Ricki and the Flash

When we talk about Meryl Streep, our words are often tinged with a knee-jerk reverential awe for the Grande Dame of Hollywood. Streep performances are not just performances, but “transformations.” For Meryl Streep’s champions, greatness is assumed, and any Meryl Streep movie is worth seeing simply because she’s in it. On the other hand, there are plenty of Meryl Streep deniers; they may be reacting to the fact that Streep seems to be off-limits to critics. But this wasn’t always the case. Streep, like Katharine Hepburn, had periods during which people rolled their eyes at her and her movies were panned by critics and audiences alike. But—and here’s where I cannot help but admire Meryl Streep—the actress stuck it out and worked hard. The current era of Streep-as-Queen did not come cheaply for her, so I do not want to attack her simply because she’s made it to the top and earned three hundred Academy Award nominations. She’s earned my respect.

However, the idea that great performances happen only when an actor “transforms” herself into the role is false. Point: One of the best Meryl Streep performances you will ever see is her portrayal of the mean romance novelist in She-Devil, the 1988 Roseanne Barr comedy in which Streep’s character steals Barr’s family from her, incurring Roseanne’s wrath. Meryl Streep is genuinely funny in She-Devil, and while I don’t think Streep is a pampered bitch in real life, the performance doesn’t feel forced or hard to reach. The role doesn’t require some magnificent industrial-light-and-magic metamorphosis. She doesn’t have a fancy accent or a lot of face-altering make-up; she’s not playing older or younger than she actually is. She’s just acting. Granted, the movie is a fairly mediocre comedy, but it sometimes achieves brilliance, and Streep's performance is one of the best things in that film. But few people compliment her for something like She-Devil, because it's not The Iron Lady or something else that's been plumbed for prestige. 

Ricki and the Flash represents yet another transformation-performance for Streep, and, like many of the previous ones, it’s a bit too much. She undoubtedly pours herself into it, but there’s something manufactured about Ricki Rendazzo. She's a not-even-has-been musician whose cover band The Flash performs crappy rock hits to lukewarm crowds at a dive-bar in L.A. By day, Ricki is a cashier at Total Foods. (An obvious reference to Whole Foods; I could write a whole review about the movie’s strange, funny, unexpected portrayal of hipster-culture.) 

Ricki offers a handful of musical numbers, where Streep showcases her perfectly raspy voice and her somehow not very credible female rock star fashion choices. I’m not sure what Joan Jett is wearing these days, but Debbie Harry hasn’t stopped being a fashion icon just because she’s reached “a certain age.” Ricki’s costumes feel like a 40-year-old middle class white person’s conception of a rock ‘n’ roll diva. It covers all the basics but feels inauthentic, too staged. And then she wears it for the entire movie—even the magic hair. Wouldn’t most people want to get out of those tight-fitting clothes into something more comfortable after a hard night’s work? Ricki is basically an action figure: her costume is as permanent as her American-flag tattoo. (Oh, and what about Ricki's blatantly right-wing politics? I could do a whole essay on that too.)

The film, which was written by Diablo Cody (loosely based on her own mother-in-law) and directed by Jonathan Demme, is a family drama laced with feel-good emotional beats masquerading as themes, all of them obvious, like “I LOVE MY KIDS” and “THE POWER OF MUSIC,” most of them accompanied by the top ten overplayed American rock songs of the past 40 years. At least they didn’t sing “Life is a Highway.” It’s probably on the soundtrack.

The family drama offers a few sparks. Here’s the setup: Ricki left her family (husband Peter and three kids) years ago to pursue a career in music. Peter (Kevin Kline) remarried, to Maureen (Audra McDonald), who raised the three kids as her own but insisted that they send their wayward mom Mother’s Day cards every year. (She tells Ricki this in their big scene together.) Maureen is a flawless human being. She’s beautiful, intelligent, dresses nicely, and is apparently a terrific cook. She’s also disgustingly right and practical and together, all of the time. (The scene between Ricki and Maureen feels like a parent-teacher conference, in which Maureen is the teacher and Ricki is the student.) She even offers Ricki money to pay for her flight home, in a moment of painful condescension.

Ricki’s daughter Julie (played by real-life Streep daughter Mamie Gummer) has just been left by her husband, for another woman. Julie is angry and suicidal, and when Ricki comes “home” to Indianapolis to care for her, the old anger she has for her mom rushes right to the surface. The sparks between mother and daughter are one of the best things in the movie. Gummer’s performance is funny and salty and tough. She also lets herself look like a woman going through hell. Her hair is mussed up and scruffy and she walks around in a long black T-shirt and pajama pants. She's venomous toward her mom, although that venom quickly runs out only to be replaced with the love she still feels for her mother. And here’s where Ricki turns into a real human being and not just a caricature of a rock diva: Ricki has more dignity and self-respect than just about anyone else in the movie, especially in the big dinner scene, where one of her sons hurls insults at her while the other one awkwardly tries to keep her from finding out about his forthcoming nuptials.

The film plays all its cards in the first act. After the dinner scene, there’s the expected sparring between Maureen and Ricki, after which Ricki retreats to L.A. The problems between Ricki and Julie seem to have been solved, but not much else is, and the film plods through a sloppy middle territory with bad musical montages, awaiting its own too-triumphant third act. There are a few obvious personal revelations for Ricki (“I LOVE MY KIDS”), which of course you’ve already scene in the film’s trailer.

The complexity that Diablo Cody and Jonathan Demme develop in the first third of the movie never takes shape. When Ricki returns to L.A. for her son’s wedding (coaxed by a sweet but condescending gesture from Maureen), she and her boyfriend Greg (played by Rick Springfield of “Jessie’s Girl” fame) stick out like two tattoed middle fingers at a gathering of rich, well-dressed pointers. It’s too much. But then Ricki and her band does a surprise song for her son and terrified hipster-daughter-in-law and THE POWER OF MUSIC conquers all.

I had a pretty good time at Ricki and the Flash despite all my misgivings. There are quite a few laughs. But the movie is ultimately unsatisfying, especially from the director of Stop Making Sense. Ricki and the Flash has energy and weirdness and charm, but the movie needed to be worked out more carefully, and its gooey, obvious themes undercut the more adult, thoughtful conflicts at work between the characters. 

Orange County

Orange County (2002) isn't offensive, exactly, but it isn't a very good movie, either. It's about an aspiring writer named Shaun (Colin Hanks), who's convinced that he needs to go to Stanford and study with a writer he's stuck on. The movie is about the various misadventures that take place in one 24-hour period during which Shaun tries to get accepted, after the dippy college counselor at his high school (Lily Tomlin in a bit role) sends in the wrong transcript and he gets rejected. That's an interesting idea, but the writer of Orange County, Mike White (who plays a small role as Shaun's English teacher), is running on empty from the very beginning.

The earnest performance of Colin Hanks (son of Tom Hanks) is one of this movie's strongest attributes, yet the writing is so undeveloped that you never really buy his whole aspiring-literary-talent thing. He's a nice guy. That's about all we get.  We see him transform from stoned surfer to would-be Ernest Hemingway, but there's no real impetus for his transformation, other than the sudden death of one of his surfing buddies, an obvious plot device. And if you're paying any attention at all to the movie, you'll see how many of these plot devices White relies on in his script. For example, Shaun's brother, Lance (played by Jack Black), is a ne'er-do-well junkie who's mooching off his family, and it's his stupid behavior that bungles a meeting between Shaun and an influential Stanford board member. Later, it's Lance who sets up an astoundingly contrived chain of events that gets Shaun into the school.

This movie doesn't know how to show its feelings, such as disappointment, frustration, grief, or joy, and so it turns to catchy pop songs to convey its emotions by proxy. Is it any wonder that a movie produced by a music conglomerate like MTV fails in its grasp for authenticity? You start to think they just made it so they could sell the soundtrack. Perhaps the audience saw through this: Orange County wasn't exactly a hit.

There's a slew of talent associated with the film, but don't expect much when the material is this sloppy. Director Jake Kasdan (who helmed last year's abysmal Bad Teacher) has a sitcom-level mentality, and he doesn't know how to work with the actors. They're all emotionally maxed-out characters at the beginning, and so there's nowhere for them to go emotionally. They fizzle. Catherine O'Hara has a few good moments as Shaun's drunk mother, but even she isn't allowed to reach her wonderfully loony potential. (She does some similar (but better) work in an episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.) Kevin Kline puts in a brief spot as the idolized writer, whose appearance marks the film's climax, but he's reduced to the role of the "wise artiste," providing Shaun (and the movie) with some tripe about writing. When you see a performer like Kevin Kline playing such a boring role, it gives you little hope for the future of comedy in movies. Also present are John Lithgow as Shaun's dad, Chevy Chase as the high school principal, Brett Harrison and Kyle Howard as Shaun's perpetually stoned surfer buddies, and Schuyler Fisk (daughter of Sissy Spacek) as Shaun's good-natured girlfriend, the only sane person in his life. And Jack Black, who is an often dizzying force of energy, is all over the place with his mugging. (There are too many stoners in this movie for any of them to stand out, for one thing.) He needs a good director to channel his crazed brilliance. Without that, he's utterly unfunny. 

The really ironic thing is that Orange County presents the adults as complete morons: the guidance counselor's gaffe generates the entire meandering plot, the parents are miserable, clinging people. They're divorced from each other and both in unhappy, unsuccessful re-marriages (for all the wrong reasons). The teachers are either stupid or disingenuous (or both). And yet, we're expected to believe that Shaun turned into a sophisticated, responsible young man amidst all this incompetency. And to top it off [SPOILER ALERT], the movie has the nerve to go Frank Capra on us at the end: Mom and Dad get back together, Son gets into Stanford via their generous financial donation to the school, he decides that home really is where the heart is, and we're all happily-ever-after-together. [END OF SPOILERS.] It's amazing that such an essentially square movie could come from the people at MTV, who seem so convinced that they are the purveyors of what's hip. Perhaps they're turning over a new leaf. They've learned that banality is safer than originality. Oh wait, that's not a new concept to them at all.

With Harold Ramis as the dean of admissions, Garry Marshall, Dana Ivey, Jane Adams, and Ben Stiller in an undistinguished cameo appearance as a firefighter.

A Fish Called Wanda

A Fish Called Wanda is a throwback to screwball comedies, directed by Charles Crichton, a veteran of English comedies from the 40s and 50s, and co-written by Crichton and Monty Python's John Cleese. It's a heist movie with Cleese as an English barrister who becomes romantically involved with a sexy American con artist named Wanda, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and her live-wire "brother" Otto (Kevin Kline). They're in cahoots with a bank robber, George (Tom Georgeson), whom Cleese is defending. (They turned him in to the police with hopes of making off with the loot, unaware that George had spirited it away beforehand.)

John Cleese successfully convinces us that he's capable of being a romantic lead as the married, dulled-out lawyer Archie Leach, and Jamie Lee Curtis does some of her best work as Wanda. She's playful and smart, and a born performer (or a ham is more like it). Loony comedy suits her talent and her looks well, and this intermingling of British and American styles of humor seems to bring out the best in her, as it does for Cleese. But it's Kevin Kline as Otto who really breaks out of the mold, delivering an off-the-wall performance as a macho moron who reads Nietzsche but hasn't a clue what it means. Otto can't stand being insulted, particularly when it comes to his "intelligence," and he makes up for his insecurities in the typical male fashion: with violent, aggressive fervor. He's hysterical, and even won an Academy Award, which rarely happens for comedic performances (or comedic anything for that matter.)

As a movie, A Fish Called Wanda sags in parts, but it makes up for its slow spots and its indulgences by being a deliriously bawdy British-American spectacle, one that's perhaps trying too hard to one-up American comedies in terms of its proud vulgarity. (It's always more clever than a truly vulgar movie, though.) You spend a lot of the time giggling at its crude humor, when you're not laughing at the genuinely fun and earnest comic performances. And there are some particularly brilliant scenes, like the one where Archie's wife (Maria Aitken) unexpectedly returns home when Archie and Wanda are kissing on the sofa. Otto, always the jealous type and never subtle, is also inside, watching, and he tries to save Archie from being found out, displaying his inability to make up a believable story to Archie's wife, who sees through him. Kline is fast with the insults, though, and he completely throws himself into his character's manic personality. The energy in some of the scenes of this movie is wonderful stuff, a real novelty in the 80s, where so many comedies seemed too carefully planned out. The best scenes in Wanda are remarkably off-the-cuff, and yet they don't seem sloppy or unstructured. They have the panache and style of good writing and the zing of good improvisation.

Michael Palin, another Monty Python regular, co-stars as Ken, one of the accomplices in the bank robbery scheme that quickly becomes subordinate to the romantic story and this film's garish insanity. The cast reunited for 1996's Fierce Creatures, which wasn't as tight or as clever as Wanda. 1988.