1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 77: The daytrippers

You’ll enjoy this movie only if you can stomach its matriarch, Rita (Anne Meara).

“She’s an insufferable scold,” complains Roger Ebert,

and since she’s onscreen or nearby for almost the entire film, her presence becomes unbearable. It has been said that you should never marry anyone you are not prepared to take a three-day bus trip with. I wouldn’t even get into a cab with Rita. … I do not mean to criticize Meara herself. She is, almost by definition, superb at her assignment here, which is to create an insufferable mother. The film’s problem is that she does it so well.

Four people spend the day with Rita: her husband (Pat McNamara); their daughters, Eliza (Hope Davis) and Jo (Parker Posey); and Jo’s boyfriend (Liev Schreiber). They drive from Long Island into the City to track down Eliza’s office-worker husband, Louis (Stanley Tucci), who might be cheating on her. Eliza has found what appears to be a love note among Louis’s possessions. Her family members don’t take this red flag very seriously. Their trip to the City is basically a joyride. Well, who hasn’t devised some spurious errand in order to get out of the house on the day after Thanksgiving?

What ensues – a surreal excursion through darkest Manhattan – isn’t so different from Scorsese’s After Hours; only, it happens in daytime, with a station-wagonful of family members gnawing on one another. Still, I must disagree with Ebert. These people actually behave pretty civilly toward each other, all things considered. Rita is a bit monstrous, yes, but I’ve met worse. It takes a lot of aggravation before the seams in this family tear; and when they do, it’s not all Rita’s fault. Rita herself is pretty hilarious, compulsively overstepping social boundaries: usurping strangers’ hospitality, getting personal details wrong (she tells a young woman who insists on being called Cassandra, “I bet a lot of people call you Sandy”; no, they don’t, but try getting that into Rita’s brain). In a grim comedy like this one, these little outrages are the point. But you have to be in the mood.

Rita isn’t even the most insufferable character. That prize is shared by Jo’s pretentious boyfriend (an aspiring novelist) and various yuppies (career literati). Here the movie twists the knife. You’d expect hamfisted suburbanite Rita to bulldoze these people, but no, she’s in their thrall and blind to the plight of her unfortunately-paired daughters, who see the world with clearer eyes.

But maybe you don’t want to endure this Rita character for more than a few minutes. Then I recommend you see Meara in this episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Talk of a lousy mother!

It amuses me to recall that Ben Stiller is Meara’s child.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 16: Breaking the waves

Opening lines:

BESS: “His name is Jan.”

MINISTER: “I do not know him.”

BESS: “He’s from the lake.”

MINISTER: “You know we do not favor matrimony with outsiders.”

ELDER: “Can you even tell us what matrimony is?”

BESS: “It’s when two people are joined in God.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The plot of this 160-minute parable is so simple that were I to recount it, your viewing would be spoiled.

And yet, it’d be negligent not to discuss this movie. Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese both list it among the decade’s ten best. It’s not as good as that, though it’s certainly a landmark of the period – and of the career of the director, Lars von Trier.

In his review, Ebert provides an interpretation of the movie that is very close to my own – at the cost of spoiling almost every plot point. A reader of his website comments: “Nobody ever gave away entire movie plots as proficiently as did Ebert.” But that’s not quite fair. How else could this most skeletal of movies have been analyzed?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In bleak, windswept Scotland, village lass Bess (Emily Watson) marries oilman Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). Gentle and easygoing, Jan is indifferent to religion. Bess is profoundly pious (and maybe a bit mad). Her church is ruled by stern elders.

As newlyweds, Bess and Jan are blissful, even ecstatic. Then a brutal hardship, which I’ll not describe, befalls them, and they must make sacrifices to prop each other up – indeed, to save each other. The logic is basically that of an O. Henry story such as “The Gift of the Magi” or “The Last Leaf.”

It’s a tiny chewing-gum morsel of a story, stretched out to near-ridiculous length. Now add this: the hardships and sacrifices that Bess and Jan undergo are grotesque, verging on inhuman. So, the story turns horrific. (Imagine the wife in “The Gift of the Magi” resorting to the vilest prostitution.)

All of this takes place on cliffs and moors and oil rigs over a cold ocean.

Scene by scene, it’s tension-filled, compelling. The handheld camera jerks us into the middle of the action.

But we’re also constantly reminded of the movie’s artificiality. “Chapters” are announced with gorgeous, dream-like title cards set to rock music of the 1970s.

For whatever reason, I was much less affected by Breaking the Waves than by two of von Trier’s other movies, Dancer in the Dark and Melancholia. But if you like those movies, you’ll probably like Breaking the Waves. All three are grimly humorous; all are grainy and naturalistic, with occasional, highly stylized interruptions.

All have stunning conclusions.