Annette Bening

The Great Outdoors (1988)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-04-222023-04-03 Movie Review

(On TV, April 2019) When I say that The Great Outdoors is about taking a trip, it’s not necessarily in the way reflected by the plot of the film. Yes, sure, it’s superficially about two brothers and their families spending a week at a lake cabin, and the various tensions between the brothers playing themselves out. But in more significant ways to twenty-first century viewers, The Great Outdoors is a trip back in time, to an era with a very specific aesthetic when it comes to dumb comedies. Written by John Hughes, directed by Howard Deutch, starring John Candy and Dan Aykroyd, you can clearly associate the film with the mainstream of mid-to-late-1980s American comedies. For anyone on a steady diet of more modern films, it’s a different experience watching a dumb 1980s comedy, with its painfully obvious plotting, shot dumb gags and abandoned emotional arcs. (I’m not saying modern movies are smarter—but the stylistic conventions are different.) But dumb 1980s films can be reasonably fun, so if you can tolerate the expected gags and predictable third-act plot developments, the end result isn’t too bad—especially considering how The Great Outdoors does a lot of mileage on Candy and Aykroyd’s pure comic talents, with Candy as a goofy dad and Aykroyd as a fast-talking urbanite. (Meanwhile, Annette Bening’s screen debut here is probably an early shame considering her later body of work.) There are a few things I really liked—notably the use of “Yakety Yak” at the beginning of the film, and the very funny scenes featuring subtitled raccoon talk. The Great Outdoors is not a great film, but it does have an amiable quality to it: if nothing else, it’s not mean-spirited at all in showing some heartwarming family moments.

Movie Review

The American President (1995)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-04-072023-04-04 Movie Review

(In French, On TV, April 2019) At this point in American history, the idea of a likable, virtuous, law-abiding president is the stuff of comforting fantasy, so here’s The American President to remind us of what that was like. This rather charming romantic comedy takes on the premise of having a widowed president woo a lobbyist. Written by Aaron Sorkin, the film can certainly be seen as a dry run for The West Wing—voluble, clever, and idealistic at once. (Checking the film’s original English-language quotes, it’s obvious that the film loses something in translation.) Even though other movies and shows have mined the same terrain since 1995, The American President still provides an interesting glimpse at the heart of a presidency, and doesn’t forget to tackle the more honest aspects of the power dynamics of a relationship between the president and a citizen. A great cast anchors Rob Reiner’s straightforward direction: While Michael Douglas gets to play the president opposite Annette Bening’s fiery lobbyist, the film can also count on Martin Sheen (I told you it was a West Wing dry run), Michael J. Fox and John Mahoney. The American President is a good movie, but the current political context makes it even better, with its romance being as idealistic as its political nature—presupposing a president of good moral character and a concerned effort to curb emission gasses. It is a bit disheartening to hear a film nearly twenty-five-year-old tackling things that really should have been done back then. But when it comes to escapism, Hollywood does it best.

Movie Review

Bugsy (1991)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-03-112023-04-04 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) There is such a heady brew of elements in Bugsy that I wonder why I’m not so happy with the result. It is, after all, a mixture of crime, Hollywood, gambling and empire building, as a mob enforcer goes to Los Angeles in 1940, discovers the allure of Classic Hollywood, and starts dreaming about building a big gambling town in the Nevada desert. It’s easy why the role of “Bugsy” Siegel would have some attraction for Warren Beatty: a mixture of a powerful criminal, decisive lover, futurist dreamer and Golden-Age Hollywood glamour—a fast-talking con man with the ruthlessness to back it up. Plus, the lead female role belonged to Annette Bening, whom he met during shooting and eventually married. Technically, the film is solid: great production values, veteran director Barry Levinson at the helm, and good actors in the main roles. But Bugsy isn’t quite as slick as its components would suggest. The script shows some contempt for its character by titling itself after a nickname he hated. The pacing is unhurried, quite unlike the character it portrays. The ending is as obvious as it’s drawn out. And so the film’s highlights (such as a visit to a movie set) are drowned in so much minutiae that the entire thing feels lifeless in comparison to its subject. Maybe I’ll revisit Bugsy someday and see if I was just in a bad mood, or if the film does not align with its own centre.

Movie Review

The Kids are All Right (2010)

ByChristian Sauvé 2011-01-252014-11-04 Movie Review

(On DVD, January 2011) If you consider this film solely from its pedigree sheet, you may expect something significant: Film-festival’s favourite, lauded by reviewers, nominated for a truck-load of awards, performances by Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo —The Kids are All Right has to be something special, right? And if you just look at the surface, the film’s two major tweaks on the usual family-drama template may be interesting: As the two kids of a lesbian couple come of age, they reconnect with their biological father, causing the father and one of their moms to have an affair. Cue the applause for a frank portrayal of what modern families can be. But beyond that departure from the usual family drama formula, what’s left? Not much. So little, in fact, that once you get the “unconventional family” premise, the film struggles to justifies its existence: The dialogue feels familiar, the plotting is a well-worn formula, the characters are all annoying in their own way, and the laughs in this “comedy” are both rare and slight. By the time the film remembers that it has a serious adultery subplot, the film concludes at a speed it couldn’t bother to reach at any time before that. The sex scenes don’t rescue the film, and neither do the actors involved. There’s a self-defeating quality in how The Kids Are All Right manages to make its unusual family seem as boring as any traditional nuclear family elsewhere in America. Is the film all right? Sure it is. But not much more.