Cry-Baby

300th review

Cry-Baby (1990) is writer-director John Waters' second mainstream movie, and it's a charming, surprisingly good-natured parody of Baltimore in the 1950s. It's about two rival gangs: the Squares and the Drapes. The Squares follow the rules, the Drapes break them, and goody-goody Allison Vernon-Williams (played by Amy Locane), feels caught in the middle. "I'm tired of being good!" she moans. She's pressured by her grandmother (Polly Bergen) to follow a conventional path. (Her grandma runs a sort of adolescent finishing school where she teaches teenagers the tenets of suburban social etiquette and good taste.)

But Allison is in love with Cry-Baby (Johnny Depp), who represents freedom from conventions. (He's eventually arrested and convicted of "juvenile delinquency!", which I didn't realize was an actual charge.) Basically, Cry-Baby is the James Dean of Baltimore. He's loved by the Drapes and despised by the Squares.

Cry-Baby is a musical, but not the kind where a song interrupts the story every five minutes as padding. Its musical numbers are mostly amusing riffs on 1950s culture, mimicking the songs that were popular then (or in some cases reproducing actual 1950s songs; these are generally the ones performed by the Squares' hilariously unhip all-male quartet, which performs at various Baltimore social functions throughout the movie.) I've never responded to 50s nostalgia. Hoop skirts and Elvis aren't my idea of a good time. But in the world of John Waters, even the 1950s can be entertaining. 

Johnny Depp's performance is wonderfully sincere yet ironic. He's reminiscent of teen idols Sal Mineo and the afore-mentioned James Dean, but he's also subtly funny. Depp had of course become something of a teen idol himself, thanks to the success of his show 21 Jump Street. So playing the lead in a John Waters movie--even a relatively clean-cut one like this--represents an attempt to move away from that image. I'm not sure it worked, because he's so likable in this film, and he certainly hasn't dimmed as a star in the last 20 years. 

The Johnny Depp we get in Cry-Baby is the Johnny Depp I miss. He's not hiding under piles of make-up and a zany wig, or an affected voice, or a character who's completely alien to society. He's a social misfit, to be sure, but he's not pandering to the audience for laughs by being needlessly eccentric. Perhaps he's so appealing to audience members because they find those ostentatious roles (e.g. Willy Wonka, Jack Sparrow) more colorful and therefore more entertaining. But it's become the norm for him to do something commercially weird. (Because, let's not forget, commercially weird is nothing compared to genuine weird, which is why John Waters going semi-commercial was actually a good thing. More on that later.) What has happened in the process of all those oddball commercial roles is the unavoidable plateau: one performance hardly distinguishes itself from another.

Frequently, Waters' movies peter out about sixty minutes in, so I was pleasantly surprised by Cry-Baby, which is perhaps his most sustained movie. Waters was working at his peak, in a sense. He had achieved a little bit of mainstream popularity with Hairspray in 1988 (even though that film wasn't a runaway success), and was given a bigger budget with which to explore his usual theme of social anarchy in the suburbs. But even when his movies run out of steam, they're still a lot more interesting than big, lumbering commercial comedies and musicals. He finds colorful people who aren't all beautiful. He pokes fun at our very conventional discomfort (or is it horror) when we're confronted with the abnormal. 

Cry-Baby has a lot of bizarre characters, most of whom are drawn with love, not scorn. Even the stodgy grandmother is redeeming, allowing her granddaughter to choose the man who loves her the most rather than the one who wants to confine her to a life of suburban drabness. The 1980s represented a sort of neo-50s return to the pernicious rot of banality. Those who find that depressing will likely respond to Cry-Baby, a movie which gleefully disrupts suburban mores. 

With Ricki Lake, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords, Kim McGuire (who plays a character called "Hatchet Face"), Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Troy Donahue, and Joe Dallesandro. 92 min. ★★½

Metropolitan

In Metropolitan (1990), Tom Townsend, who's just finished his first semester at Princeton, unexpectedly enters into the inner-circle of a group of upper-class New York college students during debutante season. It's like a preppie Breakfast Club only everyone's too intellectual to wallow in self-pity. Most of the action takes place in one of the adolescent's homes, where the group stays up late into the night drinking, talking, and occasionally playing Bridge or some other game. They're socialites in training. It would be pretentious if it wasn't so funny and so earnest.

The writer-director Whit Stillman pulls off something impressive: he creates a believable, sympathetic, even inviting, world comprised of somewhat stuck-up, educated young people who are endearing in spite of themselves. They talk about philosophy and economics but they also gossip, and they're acutely aware of their social world. They're also naive, but in their precocious over-analyzing they manage to find at least some degree of acceptance that, though they think they know everything, they may also be wrong about some things.

The performances by the fresh-faced cast are mostly good. This is an extremely talky movie, one that almost plays like a filmed stage production. It's a movie about ideas and social relationships, and while Stillman isn't totally ignorant of or indifferent to the cinematic elements of his movie, he's far more attuned to the dialogic aspects. We're immersed in this inner-circle like a fly on the wall as the social dramas play out: the scathing remarks, the incisive criticisms, the hopeful longings for romance and success, the cynical worries of the future: it's all wrapped up in a peculiar fabric of conversation. You're never even sure how much these people like each other.

At times they seem to have cut each other to pieces, and then moments later it's as though nothing's happened, and they're chasing after some other thread of conversation. It's a fascinating movie; not perfect, but never boring, and totally unpredictable. I was charmed by it in a way I haven't been in a long time.

The cast includes: Edward Clements as Tom, the newcomer who has a lot of "big" ideas about economics, culture, and philosophy, but is also still a little gauche when it comes to girls; Carolyn Farina as Audrey, the bookish girl who's never really been in love before; Chris Eigeman (a stand-out performance), as Nick, the guy who pisses everyone off with his cynical honesty and harsh criticisms of one and all, but is also somehow likable in spite of himself; Taylor Nichols (who made me think of Crispin Glover) as Charlie, the nerdy ideologue who's in love with Audrey but can't get up the nerve to tell her, and resents Tom because Audrey has a crush on him; and Allison Parisi (who, with her raven-like hair and confident, imposing features resembles a young Kirstie Alley), the most "grown-up" acting of the girls; she exudes maternal qualities but is indifferent toward the other girls at the same time. Also starring: Isabel Gillies, Bryan Leder, Will Kempe, and Ellia Thompson. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 98 min. ★★★½

Night of the Living Dead

This 1990 remake of the George Romero cult classic isn't different enough to justify its existence, or bone-chilling enough to rival the original. But the dedicated will likely find things to enjoy in it. Tony Todd, as Ben (who was the strongest and subtlest character in the 1968 Night), is well-cast, and Patricia Tallman makes a convincing 90's Barbara: she inexplicably transforms from a mousy, wimpy schoolmarm-type to a hybrid of Sigourney Weaver from Alien and Sarah, the lead character from Romero's Day of the Dead. (She overacts as the wimpy Barbara, but she's fun to root for when she turns tough.)

Romero wrote the screenplay, which seems silly as this update isn't fresh enough to conjure up any comparison the way you can with, say, the Siegel and Kaufman versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978 respectively). With the Night remake, Romero's intent was to try and recoup the money he didn't make from the 1968 film. While the movie was a big hit eventually, Romero and company never saw any of the box office earnings, partly because they failed to copyright the film under its hastily-changed title (it was original called Night of the Flesheaters). But Romero had already made three zombie films, and by now his career had mostly petered out with a number of disappointing releases (including the third zombie flick, Day of the Dead, and 1988's Monkey Shines).

Romero turned the directing duties over to longtime collaborator Tom Savini (the make-up effects guy from Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and a number of non-Romero films including Friday the 13th). Savini doesn't do an embarrassing job, but he's too much of a novice to salvage the material from being just so-so. As a make-up artist, Savini's instincts are garishly disgusting and funny. As a director he seems too careful to invest any of that eccentric monster magic into the movie.

With Tom Towles, McKee Anderson, William Butler, Kate Finneran, and Bill Moseley. 88 mins.