1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 72: Jack & Sarah
Jack’s wife, Sarah, has a baby and dies. Jack grieves. One feels for him … up to a point. Is it unkind to describe his grieving as moping? Jack oscillates between episodes of mania and self-incapacitation. Burdensome, both.
One day, while he sleeps, his parents creep into his flat, deposit the infant next to him, and creep away. He snaps out of inactivity and resolves to raise his daughter. He takes her to the office; his colleagues and secretaries watch over her most of the day.
This is unsustainable. He acquires a live-in nanny: Amy, from the USA. (The movie is set in London.)
Romance ensues.
The movie unfolds as you’d expect. There are competing love-interests. Baby Sarah is cute. Amy makes Jack better.
Jack, you may have surmised, is monstrously selfish. He’s successful in his profession; he offloads other responsibilities, especially childcare, upon servants and others he treats as servants. Whether from pity or expectation of gain, people keep on volunteering to serve him. The women in his office eye him keenly. Then there is William (Ian McKellen), who once lived in a garbage bin. He weasels himself, or perhaps Jack weasels him, into Jack’s household and becomes the de facto butler (the terms of employment are unclear).
Amy (Samantha Mathis) is, of course, the exception. She has her foibles. But she is the most candid person in Jack’s life, the idea being that the U.S. is a more plainspoken country than England (cf. Four Weddings, Notting Hill, and Wimbledon; even Bridget Jones kinda works because of, rather than despite, our knowledge of where the actress is from). Jack’s mother and mother-in-law (Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) try and try but can never get through to him as Amy does. He’s too self-absorbed for subtlety.
(My own experience in the U.S. is that the people aren’t as candid as all that. But maybe the English are desperate to have their near-relations meet an ideal they themselves fall short of.)
The great Richard E. Grant is an unusual rom-com lead. He should have a “sparkling” grin, but his eyes and mouth are terrifying. His frame is too gaunt, and his mane is combed back from too high on his head. He laughs unnervingly. He’s not a lion or wolf so much as a hyena. He makes Jack flamboyant, touchy, and pitiful.
Ebert gets it nearly right:
Anyway, that’s how I like to think of this movie: Richard Curtis (or the like) pays homage to Preston Sturges (or the like). Not wholly successful, but worthy.
One day, while he sleeps, his parents creep into his flat, deposit the infant next to him, and creep away. He snaps out of inactivity and resolves to raise his daughter. He takes her to the office; his colleagues and secretaries watch over her most of the day.
This is unsustainable. He acquires a live-in nanny: Amy, from the USA. (The movie is set in London.)
Romance ensues.
The movie unfolds as you’d expect. There are competing love-interests. Baby Sarah is cute. Amy makes Jack better.
Jack, you may have surmised, is monstrously selfish. He’s successful in his profession; he offloads other responsibilities, especially childcare, upon servants and others he treats as servants. Whether from pity or expectation of gain, people keep on volunteering to serve him. The women in his office eye him keenly. Then there is William (Ian McKellen), who once lived in a garbage bin. He weasels himself, or perhaps Jack weasels him, into Jack’s household and becomes the de facto butler (the terms of employment are unclear).
Amy (Samantha Mathis) is, of course, the exception. She has her foibles. But she is the most candid person in Jack’s life, the idea being that the U.S. is a more plainspoken country than England (cf. Four Weddings, Notting Hill, and Wimbledon; even Bridget Jones kinda works because of, rather than despite, our knowledge of where the actress is from). Jack’s mother and mother-in-law (Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) try and try but can never get through to him as Amy does. He’s too self-absorbed for subtlety.
(My own experience in the U.S. is that the people aren’t as candid as all that. But maybe the English are desperate to have their near-relations meet an ideal they themselves fall short of.)
The great Richard E. Grant is an unusual rom-com lead. He should have a “sparkling” grin, but his eyes and mouth are terrifying. His frame is too gaunt, and his mane is combed back from too high on his head. He laughs unnervingly. He’s not a lion or wolf so much as a hyena. He makes Jack flamboyant, touchy, and pitiful.
Ebert gets it nearly right:
The screenplay … is straight off the assembly line. But by casting against type, by finding an actor whose very presence insists he is not to be disregarded, the movie works in spite of its conventions.I say “nearly right” (the review really is spot-on about almost everything) because I wonder if the screenplay is trying to do something interesting. Jack’s (and sometimes William’s) actions, in scene after scene, are not just over-the-top, not only unreal, but irreal. One begins the movie thinking, “That would never happen. And that would never happen.” Then it dawns that this is part of the design. It’s like a screwball bit from Golden Age Hollywood, e.g. when the hunting party boards a train in The Palm Beach Story and the jolly old men take out their rifles and blow out the train’s windows and chandeliers. And William, of course, is an obvious throwback: the tramp who becomes a butler. Think of it this way, and Jack is less a monster, more a Preston Sturges temporary nutcase; his self-absorption will clear up once certain hang-ups are dispensed with. Although, in some scenes, he really does seem a monster.
Anyway, that’s how I like to think of this movie: Richard Curtis (or the like) pays homage to Preston Sturges (or the like). Not wholly successful, but worthy.
