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Consider the Source

From the Chicago Reader (January 26, 2001). — J.R.

The Pledge

***

Directed by Sean Penn

Written by Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski

With Jack Nicholson, Patricia Clarkson, Benicio Del Toro, Dale Dickey, Aaron Eckhart, Helen Mirren, Tom Noonan, Robin Wright Penn, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, and Sam Shepard.

Blooper Bunny

***

Directed by Greg Ford and Terry Lennon

Written by Ronnie Scheib, Ford, and Lennon

With Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and Yosemite Sam.

The Wedding Planner

**

Directed by Adam Shankman

Written by Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis

With Jennifer Lopez, Matthew McConaughey, Bridgette Wilson- Sampras, Justin Chambers, and Judy Greer.

Shadow of the Vampire

*

Directed by E. Elias Merhige

Written by Steven Katz

With Willem Dafoe, John Malkovich, Catherine McCormack, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, and Udo Kier.

I can’t say that The Pledge, The Wedding Planner, Blooper Bunny, and Shadow of the Vampire have much in common, apart from the fact that they’re showing in Chicago this week. Yet all four do, to different degrees, feed off other movies. Frankly, that’s what I like most about The Wedding Planner – a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey that aspires to and achieves the goofiness of a studio musical of the early 50s. And it’s what I like even more about Blooper Bunny (1991), a deconstructive eight-minute Bugs Bunny cartoon made for Warners that’s showing at the Film Center this Saturday and Sunday with Tom DiCillo’s 1995 Living in Oblivion as part of a thoughtful and intriguing series put together by programmer Martin Rubin called “New Narrative Order.” It puts a wicked spin on its many predecessors by being presented mainly in the form of outtakes from a fictional TV special, Bugs Bunny’s 51st 1/2 Anniversary Spectacular — including a tap-dance routine with Bugs, Elmer Fudd, and Daffy Duck and a layered cake sprouting skyrockets as well as Yosemite Sam.

What I like most about The Pledge, the third and best feature directed by Sean Penn — a somber character study featuring Jack Nicholson as a supposedly retired detective — isn’t so much what it borrows from other movies as how nimbly it bounces its premises off them, confounding expectations by avoiding the usual thriller payoffs to arrive at a few uncomfortable conclusions about the leading character’s blood lust as well as our own.

What I dislike most about Shadow of the Vampire is how it cannibalizes an earlier movie for no apparent reason. This stupid and demeaning fantasy about the shooting of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu is a piece of postmodernist kitsch whose only redeeming quality is an enjoyably over-the-top, eye-rolling performance by Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, the actor playing the lead vampire, Count Orlock.

One of the creepy aspects of the isolationism of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking is that filmmakers tend to reject the possibility of saying anything meaningful or fresh about American life at the outset. That leaves them with the options of trying to say something meaningful about other movies or trying simply to reproduce them. The latter is the modest and mainly successful task of The Wedding Planner, a comedy about a wedding planner (Lopez) falling for somebody (McConaughey) she meets quite by chance (he saves her life in a street accident) who turns out to be the designated groom in a wedding she’s planning. Every bit of this story can be traced back to big-studio B musicals half a century ago with actresses such as Janet Leigh, Gloria De Haven, and Jane Powell and actors such as Tony Martin, Bob Fosse, and Bobby Van; the guy who doesn’t get the girl is occasionally a Latino lounge lizard (played by someone like Fernando Lamas or Ricardo Montalban), and here he’s a cheerful working-class Italian with a thick accent (Justin Chambers). I find this movie charming because of my nostalgia for a brand of romantic treacle with highly photogenic leads that we don’t get much of nowadays — and because it acknowledges where it’s coming from, signaled by two trips to a San Francisco park with improbable outdoor screenings of the obscure vintage musicals Two Tickets to Broadway (1951, with Leigh, Martin, and De Haven) and Flirtation Walk (1934, with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler). I can’t recommend it to anyone who wants a romantic comedy with more contemporary qualities, but I can recommend it if you’re on the prowl for old-fashioned glamour, schmaltz, and sexy infatuations.

Shadow of the Vampire neither reproduces nor has anything meaningful to say about Nosferatu. I suspect that what I dislike most about its cannibalizing is how contemporary in spirit it is. This exercise in glibness is predicated on the notion that Max Schreck was a real vampire, hired by Murnau (John Malkovich) in exchange for the blood of the leading lady (Catherine McCormack) in order to bring more “reality” (as opposed to artistry) to his film. In other words, it’s a movie that trashes the history, personality, taste, craft, and artistry (and, incidentally, even the sexuality) of Murnau — one of the greatest silent directors. He’s so little known today that I guess it’s easy to fabricate almost anything about him and still get some people to swallow it. Shadow of the Vampire is equally dismissive of the artistry and integrity of Murnau’s cast and crew — especially Schreck, cinematographer Fritz-Arno Wagner, and adapter-screenwriter Henrik Galeen — in its attempt to validate its cannibalizing as a more up-to-date kind of artistry. This entails such absurdities as reproducing shots from Nosferatu not as they looked in 1922 but as they look in moldy prints today — and in an anachronistic wide-screen format. Why? Because Shadow of the Vampire is in a wide-screen format.

Admittedly, the film has made possible an enjoyable piece of bravura overacting by Dafoe, but at what a price. Viewers who argue that if it’s “entertaining” it’s OK to turn one of the greatest film artists into a shallow-minded hack and murderer — or to turn the Ku Klux Klan into a flip joke, as O Brother, Where Art Thou? does — are agreeing to let wealthy bozos looking at profit margins have more say about these matters than people who care about silent movies or the friends and relatives of Klan victims. I’m reminded of the depressing spectacle of teenagers begging for Antitrust T-shirts at a recent radio promo screening, jumping up and down like dogs waiting for sticks to be thrown — fighting for the privilege of granting a studio free cheesy advertising. Of course, one could argue that this is less pathetic than people paying for the privilege when they buy Disney and Hefner products.

As an antidote to such attitudes, I’d recommend Blooper Bunny — darkly inspired by Bugs’s 50th anniversary as “celebrated” by Warners and cowritten by sometime Reader film reviewer Ronnie Scheib. It reportedly miffed so many studio executives back in ‘91, around the time of the Time-Warner merger, that they promptly shelved it. It surfaced six years later, after Ted Turner brought about another merger, and has been something of a legend ever since. One of the things the studio apparently disliked was the sound of a toilet flushing (which accounts for Daffy Duck missing a stage cue), though I suspect they also didn’t like Daffy and Yosemite Sam audibly and cantankerously complaining about being exploited as cash cows in a TV special — and maybe also a montage of magazine covers featuring Bugs, including Vacuity, Moolah, TV Snide, and Vague. Ironically, Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers, another Bugs Bunny cartoon directed at the same time by the same rebellious duo, Greg Ford and Terry Lennon, is even more directly critical of studio greed, yet it got a pass and wound up on the TV special Bugs Bunny’s Creature Features, perhaps because it was less formally transgressive. (The premise, a spin on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is that malignant carrots from outer space are turning all the Warner Brothers cartoon characters into poorly and cheaply drawn replicas of their former selves.)

Much of what’s funny about Blooper Bunny is the temperament of the aging cast: Bugs rehearsing his opening line, “Gosh, I’m so unimportant,” over and over; Elmer still trying to grow hair with tonic; Daffy insanely jealous about being upstaged and threatening to have “my people” talk to “your people”; and Sam grouchily declaring as he’s being forklifted onstage that he couldn’t care less how old Bugs is — he still hates rabbits.

I’ve seen all three of the features Sean Penn has directed, yet I had to take it on faith when Todd McCarthy helpfully noted in Variety that all three have hinged “on the aftereffects of killings,” with the action of both the second (The Crossing Guard, also starring Jack Nicholson) and the third, The Pledge, “flowing from the death of a 7- or 8-year-old girl.” For I remember practically nothing about The Crossing Guard and even less about his 1991 The Indian Runner. It probably doesn’t matter, because one of the things I like most about The Pledge is how interesting it is in its own right, without reference to other movies. If it reminds me of another film, it’s Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité, which also begins with the discovery of a raped and murdered little girl in an empty field and is ultimately more about the detective investigating the case than about the rapist and murderer.

The detective isn’t the culprit in either film, yet in both cases the moral exploration of the character — as witness and as the viewer’s surrogate — teases us with this possibility. In The Pledge, the girl’s body is found during homicide detective Jerry Black’s last day at work, during a surprise party thrown to celebrate his retirement. He insists on following the case and when he discovers that none of his colleagues have dared to tell the parents their daughter’s been murdered, he volunteers, then winds up pledging to find the murderer, swearing “by my soul’s salvation.”

This sounds like a conventional setup for a mystery thriller, though the film’s arty opening (several shots of birds in the sky superimposed over a shot of Black in front of a filling station, muttering to himself) and its elliptical way of showing him reporting the girl’s death to her parents at their turkey ranch (a long shot showing the three of them flanked on every side by dozens of turkeys, the dialogue inaudible) suggest a narrative approach that respects many of the mysteries and therefore leaves them intact. Black’s obsessive desire for a resolution, which we’re sometimes asked to share, gradually becomes a kind of complicity in the original crime. It’s a bold move: the desire for edification is followed by the queasy recognition that such a desire — on Black’s part and our own — may be tantamount to encouraging the criminal to come out of hiding by preying on another victim. Consequently the unraveling of the mystery and the development of Black’s character become at times indistinguishable, especially after we see him apparently retired but continuing his investigation by other means. (A lot of what’s going on is left up to our own interpretations, which only increases our implication in the events.) Ultimately, the film’s lack of satisfying closure is a direct consequence of its integrity, which depends on keeping us creatively suspended.

I don’t know how much of this ambiguity can be traced to the Friedrich Dürenmatt novel the film adapts, but there’s little question that Penn’s direction — in terms of storytelling and coaxing first-rate performances out of a lot of talented actors — gets pretty close at times to masterful. Nicholson has rarely done such nuanced work, and the degree to which his character gradually entangles us in aspects of his behavior becomes a way of criticizing the mystery thriller genre itself as a response to life. In different ways, the other movies reviewed here feed off other movies. The Pledge does something more interesting: it feeds off us.

Left Behind

This fundamentalist SF, based on a best-seller by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, is (or was) billing itself as The Christian Entertainment Event of 2000, but seems perfectly timed to coincide with the ascension to office of George W. Bush. It’s a clunky effort Bush could have written and directed. Over 142 million people on the planetincluding all the childrenhave vanished and gone to heaven because they’re true believers. Meanwhile, the Antichrist turns out to be Russian, proving that Joseph McCarthy must have been right all along. The credited director is Vic Sarin and the credited writers are Allan McElroy, Paul Lalonde, and Joe Goodman. Among the cast are Kirk Cameron, Chelsea Noble, Clarence Gilyard, and Brad Johnson, doing what they can with hopeless if weirdly sincere material. 95 min. (JR)

The Wedding Planner

Dopey but charming, this romantic comedyabout a San Francisco wedding planner (Jennifer Lopez) experiencing love at first sight vis-a-vis a pediatrician (Matthew McConaughey) who turns out to be the expectant groom in one of her assignmentsdraws much of its allure from the two leads. Most of the remainder comes from a clear desire to emulate and approximate various second-tier studio musicals and comedies that one might associate with the early 50s. This never rises above such treacle but happily lives up to it every chance it gets. With Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Justin Chambers, Judy Greer, and Kathy Najimy; written by Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis and directed by Adam Shankman. 100 min. (JR)

THE AMERICAN CINEMA Revisited [on Andrew Sarris]

I’m saddened that Andrew Sarris (1928-2012) didn’t live longer than 83, even though he had a very rich and rewarding career as a film critic.

This book review appeared in the sixth issue of Cinema Scope (Winter 2001) and is reprinted in my most recent collection. — J.R.

The American Cinema Revisited

Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic:
Essays in Honor of Andrew Sarris
Edited by Emanuel Levy
The Scarecrow Press, 2001

Ironically, my enemies were the first to alert me to the fact that I had followers.
– Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist (1970)

One of the main emotions aroused in me by the 40 or so contributions to the millennial Festschrift Citizen Sarris is nostalgia –- specifically, a yearning for the era three or four decades ago when something that might be described as a North American film community was slowly emerging and recognizing its own existence.

This was just before academic film studies, radical politics, drugs and diverse other developments splintered that community into separate and mainly non-communicating cliques and ghettos, accompanied by an intensification of studio promotion that eventually took infotainment beyond its status as a minor industry and into an arena where advertising was coming close to defining as well as monitoring the whole of film culture, thus phasing out individual voices -– or at the very least bunching them together in sound bites, pull quotes, bibliographies and adjectival ad copy.

It’s not as though a single film community can’t or won’t ever exist again. More precisely, it’s changed its stripes and certain portions of it have gone back underground –- “underground” in the present situation often meaning online. And occasionally representations of that lost community crop up in books such as this one, where academics (ranging from John Belton to James Naremore to Elizabeth Weis), journalists (from Roger Ebert to Leonard Maltin to Gerald Peary), programmers, distributors and producers (including Geoffrey Gilmore, Daniel Talbot and James Schamus), and filmmakers (including Robert Benton, Budd Boetticher, Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Hanson and John Sayles) are once again juxtaposed cheek by jowl, as they used to be in the pages of Film Culture –- as if they all still listened to one another. (To be fair, sometimes they still do, and this book demonstrates how it can still happen –- and how Sarris could and can make it possible.) Through Emanuel Levy hasn’t quite succeeded in making this group international –- despite a one-page essay by Serge Losique entitled “The International Film Critic” and a Todd McCarthy memoir entitled “Sarris and Paris” — he’s at least made it North and South American in orientation rather than  simply “American,” with Piers Handling contributing a useful piece about “Auteurism in Canada” and Richard Peña  doing something similar with Latin America in “Andrew Sarris and the Romantic Rebellion”.

My nostalgia for that era and lost community is personal as well as tribal. I’m speaking of the decade during which I left Alabama for Vermont and New York and discovered art cinema as well as film criticism, the French New Wave as well as the auteurist styles of Hollywood -– the latter as propounded in a 68-page essay called “The American Cinema” by Andrew Sarris that lead off the Spring 1963 issue of Film Culture, which I still own minus its lurid cover of chained chorines in a surreal 30s musical. (By contrast, hardly anyone seems to recall Sarris’ pantheon of actors’ performances, “Acting Aweigh!”, which     appeared in the Fall 1965 issue and was clearly designed as a companion piece, though it inspired much less comment or controversy.) I was already a buff at the time who ran the Friday night film series at Bard College, but I didn’t start getting involved professionally with film criticism until 1968, just as I was quitting grad school in English and American Lit, when a classmate hired me to edit an anthology of film criticism (never published) structured around directors -– which lead me to meet, among others, Andrew Sarris.

I moved to Paris the following year, and on trips back wrote a few movie pieces for The Village Voice that Andy either assigned or approved: first a pedestrian account of a thrilling experience –- being an extra on Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer; then reviews of such independent fare as Jim McBride’s Glen and Randa, a documentary about the first moon landing called Moonwalk One, and Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania; and my first two years of Cannes festival coverage — thereby paving the way for book reviews of everything from Gravity’s Rainbow and Myron to Theory of Film Practice, Martin Gardner’s  Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, Jerry Lewis: In Person, and Dwight Macdonald’s  Discriminations. I also contributed ten best lists to Sarris’ year-end wrap-ups, along with a slew of others –- not really the same thing as the Voice’s recent annual polls, because it was still a genuine community newspaper in the early 70s, closer to a bulletin board than anything else, with a letters column that was typically more fun to read than anything else in the paper.

How did Sarris figure in all this? As one of the main connecting threads and references for me and my friends, and in many ways as a passionate rallying point, Also as a facilitator and friend in his own right. During the same period, I can recall Andy once gleefully referring to King Vidor’s Street Scene as “pre-Bazinian” after a Paris Cinémathèque screening, and offering a wonderful rap to me about what was so special about Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore as a kind of “first-person” testament and as an uncommon stretching of a filmmaker’s limits, after its first Cannes screening.

The names I miss most in this volume of tributes are those of various Sarris disciples and comrades-in-arms with whom I feel or once felt a particular kinship, such as Stuart Byron, David Ehrenstein, Tag Gallagher, Stephen Gottlieb, Roger Greenspun, Joseph McBride, Richard McGuinness, Michael McKegney, Roger McNiven, George Morris, William Paul, and James Stoller. The reasons for these absences are quite diverse (some of these people are no longer alive, and others no longer write) and I’m not bringing them up as reproaches to Levy’s ample list of contributors — simply as indicators of the sort of history that sometimes escapes textbooks and Festschrifts alike. Along with many of the writers who are included, they and I qualified in some ways as Sarrisites –- a motlier crew than the Paulettes (also known as the Kaelites), by and large, though surely no less passionate, and surely different in vocation insofar as we were all entirely and exclusively self-appointed. (I can still recall Todd McCarthy’s voluminous, single-spaced letters to me in the mid-70s, running through weeks and months of auteur-oriented filmgoing with heartfelt thumbnail evaluations attached to every feature, often complete with Sarris-like alliteration). Only later would come the revisions, retractions and even defections. It was a shock, for instance, once I came to know Samuel Fuller, that, contrary to what Andy wrote, he wasn’t either a primitive or a right-winger — not the man who organized a fund-raising party for Adlai Stevenson in the 50s. But Manny Farber wasn’t really accurate about those aspects of Sam either, and if it weren’t for both of these pioneering critics, I might never have discovered Fuller’s movies in the first place.

Furthermore, as Molly Haskell puts it in one of Citizen Sarris’ best pieces, “Life with Andrew…and Film” — even more valuable for its many corrective insights than for its biographical information — “Although he attracted a great many followers (and detractors: he received more mail, hate and otherwise, than anyone at the Voice), Andrew never set out to acquire acolytes, or form a flock of disciples to whom he would issue the party line on every film, or whose straying members he would whip back into the fold…or excommunicate!” It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out who Haskell is distinguishing her husband from, and it’s important to stress that her point isn’t a wife’s wishful thinking or idealistic gloss but the gospel truth: not only did Sarris fail to encourage disciples, unlike his most visible opponent; one way or another, he — unlike the enduring example of his work -– wound up doing his best to discourage them. Another of Haskell’s corrective insights distinguishes him from practically everyone else in his critical generation: a refusal to use such Frankfurt-school epithets as “trash” or “kitsch,” perhaps underlining the degree to which he developed in reaction to analysts such as Siegfried Kracauer, and in concert with what he once called “the Parisian heresy (in New York eyes) concerning the sacred importance of the cinema.”

***

The interesting thing about Andy in the 60s was that he became polemical almost in spite of his normal and mainly gentle inclinations — a taker of hard and fast positions that disconcertingly created dissension wherever he went, when it wasn’t really his nature to sustain such battles for long. In the back pages of the Spring 1963 Film Culture, he assigned five stars to Renoir’s The Elusive Corporal and Hitchcock’s The Birds, no stars to Lawrence of Arabia and To Kill a Mockingbird, and only one star to Antonioni’s Eclipse — judgments bound to give offense to all sorts of people as well as a certain kind of passionate sustenance to a hardcore group of followers, myself included (even though I preferred Eclipse to The Birds, and still do today, and despite the fact that Andy later offered a thoughtful semi-defense of Zabriskie Point in contrast to practically everyone else in New York at the time, reprinted in The Primal Screen.) Because what Andy stood for was a revolution in taste –- a new kind of syllabus founded on the excitements stirred up by the personal styles of directors. It led to a lot more than his defense of certain American directors; he was also one of the few American critics at the time to defend Muriel and Gertrud.

Above all, it was a declaration that movies were important -– a position that still gave one a lot of leeway for change and development. Here are two key sentences by Sarris drafted four years apart for Film Culture, each one retaining its own kind of legitimacy. 1962: “After years of tortured revaluation, I am now prepared to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on the proposition that Alfred Hitchcock is artistically superior to Robert Bresson by every criterion of excellence and further that, film for film, director for director, the American cinema has been consistently superior to that of the rest of the world from 1915 to 1962.” 1966: “All in all, no film I ever seen has come so close to convulsing my entire being as has Au hasard Balthazar.”

It was the passion that finally counted the most, and one might add that similarly, the best pieces in this collection aren’t always or necessarily the ones that have the most to say about Sarris. In contrast to the more gingerly or dutiful tributes that seem to be walking on eggshells -– no need to name names here, because most of them can be spotted at once –- is a lengthy and deeply felt piece of invective by Ed Sikov, an avowed ex-Kaelian, about the homophobia he finds in Pauline Kael’s review of George Cukor’s last feature, Rich and Famous, which he briefly juxtaposes with Sarris’ review of a Cukor biography, as well as Sarris’ public apology for gay-baiting when he wrote about Parker Tyler. In his Preface, Levy records his regrets that neither Kael nor any of the “Paulettes” he approached agreed to contribute anything to this volume, though he neglects to add that the fury of this former Paulette — almost recalling in certain respects one of the essays in The God That Failed about defection from the Communist party — is in some ways as revealing as the silence of the others. The degree to which some autuerists and anti- auteurists split over issues of politics, religion, and even sexual orientation testifies to the urgency these kinds of debates had when certain basics of critical programs were still being established and defended. Which is another way of saying that these people weren’t just fighting about movies; they were fighting about world views, lifestyles, and personal philosophies — a far cry from the thumbs up and thumbs down of simple consumerism. (If you want to get a sense of the decanted essence of this position, see if you can hunt down The Films of Josef von Sternberg, a Museum of Modern Art monograph of 1966 that qualifies as Sarris’ first book — and for me as well as a certain number of contributors to Citizen Sarris remains his best.)  In the same period that I became a Sarrisite and some others became Paulettes, I also became, after I moved to Paris, a Burchite — hunting down the unseen films mentioned in Noël Burch’s Praxis du cinéma (the original French edition of Theory of Film Practice) with some of the same fanaticism that led me to stay up all night in Manhattan (before the era of VCRs) to catch unseen features by Nicholas Ray or Samuel Fuller. Maybe the agendas of The American Cinema and Praxis du cinéma were too incompatible to make much sense together, but not for a crazed cinephile in Paris with time on his hands. Things were still growing then, which meant that everything was still possible.

I don’t doubt that things are still growing and still possible for various crazed cinephiles today, so I’m not trying to pull any rank here. The point is that, cinema-is-dead theorists to the contrary, film history never even comes close to repeating itself, for better and for worse. And the prime lesson to be learned from Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic isn’t how much things were changed forever by one book called The American Cinema, because ultimately there is no forever in film criticism. The point is how much they’re still changing because of it, because with or without forever, ripples can last for centuries.

–Cinema Scope, issue 6, Winter 2001

The Pledge

The third feature directed by Sean Penn and the first one that I’ve liked. Adapted by the couple Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski from a 1958 Friedrich Dürrenmatt novel, this is a nervy as well as somber piece of work, not only for the way it confounds and even frustrates certain genre expectations, but also–and especially–for how it confronts the viewer with the moral implications of that frustration. Jack Nicholson, in one of his most impressive, least show-offy performances, plays a Reno police detective who becomes obsessed with the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl and by his pledge to her parents that he’ll catch the murderer–unlike his colleagues, he still considers the case unsolved. Though he makes a stab at retirement, moving into a fishing resort and taking over a filling station, he continues to track down what he believes are clues, but this movie qualifies as a mystery thriller only intermittently; it’s more concerned with how much he–and we–want the culprit, real or imagined, to spring out of hiding and continue his bloody work. An abandoned balloon at one juncture alludes directly to Fritz Lang’s M, and though Penn’s arty direction doesn’t belong in that league, he’s become a very accomplished storyteller and an adroit director of actors–including the omnipresent Benicio Del Toro, Aaron Eckhart, and, in striking cameos, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, and Helen Mirren. (Even the normally disappointing Robin Wright Penn is better than usual.) With Sam Shepard, Tom Noonan, Lois Smith, and Harry Dean Stanton. 124 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Esquire, Golf Glen, Lake, Lincoln Village, Norridge, Village North.

–Jonathan Rosenbaum