Blythe Danner

  • To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

    To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) There’s a perfectly fair argument to be made that To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar is too conventional a film—fluffy, predictable, shallow and willfully unwilling to confront deeper issues about its characters. On the other hand—this was a major Hollywood studio production about drag queens from the middle of the somewhat less accepting 1990s: How could it not be such a film? A safe way to talk about outsiders is to make them irresistibly likable, and that’s the bet successfully waged here. Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo star as three drag queens whose cross-country road trip lands them in a small Midwestern town, where they’ll confront local bigots, crooked police and various semi-romantic entanglements. It goes without saying that our three protagonists are without personal flaws, and are free to use both masculine and feminine virtues to overcome their obstacles. It all works really well, at least on a somewhat fairy-tale level. But notice how To Wong Foo quickly skims over the question of the protagonists’ sexuality (and when it does, makes such broad sassy considerations with such outdated terminology that they immediately become suspect) and takes the very convenient route of avoiding the transformation process—save from a scene at the very beginning of the film, our leads remain in drag all the time, night and day. There’s a sanitization process that helps with the film’s fantasy of easy acceptance, but we’re nowhere near realism. Reading about the film from the perspective of queer cinema commentators is highly enlightening. But on the surface level that it seeks out, To Wong Foo is more successful than not—let’s not underestimate the performances of Swayze and Leguizamo (for whom this is still one of his best movies)—plus a still-remarkable performance by black masculinity icon Wesley Snipes. Non-queen actors are also not too bad, with Blythe Danner and Stockard Channing getting some attention in largely functional roles. It all looks clean and stereotypically mid-American, with director Beeban Kidron keeping things moving at the intended level. No, To Wong Foo is not a heart-wrenching drama nor cutting social commentary—but it is likable and fun to watch and, in normalizing the outsiders, makes them less of outsiders. Not a bad result then or now.

  • The Tomorrow Man (2019)

    The Tomorrow Man (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) There’s something half-clever in the conceit at the heart of The Tomorrow Man if you see it as a romantic comedy of sorts — the opposition between a doomsday prepper and a borderline hoarder. It works even better considering that John Lithgow (a master of implicit comedy, helped by a refusal to go manic) and Blythe Danner (as attractive now as ever) headline the film and can easily earn sympathy even when playing flawed characters. The prepper mindset carries a certain topicality, but it’s clear that, as the film digs into the tortured psyche of its characters, it has more to do with a certain kind of paranoia than a current-events commentary. I have to admit that I’ve got a certain innate sympathy for Lithgow’s character here — I’m maybe twenty-five years, one mental breakdown and one tumble down the conspiracy cliff away from him. As an elderly romance (both actors are in their mid-70s), The Tomorrow Man is cute and rather straightforward once a few initial mysteries are resolved. It does have its clunky moments, some at the beginning (it’s not clear why she doesn’t view him as an alarming stalker) and many more at the end (with some idiot plotting, unearned changes of opinion and unsatisfying developments). But writer/director Noble Jones is going for something a bit difficult to full define, perhaps because the script so often slips and falls. The ending sequence, which throws the film in a somewhat different genre simply for the sake of a good ironic joke, is a bit like that: Sure, it’s a surprise, but does it fit? Does it finalize the character’s journey, or does it negate it? As I’ve said: half-clever. Halfway there, but not there. Maybe tomorrow.

  • The Great Santini (1979)

    The Great Santini (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) There’s something to be said about actors willing to give themselves up to their character while keeping their own ego in check. I’m hardly the first one to point at Robert Duvall’s performance in The Great Santini as one of those great examples of an actor committing to playing a borderline loathsome one—the infamous basketball sequence, in which a grown man can’t accept being beaten by their own son, is one of those masterclass examples of an actor serving a character without caring for their persona. Much of the film is built around the same principles: The lead character is a top-notch fighter pilot, a capable military leader, but a terrible husband and an even worse father-of-four. The Great Santini doesn’t have a plot as much as a series of episodes in service of a character study—the film ends (unsatisfactorily) when the character does. Duvall is very good as the mean prankster, grudge holding, inflexible military officer unable to maintain a distance between the job and his family—but then there are the other actors surrounding him, from the ever-cute Blythe Danner to redheaded Lisa Jane Persky’s screen debut to a solid performance by Michael O’Keefe as his son and rival. Despite the pranks and the grander-than-life nature of its lead character, The Great Santini is not exactly an enjoyable experience: it’s a film about the trauma of living with an oversized character and the energy it takes to power through it. The plot is secondary and treated as such. As a showcase for Duvall, on the other hand, it remains essential.

  • Hearts of the West (1975)

    Hearts of the West (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I had a harder time than I expected in watching Hearts of the West. Starring Jeff Bridges as a 1930s naïve would-be writer heading west to gather fresh material for his prose, and then to Hollywood to escape a pair of criminals, this film has a lot of elements that I would consider enjoyable. Bridges as a young man, some material about naïve writers, the ever-cute Blythe Danner as the love interest (any resemblance to Gwyneth Paltrow is strictly maternal) and, more interestingly, a look at Hollywood in the everything-goes 1930s before westerns became respectable. But it’s when you dig into the details that it all becomes much messier. For instance, I never got a good handle on its lead character: written as a naïve kid with literary delusions, he’s played by a too-old Bridges as somewhat wiser than what’s on the page: I would have enjoyed the film more had the character been something else—perhaps coming from an eastern city rather than the farm, or something. And while Hearts of the West has been described as having an off-beat tone, the reality feels more undisciplined than anything else: the good moments are undercut with tonal shifts and tangents that don’t do much to reinforce the film itself. Oh, Alan Arkin is good as an old-school producer and Andy Griffith is unusually likable as a has-been star would-be plagiarist. But the low budget seemingly limits the film from creating an immersive look at 1930s filmmaking, and the film doesn’t have a plot as much as an excuse to string along various scenes. In the end, Hearts of the West is intermittently interesting, not quite as likable as it should have been and somewhat vexing in how it squanders promising elements.

  • Tumbledown (2015)

    Tumbledown (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2020) Rebecca Hall and Jason Sudeikis make for an interesting pairing in romantic comedy Tumbledown, although the “comedy” here may be a bit more muted than you’d think considering that the story happens during the female lead’s final stages of grieving for her dead husband. The plot has to do with a writer (Sudeikis, in an unusually toned-down role) travelling from New York City to Maine in order to complete his biography of a dead singer. Alas, the singer’s widow (Hall, as beautiful as ever) is not a willing participant and the complex relationship they have eventually moves toward romance. It’s all a bit predictable in a good way, with Hall’s character moving on from her grief into something else. It’s perhaps a bit sweeter than usual for those kinds of films, considering the more dramatic aspect of a dead husband hanging over the romantic component of the film. The late-winter small-town setting echoes the larger thematic aspects of the script and the darker undertones of the backstory. There are a few issues with the script—Sudeikis’ character, who has elements of wish-fulfillment for the female audience, isn’t always written in the most believable ways. Elsewhere in the cast, I did enjoy seeing another late-career role for Blythe Danner –and Griffin Dunne too! While uneven and arguably a bit too wrapped in the conventions of romance (although, you know, those are likable characters and we want them to be happy), Tumbledown isn’t bad considering its slow pace.

  • Husbands and Wives (1992)

    Husbands and Wives (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2020) One of the issues with Woody Allen and trying to separate his art from his somewhat unsettling life is that his movies are big giant signposts telling us about his state of mind at any given time. Husbands and Wives, for instance, is a tale of marital dissatisfaction that just happened to come out at the end of his relationship with Mia Farrow—with Farrow and Allen fighting it out on celluloid. Whew. There’s more, of course—the seediest things in Allen’s filmography are the constant relationships between much older men and women at most half his age, and we get that once again here—hey, Allen, can’t you at least stop writing that stuff in your scripts? As for Husbands and Wives itself, there’s a reason why it generally holds up when compared to the other Allen films of that era: the intense navel-gazing eventually leads somewhere, and the film doesn’t even unfairly evoke the memory of Allen’s comedies. The mixture of Manhattan DINK lifestyle, documentary style and messy examination of personal foibles is certainly classic Allen, done in a still interesting-enough way compared to some of his later works. He also, as usual, gets great performances from his supporting cast: Juliette Lewis makes an impression in a more sedate role than the ones she’d play throughout most of the 1990s, a rising-star Liam Neeson barges into the plot and Blythe Danner makes a very quick appearance. Husbands and Wives is a kind of film best suited for adult audiences, not so much for any risqué content than because it’s glum and unromantic about long-term relationships—and it takes some living to relate to that.

  • The Lucky One (2012)

    The Lucky One (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Here are the facts: The Lucky One is a romantic drama based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. I should just stop the review right here, because you already have all of what’s required to make up your mind about the movie and whether you’re likely to enjoy it. Most Sparks novels are built according to a similar melodramatic template, and this similarity is not helped at all by bland casting and unremarkable direction. The story has to do with a soldier making his way back from Iraq to a woman whose picture he found during combat, but really that’s just an extra-melodramatic setup for a “stranger comes into town” plot à la Safe Haven. It ends pretty much how you’d expect, which is tautologically the only way it could end up given the expectations of its audience. If it sounds as if I’m exasperated by the result, that’s true only up to a certain point. Past that, the film delivers exactly what it intends, and there is some atmospheric attractiveness in small-town romance stories with added dramatic flair. (Plus Zac Efron and/or Taylor Schilling. Although I’m getting old enough now that Blythe Danner is starting to look like the cute one in the film.) The Lucky One is the kind of movie that it wants to be, and you’d don’t have to see it if you don’t want to.