lawprof

Director/scriptwriter Paul Weitz was blessed with a top cast for his comedy/drama "In Good Company." Here's a film that in some ways resembles and is a bit of a genre successor to "The Graduate," that 1960s iconoclastic gem. Even the new songs complement the story in the same way Simon and Garfunkel's lyrics melded with the story line in "The Graduate." Dennis Quaid as Dan Foreman is in his early fifties, a contented manager of a sports mag's ad department. His home life seems almost too good to be true. He loves his wife, Ann (Marg Helgenbergen) and gets on well with his two teenage daughters. The older one, Alex (Scarlett Johansson, in another deep and convincing performance), has a tennis scholarship to a New York State public university where the tuition isn't exactly sky high. But she wants to transfer to New York University in Greenwich Village to study creative writing where the cost is very, very steep.

Almost before you can get into your tub of popcorn Dan is struck with multiple whammies. His magazine is taken over by a mega-corporate raider, Teddy K, and a new ad department honcho, Carter Duryea (Topher Grace), only twenty-six years young, bounces Dan from his executive office while also anointing him as his designated "wingman." Earnest, inexperienced, foppish, supercilious and dangerous in that special way the inept invariably are, he poses a real threat to Dan's future. And Dan is worried about his future because Ann announces she's having a change-of-life baby.

And then Scarlett meets Carter. You need me to tell you what Dan's next mid-life crisis will be? "In Good Company" could have been just a mildly amusing sitcom. The fast-paced acting and the excellence of the cast - especially Quaid and young (she's still a teen) Johansson - kept me glued to the screen for the whole showing. And I admit to being troubled by the issues underlying and scenes showing peremptory firings. There's some ambiguity here - is that the only way for a prosperous corporation to go? Dan's pain at losing long-time co-workers is deeply etched on his face but is he more sentimental and loyal than realistic? I don't know. From the vantage point of a tenured academic with lifetime employment I found myself dragged into questions that I think Weitz meant to raise. Well, he did anyway.

Small roles are well performed by David Paymer as one of Dan's subordinates and Selma Blair who briefly shows up in the beginning as Carter's new wife, Kimberly. I always enjoy seeing this fine actress but her talent is wasted in brief roles.

And Manhattan restaurants where I eat and stores where I shop are all over the well-shot scenes and that always makes me happy.

A very good film.

9/10

Bill Murray delivered one of the best performances of his outstanding career in "Lost in Translation" and I was primed for a reputedly even stronger one in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." Instead I found a strong cast in a muddled story that reflects director Wes Anderson's indecision as to whether the film was to be a comedy, a fantasy or a serious look at relationships.

Murray as deep sea explorer Steve Zissou is nearing the end of his long-running global, big celebrity popularity as a faux Cousteau. And there are plenty of references, verbal and physical, to the late, great scientist. There's a Moby Dick element, off center really, to the story as Zissou is bankrolled to find a near mythical shark that devoured his long-time partner and closest friend. "Revenge" is Zissou's one word explanation and justification for hunting down and killing a sea creature. Not PC, of course.

Oh, and Zissou is also a Bob Ballard-type employing technology to search the ocean depths, here a motley mishmash of put-together-in-a-hurry tools. His ship's shop is a caricature rather than a clever send-up of the dependence on advances in extreme ocean-exploring technology that frequently highlight documentaries shown over and over again on cable.

Anjelica Huston is fine as Zissou's still suffering but relentlessly supportive ex-wife. Owen Wilson as Zissou's possibly own son, the product of a long-ago liaison, is an act that straddles the extended adolescent romantic and the second banana buffoon. An actually very pregnant Cate Blanchett is a reporter running away from a bad situation as a married man's girlfriend. She's confused as well she should be. What is she doing with this madcap outfit? Blanchett gives her role her customary all (could she ever do less?) but she's wasted here.

William Dafoe is first-mate, a funny but capable chap who hungers for Zissou's approval. He's funny but his interaction with both Murray and Wilson smacks mainly of a sitcom shtick.

The romantic relationships here aren't interesting or even marginally funny, they're tedious.

Murray has the ability unsurpassed by any other actor to project a knowing weariness at the vicissitudes of life, the central emotional outpouring that made "Lost in Translation" shine. Here the weariness seems to be due to having to deal with rapidly shifting tempi that reflect a confusing and, ultimately, unsatisfying tale.

There are funny moments in "The Life Aquatic..." but the whole never equals the value of its too many discrete parts. Ultimately one word describes the film: camp.

And finally in the end titles, the producer must have belatedly been informed that there's a real Steve Zissou who is acknowledged as a New York lawyer specializing in "complex litigation." Actually he practices criminal law in Queens, New York where there are lots of those cases, few of them complex. But it's never admitted that a Steve Zissou, deceased, a devoted Cousteau protégé, remains a stridently debated character in the annals and journals of ichthyology because of his early Sixties claim to have discovered the upstate New York spawning ground of the gefilte fish.

Murray can do so much better and I hope he will soon.

7/10

"The Coward," a 1915 silent era Civil War flick, was designed, written and directed to be enjoyable North and South of Messrs. Mason and Dixon's line. Today it's a curiosity piece both as entertainment and as history (I'm showing it in a few weeks in my law school legal history seminar, "Slavery, the Constitution and the Civil War." Our un-hero is a finely turned out Southern lad, popular with the demure lassies and scion to the small but well-kept estate of a former colonel. The fellow lives with his parents and their two devoted slaves, a cook and a sort of valet-butler.

The call to arms, to defend the South (the South was invaded?), comes and the boy heads to the recruiting station where his contemporaries are eagerly lining up to doff formal attire and don uniforms. He chickens out, goes home and confesses to Pa that's he's chicken. No, thunders dad, no member of our family can be a coward. Get thee back and sign up.

He does so but at the first sign of danger, while on picket duty, he deserts and skedaddles home. Mommy embraces him, the slaves try to hide him and Pa has a royal fit when he finds his worthless, gutless offspring gulping down milk and cookies in the kitchen.

Determined to salvage family honor, Pa enlists as a private, replacing his son. Meanwhile, Union officers have occupied the family home and a hiding in the attic deserter overhears their battle plans. Guess how the story develops from there.

A tale of honor cravenly lost and then heroically redeemed, "The Coward" is the kind of satisfying melodrama that early moviegoers loved. The actors magnify their facial expressions to compensate for silently mouthed dialog.

Southerners watching "The Coward" could bask in the family loyalty to the Confederacy and the pliant, loving submission of slaves. Northerners saw an honorable foe whose forces but not spirit could be beaten.

A neat relic from the vaults of the silents.

8/10