1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 85: To die for

A few years ago, I put on I, Tonya (2017) and then quickly turned it off. I couldn’t stomach its “mocumentary” format. A respectful reassessment of Tonya Harding was then in vogue. I’d been impressed by ESPN’s documentary about the figure skater.

I’m not sure if I, Tonya tries to portray Harding’s life any more accurately than, say, Amadeus portrays the life of Mozart. What I am sure of – now – is that stylistically and thematically, I, Tonya is a re-hash of To Die For (1995).

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To Die For isn’t about Tonya Harding, but elements of that movie nod to the Harding-Kerrigan scandal as it was interpreted in the 1990s – i.e., as a specimen of:

(a) ruthless feminine ambition (to take the lurid perspective);

(b) journalistic sensationalism (to take the sober, critical perspective).

(See, e.g., the second verse of Weird Al’s song “Headline News,” which expresses both perspectives.)

To Die For’s source is a 1992 novel by Joyce Maynard. The novel draws from the real-life murder of Gregg Smart by his wife, Pamela.

However, To Die For and the Harding-Kerrigan case do share certain themes. These include:

(a) personal ambition;

(b) the sleaze of media producers, subjects, and consumers;

and

(c) violence performed over long distance.

Imagery is shared, too: especially, ice and ice-skating.

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“First impressions in one word?” says rough-edged figure skater Janice Maretto (Illeana Douglas) when asked to describe her sister-in-law, Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman). “Four letters. Begins with ‘C’: Cold. C⁠-⁠O⁠-⁠L-⁠D.” Janice looks directly at the camera. One gathers that she’s being interviewed for a documentary about Suzanne and that Suzanne has acquired a certain notoriety.

Other characters, including Suzanne, are “interviewed” during the movie, but it isn’t always clear whether it’s for the same “project” or even whether it’s during this life or the afterlife. It isn’t clear whether Suzanne herself is alive or dead.

Her husband, Larry (Matt Dillon) – Janice’s brother – is definitely dead. The movie recounts Suzanne’s role in his demise. It blends “interviews,” other TV footage, and straightforward narrative. The blend disorients, but that’s on purpose.

The general outline is simple enough: ambitious young wife tires of husband, regards him as career obstacle, plots his murder, is found out.

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There’s more to it. The murder isn’t just Suzanne’s means to a career.

No, what’s distinctive about Suzanne – her tragic flaw, if someone so hollow can have one – is her craving for attention. She wants a career in broadcasting because it’s a way to be seen.

The wrinkle is that she’s unable to supress that craving in order to obtain greater exposure in the long run. She has to be noticed at every step. It’s a compulsion.

When she gets a job forecasting the weather for the local cable channel, she inundates her boss (Wayne Knight) with suggestions about how to run the station.

Boss: “Well, Suzanne, I sure pity the person who says ‘no’ to you.”

Suzanne: “No one ever does.”

She recruits three youths to feature in her self-publicizing documentary about the lives of high schoolers. She does more than interview and film them. She becomes their after-school companion. Soon she’s hanging out with them in shopping malls, giving them weight-loss and career advice, trying on clothes in front of them. Training them to depend on her, adore her, gawk at her, hang on her every word.

Her posse consists of three losers: Lydia (Alison Folland), Russell (Casey Affleck), and Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix). They’re the best thing about the movie. Director Gus Van Sant is on his surest footing here, sympathizing with troubled youth. Phoenix’s performance, especially, is a slam-dunk. It’s as if a dismal cartoon teenager from Beavis and Butt-Head acquired flesh and blood, became a Real Boy. Suzanne soon has Jimmy wrapped around her finger. She plays him against the other two.

Then she coaxes them to murder her husband.

Why? Why not kill him herself? Why involve these sad, incompetent children? Not because Suzanne is a criminal mastermind, but because it’s compulsive for her to play to an audience. Why bother to become a murderer if no one is there to see it?

Lydia, in an interview, explains:

Suzanne used to say that you’re not really anybody in America unless you’re on TV … ’cause what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if there’s nobody watching? So when people are watching, it makes you a better person. So if everybody was on TV all the time, everybody would be better people.

Then, touchingly, Lydia adds:

But, if everybody was on TV all the time, there wouldn’t be anybody left to watch, and that’s where I get confused.

It’s like someone near the bottom of a pyramid scheme dimly realizing it’s a pyramid scheme.

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But hey, Lydia is on TV, isn’t she? She has made it, hasn’t she? And doesn’t almost everyone in this story appear on TV?

There are a couple of very weird scenes – whether they take place in this world or in the next one, I’m not sure – in which Suzanne’s and Larry’s families answer questions together, for a talk show, in front of a studio audience. Despite the tragedy that has brought them there – that ought to pit them against each other – the families are convivial. They even seem mildly pleased to be interviewed. Could it be that although these ordinary citizens lack Suzanne’s obsessiveness, they share her basic philosophy: that what really matters is to be seen? That, unspeakably, the destruction of Larry and Suzanne is a blessing for them? That scraps of recognition are worth people dying for? If this is so, then the movie indicts not only the outrageous, cartoonish Suzanne, but ordinary people as well, in fact an entire society.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 10: Beautiful girls

This movie takes place in the coldest, snowiest time of the year, in a town in the northeastern United States. The setting is not unlike those of It’s a Wonderful Life and the bleak novel Appointment in Samarra. Everyone knows everybody else; the hierarchies have long been established; very little goes on, and so the inhabitants drink a lot of alcohol and dabble in sexual and romantic intrigue.

The most troubling flirtation is the one between Marty (Natalie Portman), a precocious thirteen-year-old, and Willie (Timothy Hutton), who’s twenty-nine and has returned to the town after many years in the big city. Marty’s and Willie’s scenes are meant to be charming, but some viewers may well be disgusted by them. The obvious contrast is with the novel Lolita, in which it’s clear that the teenaged character’s flirtatiousness is a projection of the adult narrator’s warped point of view. Is anything like this true of Marty’s and Willie’s scenes in Beautiful Girls? It would seem not.

Whether or not the movie errs in failing to condemn a grown man’s attraction to a thirteen-year-old, its focus is upon a different problem, which is that Willie is insufficiently committed to the grown woman with whom he’s in a long-term relationship. This is a problem that he shares with several other male characters.

They include Tommy (Matt Dillon) and Paul (Michael Rapaport), who are involved with Sharon (Mira Sorvino) and Jan (Martha Plimpton), respectively. Tommy distracts himself from Sharon by continuing a long, stale affair with rich housewife Darian (Lauren Holly). Paul has fallen out with Jan because he idealizes women in a way encouraged by certain magazines. The movie could have been called “Distracted Men,” though that title wouldn’t have sold as many tickets as “Beautiful Girls.”

I list all these actors because their casting is crucial. No one plays against type. Hutton (Ordinary People) plays a starry-eyed idealist on the verge of self-destruction. Portman, previously of Léon: The Professional, seems sophisticated beyond her years. (Now that the years have caught up with her, is she as effective an actress?) Dillon, as in Drugstore Cowboy, A Kiss Before Dying, and Wild Things, plays an intelligent hunk trapped in a soul-crushing rut; Holly (Dumb and Dumber) plays a character who’s rich, glamorous, and accustomed to enjoying men’s attention. Rapaport and Plimpton look less gorgeous than the other actors but display incisive charisma. This is even truer of Rosie O’Donnell, whose task is to recite basic feminist wisdom.

Earlier I mentioned It’s a Wonderful Life and Appointment in Samarra – one story that ends well and another that ends badly. So, then: which way does this movie go? Do these people get better or worse? Is this movie nasty or nice?

From the beginning, there’s no question that it’s a very nice, very jolly movie. For all their misdeeds, the characters exhibit warmth and camaraderie, as in this poster – which arranges the cast around Andera (Uma Thurman), the movie’s most desirable “girl”:

Other characters, hitherto unmentioned, add to this camaraderie. They’ve more or less figured out life; they serve as beacons to those who are still wandering. A lot of caring goes on in this movie.

As Roger Ebert puts it:

What’s nicest about the film is the way it treasures the good feelings people can have for one another. They emerge most tenderly in the friendship between Willie and the 13-year-old girl.

They have crushes on each other for essentially idealistic reasons (each projects a simplicity and perfection that may not be there), and yet they draw apart, ever so tactfully, because they are sensible enough to know that it’s the right thing to do.

Their relationship is mirrored in all of the others, which are all about idealism and its disappointments. The men insist that women correspond to some sort of universal ideal, and the women sometimes blame themselves when they cannot. But somehow, doggedly, true love teaches its lesson, which is that you can fall in love with an ideal, but you can only be in love with a human being.

The townspeople are rough around the edges, as illustrated in scenes of misbehavior involving snowplows. Piling up snow in front of a former girlfriend’s garage is not a gentlemanly thing to do. But snow is, at least, clean; it can be cleared away; and, eventually, it will melt. This movie exhibits the comedic faith that wrongs are impermanent, that they can be undone.