Annette Benning

  • Regarding Henry (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) You don’t watch Regarding Henry for the plot. From a very early point, you’ll be able to recognize and anticipate everything that’s going to happen, the middle-class values it espouses as being obvious and the sub-threads that will illustrate that thesis. Even in execution, this is the kind of film that shouts its foreshadowing, leaves no emotional trigger unfired and takes forever to get to its most obvious plot points (“Ritz!”). It is close to the epitome of a very specific kind of Hollywood drama that passes off bromides as earth-shattering revelations, treats lower-class people as likable tools for the middle-class and hypocritically seems to reject the ideology of the super-rich as aggressive. In a few words, the plot has to do with a super-powered high-class lawyer with no morals who is shot in the head during a convenience store robbery and then, thanks to amnesia, has to rebuild himself from the ground up. You will not be surprised to see the new him be disgusted at the old him, or actions related to that shift being Regarding Henry’s climax. Casting Harrison Ford in that lead role is both a coup and a curse—1991-vintage Ford could project confidence-becoming-arrogance like few others, and his very reserved acting style serves him well in the lengthy middle part of the film, where he’s a catatonic mute gradually learning everything again. It’s in the later part of the film that Ford’s acting limitations become more obvious—but by that point we’re supposed to be deeply invested anyway. Annette Benning does have a more challenging role as the wife undergoing her own trials as her husband rebuilds himself—and she does look great in a curly red hairdo. But while very little of the film’s description so far may seem appealing, it’s a measure of veteran director Mike Nichols’ expertise (working from a script by J. J. Abrams—yes, that J. J. Abrams—who also has a small role here) that the film feels rather watchable throughout. Despite fundamental flaws that would have toppled a more cynical approach to the film’s direction, Nichols makes Regarding Henry work, somehow, even when he’s slumming. It’s far too manipulative to be anything but adequate, but at least it rises to that level—which wasn’t necessarily a done deal had anyone else had helmed it. It’s clear that a better script would have featured more interesting justifications about the ideology of the super-driven Manhattan lawyer, or how the child is the father of the man (all over again) or believable dramatic arcs for people surrounding the protagonist or, well, anything better than the Ritz thing. “Watchable” may not feel like much of a compliment, but considering where Regarding Henry started from and the multiple hurdles it throws in its own path, it will have to do.

  • Love Affair (1994)

    Love Affair (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2021) On paper, the idea of remaking 1939’s Love Affair (itself remade in 1957 as the better-remembered Cary Grant vehicle An Affair to Remember) with Warren Beatty and then-new wife Annette Benning isn’t all that awful as Hollywood ideas go. Sure, it’s recycling, but it’s recycling from earlier decades, which almost makes it affectionately reverent of Hollywood history. Further burnishing this connection to classic film history is Katharine Hepburn, here playing a canny older woman in her final film role. If you look down the cast list, you’ll find names such as Kate Capshaw, Pierce Brosnan (bearded), Garry Shandling, Harold Ramis and Rosalind Chao in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role. Still, even a good cast can’t quite save a clunky script that doesn’t update the most vexing elements of the original films, makes new mistakes of its own and can’t create dialogue equal to the original. Beatty and Benning appear self-satisfied with themselves here, but even their star coupling can’t quite translate to screen heat. A series of unlikely events is contrived to make the film happen like it does (including the engineering the entrance of Hepburn’s character) but perhaps the worst is the heavy-handed ableism that powers much of the last act of the film — something that should have been left in the past, even if it had meant not making this film at all. Not all remakes are good ideas, and this may help to explain why this Love Affair has now sunk so thoroughly in obscurity as anything but Hepburn’s final film.