Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992)

Even at the time, I could sense there was something empty about this adored-by-the-gays black comedy during which I may have lightly chuckled once or twice. Thirty years later, I can better articulate the film's shortcomings. There's just not that much (can it be?) story here. Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep play a writer and an actress respectively who have long resented one another. But Zemeckis, along with screenwriters Martin Donovan and David Koepp, tell us so little about their past that all the subsequent Oscar-winning special effects lack narrative urgency. I wanted to learn more about the apparent class animus between the two when they were younger. During a brief moment of calm, Hawn admits that she found Streep too white trash for her presumably higher-class friends. But we're granted little more information than that before the viewer is plunged back into ever-more FX, the gaping hole in Hawn's body after Streep nails her with a shotgun mirroring the hole at the center of the narrative. And the motivation which sets the plot in motion (jealousy over doughy, ineffectual Bruce Willis) is too thin to compensate. I applaud Zemeckis' commitment to cartoonish grotesquerie (at least at this point in his career). But yet again (gawd, I could use a rubber stamp here), there has to be something at stake in the spectacle and Death Becomes Her lacks the sense of purpose that fuels the best cartoons.

Grade: C+ 

The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

Based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours has a pretty big problem at its core. Two stories spin out from an account of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman in an Oscar-winning performance) writing Mrs. Dalloway and, like so many films about authors, neither screenwriter David Hare nor director Stephen Daldry provide much insight into Woolf's style or even the toil of writing. This fatal-for-some shortcoming is compounded by a further conceit dictating that each story plays out over a single day (despite a brief depiction of Woolf's suicide which frames the film). Would I could pump out even a blog post within 24 hours.

But if you can forgive these limitations (and again, I grant that it will be impossible for many viewers), The Hours is surprisingly moving, in more ways than one, for a project that threatens the most ponderous Oscar-mongering. The other two stories concern a housewife (Julianne Moore) consumed with soon-to-be-specified dread in 1950s Los Angeles and an editor (Meryl Streep) in contemporary Manhattan. Woolf's limning of the quotidian passions and disappointments of lesbian life filter through the latter tales for the kind of trenchantly observed film for grown-ups that seems to have retreated from theatres to the big streamers today. Best of all, Daldry keeps things brisk. Before one trajectory becomes too crusty, he switches to another for a productive middlebrow mental workout. That's no insult. The Hours allows us to think of lesbianism transhistorically and casts welcome doubt on contemporary life as always already more enlightened.

There are some crass moments such as when Moore's housewife bolts up from her attempted suicide and proclaims, "I can't!" The fact she did not, in fact, go through with it would have conveyed that information to us quite efficiently. But overall, the game time performances power over the few low points. And for all the accolades thrown at the three principals, the greatest performance here is owned by an unrecognizable-by-me Toni Collette as a fellow housewife trying to sublimate her desire for Moore. In just one scene, she motors through lust, containment, anger, propriety, resignation all while suggesting possibilities for different futures than her tract-home existence allows. 

Fleet, yielding, with a drive unexpected in such prestige items, The Hours is the rare kind of film to give middlebrow a good name.

The Hours: A-minus

Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985)

The only thing preventing this biopic of Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen from achieving classical-Hollywood elegance is a typically 1980s case of elephantiasis. Cut it down by at least 45 minutes, especially the  romance with Robert Redford (pretty but dull and in desperate need of Blistex), and Pollack would've created a film to remember a year after seeing it. As it stands, it's shockingly watchable for such a project. The story derives much of its tension from a buy-now-pay-never sexuality one tends to associate with the 1960s. Klaus Maria Brandauer's Baron Bror von Blixen, Dinesen's faithless husband, is no more fickle than Redford's Denys Finch Hatton. He just provides a lot less gotta-be-me-babe justifications for his roaming and both men give Meryl Streep's Dinesen no peace. But now let's have Farah Aden's story.

Grade: B+

The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006 [that long ago??])

If I had guilty pleasures, The Devil Wears Prada would be one. Whenever I rewatch, though, I totally skip the non-Miranda scenes which is to ask, "Adrian Grenier was in this?"