Ileana Douglas

  • Dummy (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2022) One of the fascinating things about small low-budget independent movies is that, from time to time, some of them can have a second life as a showcase for actors who became famous much later. I should be careful in talking about Dummy as an ensemble cast of then-unknowns –at the time, Milla Jovovich was already well-known, Adrien Brody was on the upward trajectory of his career (and about to hit the big time thanks to The Pianist) and Ileana Douglas had a long filmography. On the other hand, Vera Farmiga and Jared Harris were in their first years in the movie business – and that clearly shows in how nearly unrecognizably young they look compared to their later high-profile years. But yeah: five actors, many of them used in ways not necessarily associated with their best-known screen persona. It’s quite a trip to see Jovovich as an emo-type struggling singer with a tendency to fly off in a rage, or Harris as a young man with stalking issues. Brody, on the other hand, is playing to type as a socially awkward young man who finds ways of expressing himself through ventriloquism. There’s a low-key comedy tone running through the film even as it focuses on some miserable characters – the upbeat ending ensures that viewers will get a good feeling from this quirky film. Dummy is a bit of a surprise – not a big one, but a low-profile independent film that managed to cast five actors of interest in the service of an ultimately feel-good film. I’ve seen much worse.

  • Message in a Bottle (1999)

    Message in a Bottle (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2016) What?, you say, Kevin Costner playing an idealized stoic male loner figure designed to make women swoon? Well, yes. Message in a Bottle, predictably adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel, starts with a mystery (who is the man who would write such a heartbreaking letter and toss it off to sea in a bottle?) and gradually ends on the trail of a sensitive model of masculinity, still grieving over the loss of his wife in a picturesque eastern seaboard town. Cue the waterworks, cue the stirring music, cue the sage old man, cue the lies that lead to rifts, cue just about everything that such Nicholas Sparks-inspired movies have. It’s mechanistic and calculated and cynical and obvious and it still works in some fashion. It helps that the actors are good at what they do: Costner is Costner, obviously, but Robin Wright makes for a suitably bland heroine and Paul Newman shows up as a wizened old man. Throw in Ileana Douglas as spunky comic relief and Robbie Coltrane as a gruff boss and the clichés just write themselves into comforting lines. The audiences for this kind of movie are self-identified—the rest of us might as well not even try to comment.