1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 97: Casper

… “the first feature film to have a fully computer-generated … character in a leading role,” according to the IMDb.

Indeed, when ghostly young Casper is granted a few hours of re-embodiment, his human portrayer is less winsome than the computer-generated spirit. This is less a mark of human failure than of technical virtuosity.

Along with Casper, there are three other principal ghosts: “Fatso,” “Stretch,” and “Stinkie,” Casper’s loutish uncles. Physically, they’re overgrown soap bubbles. They’re corporeal, but just barely. You can see them – and see through them. If you touch them, they dissipate. (No harm is done; they easily re-form.) Fat or thin, they’re rounded: there’s little angularity, and no severity, in their faces.

The uncles are malicious but jovial. Casper himself would be cuddly were he more than minimally solid. Such is his plight: he can love, but he can’t be embraced by his beloved.

The movie is a child-friendly version of the classic story of a romantic encounter between a human and a god (an angel, a sprite, a space alien, etc.). The themes are inaccessibility and yearning.

The girl is played by 1990s “child scare-queen” Christina Ricci (The Addams Family; Sleepy Hollow). Casper sees her and falls in love. (That’s also how I felt about her in the mid-nineties.) Ricci is Kat, the daughter of Dr. Harvey (Bill Pullman), a psychologist who specializes in therapy for the dead – or, as he calls them, the “living impaired.” He explains that ghosts are people who fail to fully “cross over” because of “unresolved issues.” Dr. Harvey has an unresolved issue of his own, which is that his wife’s death has left him griefstricken and dialed up his eccentricity to eleven. He drags Kat across the country so that he can talk to ghosts and track down his wife’s spirit.

Dr. Harvey and Kat end up in Maine, in the run-down, Gothic dwelling of Casper and his uncles, at the behest of treasure-hunters played by Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Cathy Moriarty (most famous as Robert De Niro’s chilly wife in Raging Bull). Idle and Moriarty are involved in the movie’s funniest scenes, some of which also benefit from cameos by Saturday Night Live icons – a conceit repeated by director Brad Silberling in his Land of the Lost (2009).

For example:

The uncles like to frighten people. Casper tries to befriend people. The effect is the same: the living flee in terror. Until the Harveys arrive, that is. They weather the initial storm. Soon, Casper is cooking Kat’s breakfast, and the uncles are taking a shine to the Doctor – so much so, in fact, that they plot for him to die so that he can join their posse.

Kat, meanwhile, is grateful for Casper’s attention, although she’d rather be with the local flesh-and-blood heart-throb (cue Carrie references). Will Casper win her over? In the spirit of Ray Bradbury, yes and no. Carefully attend to Casper’s re-embodiment scene. It becomes clear that Kat would accept him only under conditions that he couldn’t permanently satisfy; and, perhaps, rightly so. The movie is bittersweet.

It also has more swearing and gross-out humor than your average children’s movie. (Again, see Silberling’s Land of the Lost, which, wisely, targets an older audience.) Casper’s plight might be at the movie’s center, but the tone is set by those hedonistic vulgarians, the uncles. Which is just as well: the core is perhaps too sad.

I liked the set design best of all. The run-down mansion is exquisite. There are lots of visual references to old movies – to Oz, especially. Afterward, I wanted to watch Casper again, to see how many references I could count; Land of the Lost, too.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 95: The ice storm

In A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese, a midlife-crisis sufferer, paces nervously in his underwear. He’s in a strange house, waiting for his lover. …

Mr. Hood – Kevin Kline, Cleese’s Wanda castmate – does the same in The Ice Storm (1997). Kline doesn’t quite play it for laughs, but the situation is amusing – especially when Mr. Hood goes downstairs and finds his teenage daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), fooling around with little Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood).

Wendy has put on a Nixon mask. (It’s 1973.)

Why are you here, Mr. Hood asks her.

Later, he tells his wife what he caught Wendy doing.

Why were YOU at the Carvers’, asks Mrs. Hood (Joan Allen).

Mr. Hood is taken aback. The marriage has gone so stale that he has forgotten to disguise his affair with Mrs. Carver (Sigourney Weaver).

(Mrs. Hood also has a vice: she shoplifts.)

Mr. Hood’s affair is as stale as his marriage. Mrs. Carver tells Mr. Hood that he’s boring. He is, but she’s cruel about it. She leaves him in her bedroom, gets in her car, and drives away.

Humiliating her husband and her lover – simultaneously, if possible – is how she gets her kicks.

Her son, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), a quiet, shy boy, also displays a touch of sadism. (It says something that he is one of the most likeable, or least despicable, characters.)

He blows up toys in the back yard.

Play with the whip instead, his mother tells him.

Mikey, Sandy’s brother, is a gifted student whose mind is in the clouds. He worries about molecules that drift through the air into people’s bodies.

He’s a chip off the old block. His father, Mr. Carver (Jamey Sheridan), a scientist, is like a planet with a huge irregular orbit. Kindly but distracted, he passes near his family once every few earth-decades.

The Carvers and Hoods live in New Caanan – an apt name, what with the regression of morals – on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Other suburban dramas have been filmed or located there: The Swimmer, Revolutionary Road, and Nicole Kidman’s Stepford Wives.

The scenery is as important as the story. Look at those houses!

(Nowadays, you can tour them on realtors’ websites.)

One character is breaking away from New Caanan: Wendy’s older brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), who attends a boarding school in Manhattan. He has normal teen misfortunes. He’ll get over them. He reads comic books – and the Russians. He is not trapped in his family’s social circle. He has a broader perspective on families. He’s able to generalize.

One worries more for the other children. Least for Wendy, perhaps, because her choices, while wrong, are deliberate. They’re experimental, not wanton or compulsive or knee-jerk. She even shoplifts experimentally (not desperately like her mother). It may not be nice that she carries on with both Carver boys at the same time. But, one perceives, she’s figuring out that she definitely likes one better than the other.

Ricci suggests all of this without saying much. Actors tend to specialize in either smart or dumb roles. Ricci can project intelligence or abject stupidity, as required. Wendy is shrewder than her deeds. Her face is bland but we can tell the gears are turning.

The other standouts are Hann-Byrd as Sandy, Sheridan as Mr. Carver, and Allen as Mrs. Hoover (the most reflective adult). Oh, and Allison Janney, who does a hilarious and unsettling turn as the hostess of a “key” party. (Men put their keys in a bowl; women draw keys; each woman goes home with the man whose key she has drawn.) Janney is New Caanan’s Ghislaine Maxwell, always smiling, coaxing would-be-sophisticates into becoming companions in degradation. None, afterward, can quite understand how he or she drifted into misery. They’re like their children, making the same mistakes, only they never learned to choose responsibly – as Wendy, in her one-step-backward-two-steps-forward manner, is doing. Perhaps the upheaval of the sixties permanently unmoored the grownups. I don’t know. The movie succeeds less as social commentary than as a rotation of vivid character sketches. Which is all right; that’s what ensemble dramas are for.

I should mention, also, that in the end, an ice storm purifies the air.