
"How To Cheat In The Leaving Certificate" (15) Virgin, Ormonde, Dublin; Omniplex, Galway, Limerick
Today's other black-and-white first feature from a film-maker in his early twenties, How To Cheat In The Leaving Certificate, was directed and co-written by Graham Jones when he was 22, and resourcefully achieved on a minuscule budget. Its release shrewdly timed for the teachers' conferences and the pending examinations, it received a great deal of free publicity last week from an unlikely source - the junior education minister, Willie O'Dea, who, unconstrained by not having seen the film, publicly attacked its ethos.
That his outburst drew so much attention to such a lowly-funded production is apposite, given the deeply cynical nature of the film itself. The title is self-explanatory in the case of this inventive endeavour which follows the determined attempt of one Leaving Cert student (Garret Baker) who, abetted by five accomplices, sets out to disprove his headmaster's warning that they can't beat the system. Failing to access the exam questions via computer, they scheme to steal the exam papers from their Athlone storehouse. There is a good deal of witty throwaway humour in this pacy, enterprising entertainment which has a serious subplot involving a student who committed suicide after being caught cheating in his exams. Director Jones sprinkles his picture with cameo appearances from many well-known Irish faces - a device which could have been irritatingly distracting, but actually works here. Those cameos most notably include Eamon Morrissey as the doctrinaire headmaster, Chris De Burgh as a flirtatious petrol pump attendant, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill as the examiner in the movie's amusing Irish orals scam, Mr Pussy as an exam superintendent, and best of all, Mary McEvoy as an inept and blase career guidance teacher.
"Great Expectations" (15) Nationwide
Indebted more to MTV than to Charles Dickens, Alfonso Cuaron's folly is very loosely - and ultimately pointlessly - based on the Dickens classic. In this Great Expectations which takes place in Florida and New York in the 1970s and 1980s, Pip becomes Finn, a gauche fisherman-turned-artist winsomely played by Ethan Hawke, while Miss Havisham becomes Ms Dinsmore, a reclusive, brokenhearted woman (played by a hyperactive Anne Bancroft) who spends her life listening to Besame Mucho. The soundtrack features six different renditions of the song, but omits the smouldering 1962 version by bass guitarist Jet Harris.
The only principal character whose name is retained from the original novel is Estella, the aloof and domineering object of Finn's desire. She is played by Gwyneth Paltrow whose famously swan-like neck is again caressed by the camera, while Robert De Niro is strictly on auto-pilot as the criminal who befriends the young Finn at the outset. The misconceived screenplay is the work of Mitch Glazer who updated Dickens to rather more amusing effect in the Bill Murray comedy, Scrooged.
This over-lit, over-designed effort is a singular disappointment from its young Mexican director, Alfonso Cuaron, after his attractive Hollywood debut with A Little Princess. As a modern literary reworking, it falls infinitely short of Baz Luhrmann's bold and exhilarating recent Romeo + Juliet. As a picture of a tortured young artist, it is altogether less convincing than William Boyd's spoof tribute, Nat Tate.
"Hard Rain" (15) Nationwide
Mikael Salomon's vacuously formulaic film is set in a small Indiana town which is forced to evacuate when it is flooded; meanwhile, thieves plot to rob the armoured car transporting $3 million from the local bank. The film commendably wastes no time in getting down to business, opening on torrential rain and rising flood waters. Its only other commendable feature is an effective employment of sound and special effects.
Even the generally redoubtable Morgan Freeman is left high and dry, so to speak, as the master criminal on the usual one last job, while Minnie Driver is truly exasperating as the archetypal irrational woman-in-peril whose behaviour is consistently reckless, stupid and illogical. Ironically, the only honest man in sight is the security officer played by Christian Slater - who was jailed on an assault charge the day after the movie had its US premiere in January.
