Jeff Daniels

Fly Away Home (1996)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, September 2020) It always amuses me how some movies, and not necessarily the box-office champs, end up as being shorthand for an entire concept. For members of a certain generation, perhaps a declining one, Fly Away Home is “the movie where the geese imprint on a human.” It begins as a young teenager (Anna Paquin) moves to Ontario to live with her estranged father (Jeff Daniels) after the death of her mother. Through happenstance, she starts taking care of geese eggs after the disappearance of the mother goose, and becomes their surrogate mom. Had the film ended there, no one would remember it today. But our protagonist’s father, fortunately, is an ultralight aircraft enthusiast who uses his specific skills to teach the birds how to fly, and eventually leads them through a cross-continental migration so that they can be with their own. The film’s single best scene has the geese and ultralight plane flying through a city downtown (Baltimore in the film, Toronto in real-life) in between high-rises. Fly Away Home is a bit of uplifting fluff, but a comforting, even inspirational one—an eloquent proof (should aliens ask) that humans can care for animals as much as each other. I hope it stays a reference for entirely new generations.

Something Wild (1986)

Something Wild (1986)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) Much of Something Wild feels like a film on autopilot, as long as you account for one mid-movie swerve into slightly different territory. It doesn’t take a long time for the premise to be established: here’s a straight-arrow corporate guy who gets snagged in the schemes of a flighty bohemian-type girl and—somehow—goes along with her on a road trip away from Manhattan back to her small town. Stuff happens, lessons are learned, characters revealed, cars crashed and chuckles obtained but that only takes us to the middle of the movie, as the last half gets significantly darker as the female lead’s dangerous ex-boyfriend shows up to make trouble for everyone. Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith are the lead couple, while Ray Liotta makes an early bid at his tough-guy screen persona with his role as the ex-boyfriend. The casting seems appropriate; Griffith, in particular, gets to play a few roles all by herself and her chameleonic character. Still, much of the fun of Something Wild is in seeing what else it has in store for the pair’s difficult trip and how they will deal with the unbelievable coincidences that keep complicating their lives. I’m not sure about the darker shift in tone toward the end, but it does feel as if it lives up to its “anything can happen” credo. Not a bad choice for fans of the lead actors or director Jonathan Demme, but there have been quite a few similar movies since then.

101 Dalmatians (1996)

101 Dalmatians (1996)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Video on-Demand, November 2019) Long before the recent spate of Disney live-action remakes, there was 101 Dalmatians, reprising the animation film with actors such as Glenn Close, Jeff Daniels and Hugh Laurie. While Disney will argue to this day that the box-office receipts justified the film, us non-shareholders will instead point to Close’s performance as one of the few reasons to watch it. She is deliciously evil playing the cruel Cruella, and some of the special effect work is rather amusing now that the state of the art has evolved far beyond what’s in the film. The rest of the film skews heavily to young audiences, with much of the shenanigans being handled by bumbling associates of Cruella. The remake simply doesn’t bring enough to the original to displace it, although we can count our blessings that it’s better that the sequel 102 Dalmatians. It’s rather amusing to read 1990s reviewers complain about the pointlessness of the remake—they clearly hadn’t seen what was yet to come.

Arachnophobia (1990)

Arachnophobia (1990)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, May 2017) Twenty-seven years later, I still remember the ads for Arachnophobia and especially it’s “thrill-omedy” neologism, coined at a time when hybridizing horror and comedy was still a daring concept. We’re far more familiar with the form nowadays, and that does play a part in appreciating the movie today: While some of the film’s methods seem a bit obvious now, the general concept is more easily accepted and the substance may seem more accessible now than in 1990. Arachnophobia, from its title, makes no pretension about what it means to be: a scare-ride for people who are even slightly disturbed by spiders. As the volunteer (and designated) spider-catcher in my household, I’m not really the prime audience for the movie … but I can recognize that it makes a decent effort to be entertaining. While the first half-hour is too long, the rest of Arachnophobia works well as a B-grade comic thriller. Jeff Daniels is suitably sympathetic as a doctor who gets far more trouble than he expected in moving his family from the city to the countryside, while John Goodman is remarkable as a slightly disturbing and incompetent exterminator. Arachnophobia is not a great movie, but it doesn’t have to be. See it with Eight-Legged Freaks for a good spider-movie double feature.

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2017) My allergy to muddy family dramas remain just as pronounced, as a viewing of The Squid and the Whale confirms. Writer/director Noah Baumbach takes a small budget, some quirky ideas, well-known actors and a heartbreaking subject as the basic elements of an eighties-set drama in which two boys react badly to their parents’ ongoing divorce. It’s more of a darkly amusing drama than a somber comedy: While the humour is there, much of the film is intensely depressing. At least there are great performances along the way. Jesse Eisenberg turns in a nuanced performance, while Jeff Daniels is fantastic as a deeply flawed, yet oddly captivating father. Laura Linney doesn’t get as good of a role as the mother (given that the film is largely written from the elder son’s unsympathetic perspective, she doesn’t get the best role in the ongoing mess) while Anna Paquin merely … shows up as a student with a deeply inappropriate relationship. Much of the film is mumbled through domestic scenes of heartbreak and aimless fury, set in intellectual-class New York intelligentsia. It’s not fun, but it ends up being more absorbing than you’d expect considering the flawed characters, super-16mm cinematography and life-goes-on ending. The Squid and the Whale was less painful than expected, which actually stands as outstanding praise in this case.