March 22–29, 2001

movies

Screen Picks

The week in repertory film, TV and video.

by Sam Adams

Wit

Oscar Night

(Sun., March 25, 8 p.m., ABC)

You love them, you hate them, and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about them. (Well, there’s always getting drunk and yelling at the TV set, but you do that every year.) At least this year, there’s little chance of a Dances With Wolves-size travesty. That’s not to say the likely winners are deserving — although the very idea of "deserving" an Oscar, as if they’d ever been handed out on merit, is a strange one — but that the few egregious nominations (i.e. any one connected to Chocolat ) are long shots. (One shock to prepare for: Sting beats Bob Dylan. Just watch.) Plus, this year features the return of my personal favorite Oscar catchphrase: "Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Debbie Allen." Sure you can crack wise about Saving Private Ryan tap-dance numbers all you want, but excess and bad taste are what the Oscars are all about; trying to take the vulgarity out of Oscar night is like trying to take the fat out of peanut butter.

Dancer in the Dark

($24.98 DVD)

No doubt one of Sunday’s most memorable moments will be the unofficial winner of this year’s Elliott Smith trophy for Awards Show Incongruity: the duet between Björk and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke on Dancer’s "I’ve Seen It All" (which, again, will lose to Sting). Yorke’s nowhere to be found in Dancer itself — Peter Stormare takes his part — but that doesn’t mean Lars von Trier’s grungy, infuriating musical isn’t worth revisiting. For me, Björk’s presence is the only thing that redeems von Trier’s arbitrary, manipulative tragedy, but what a presence it is! Though her performance often seems as much like a nervous breakdown as an acting triumph — an impression fostered by von Trier’s chilly comments at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where he and his star posed for pictures but reportedly never spoke — there’s no question it’s an astonishingly moving one. (Of course, the Academy was right to snub her in favor of Juliette Binoche and Julia Roberts, who are, after all, "real" actors.) And the songs, which brilliantly blend melody and industrial clangor, worked perfectly with von Trier’s realist musical conceit, even if the conceit itself seems misguided. (I thought the whole point of musicals was to get away from reality.) Ever the methodologist — in fact, his methods are often more fascinating than his results — von Trier expounds on the commentary track along with his producer and technical consultant (who illuminates the complicated techniques involved in capturing the action on widescreen digital video); a separate commentary features insight from choreographer Vincent Patterson. Does this take the film’s bad taste out of your mouth? Not exactly. But it’s fascinating all the same.

Wonder Boys

($29.99 DVD)

Curtis Hanson’s follow-up to his overrated, tonally middlebrow L.A. Confidential — nominated for Steve Kloves’ screenplay, Dede Allen’s editing and Bob Dylan’s song — is a more low-key affair, full of lopsided, drugged-out humor and an unusually charming performance from Michael Douglas. (Yes, I did just write those words.) Hanson’s bourgeois conventionality — all Michael Douglas’ plugged-up novelist needs is a fresh start and a loving woman — hems the story in unnecessarily, and the gently farcical tone sometimes shades into frenzied desperation. But after Confidential’s self-conscious old-masterisms, it’s a relief to see Hanson do something this offhanded; like Douglas’ character, who’s paralyzed by the success of his first novel, you sense Hanson wanted to do something he all but knew wouldn’t cause a ruckus.

Wit

(Premieres Sat., March 24, 9 p.m., HBO)

At first, all you can think of is how wrong Emma Thompson is for the role. Margaret Edson’s play which garnered praise off-Broadway with Angels in America’s Kathleen Chalfant in the central role, a severe professor of English literature (specializing in the sonnets of John Donne) who finds out she has advanced and almost certainly fatal ovarian cancer. Thompson, of course, usually comes across as anything but severe: Edson’s sour gallows humor at first turns to sugar in Thompson’s mouth. But as the film — adapted for TV by Thompson and director Mike Nichols — winds on, its power accretes steadily; if Thompson flubs the initial saltiness, she certainly has the vulnerability part down pat. Nichols’ direction, which sometimes deals clunkily with the play’s theatricalisms — having Thompson play herself as a five-year-old is a notable case — works best when it simply lets the fine cast, which also includes Christopher Lloyd, Audra McDonald and Jonathan Woodward, get down to business. The ending is hardly a surprise, but it still comes as a shock, and even the pauses for sentiment are well earned. If you get the sense that the play’s been shorn of some of its insight, Wit still remains wrenching, its anguish oddly purifying.