THE DEEP END (Scott McGehee, David Siegel, 2001)

Remakes rarely approach the quality of the original films, least of all American remakes, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the original artist has generally already given the material the best possible form, requiring the remakers, to distinguish their work, to settle for a second-best form or one even more inferior than that. Also, whereas the original filmmaker could focus on the relevant thematic material, the remaker has also the earlier version with which to contend, and this can distract the remaker, diluting his or her efforts. Recently, most of us were shocked at the vastly inferior nature of Christopher Nolan’s loud, crass, diffuse, and just plain stupid remake (2002) of the brilliant Norwegian police procedural Insomnia (1997), by Erik Skjöldbjerg, one of the most stunning feature debuts in cinema. In this instance, another recurrent problem kicked in: its transplantation to a different country required a herculean effort to make the remake’s action seem “at home.” Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. At least in passing I should note that the most massively moving and beautiful film ever made, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s exalted expression of his Christian faith, Ordet (1954), from Kaj Munk’s play, far exceeds Gustaf Molander’s estimable earlier version (1943).

Ironically, Molander did much more to “open up” the play; stirred by Munk’s death at the hands of the Nazis, Dreyer instead hewed to the text out of respect for Munk’s memory. The recent well regarded thriller The Deep End, written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, remakes a film from Max Ophüls’s Hollywood sojourn in the 1940s, The Reckless Moment (1949); but in this instance, I cannot relate either version to the novel on which both films are based, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, having never come across it. (Raymond Chandler regarded Holding as the most suspenseful mystery writer of their day.) As a result I don’t quite know what to make of the remake’s singlemost shift in plot. Did the version that appeared two years after the book’s publication radically change this element to accommodate Hollywood’s timidity at the time regarding homosexuality in films? (Charles Jackson’s study of homosexual guilt, The Lost Weekend, a few years earlier had become an Oscar-winning film with all the homosexual references—the guts of the book—expunged.) Are McGehee and Siegel returning to or altering Holding?

I can compare only the films then, without reference to the original story. In both versions a mother disapproves of her teenaged offspring’s affair with an older man. In the Ophüls film, the child is a daughter; in this newer version, a son. The rest of the two plots is roughly similar. A lovers’ quarrel results in the death of the older partner; the mother disposes of the body and covers up the event. She in turn is blackmailed by two individuals, one of whom befriends her and eventually dispatches the other blackmailer before sacrificing his own life so that the woman can proceed to bring her life back to normality. In both films the military father is absent: in Germany, helping that nation rebuild after the war, in the Ophüls; at sea, in the McGehee and Siegel.

Ophüls’s Reckless Moment, befitting one of cinema’s premier artists (and one of the great Jewish artists of the twentieth century), is an atmospheric domestic thriller with profound reverberations. Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett, in the performance of a lifetime) is not acting as “the father” in her husband’s absence in order to maintain the family’s security and order. Rather, she is replacing—supplanting—him in order to contest her daughter Bea’s incest-by-proxy, which she (unconsciously) perceives as exacerbated by her husband’s absence. In effect, this absence prevents Bea from normally working out an Electra-complex, helping to turn her mother into a kind of therapist. Lucia does all she can to keep her family, as it were, inviolate; any intrusion must somehow be disposed of. In her harried attempts to protect her daughter and to raise blackmail money, she is an utterly sympathetic character; enhancing her sympathetic nature, as she clandestinely goes about trying to rectify a sordid and taxing situation, she is besieged by meddlesome inquiries from her son and father-in-law: males who would keep her tied down in a back seat. Indeed, a feminist portrait emerges of a subtly heroic woman battling the male prerogatives arrayed against her. At the same time, however, the sleazy world into which Lucia must descend in order to protect her family—a world of death, corpse-disposing, blackmail, loan sharking, quasi-adultery—taints her and adds something deeply unpleasant to the film’s portrait of her. Ophüls finds Lucia admirable; he also finds her ruthless in her determination to prevail. It’s elusive, to be sure, and her husband’s stint in Germany helps us to touch upon it, but Lucia displays glints of what Ophüls may regard as fascistic. (Perhaps her Italian name also helps us along this line.) The depth of all she is willing to sacrifice in order to protect what after all is a bourgeois domain, including the life of perhaps the only man she ever loved, the sympathetic blackmailer, Martin Donnelly (James Mason, marvelous), implies a horrifying aspect, as though the sordidness that initially had seemed so alien to her was in fact in some sense a part of her destiny. The severe nature of Lucia’s hairdo, even, with its careful arrangement of slick straight hair and iron curls, suggests an offputtingly formidable aspect. Ophüls’s ultimate point, it seems to me, is that the Second World War has changed the world, including America, on a purely domestic level, casting certainties—including male domination—into flux (a good thing), but also steeling with harsh, determined, unpleasant accents much in the everyday world that had once been guided, or seemed to have been guided, by clear, simple emotions. I can sum up The Reckless Moment in three words: Hitler changed everything.

The McGehee-Siegel version, updated to the present, has no such resonance or intellectual reach. It lacks conviction, in fact, because Margaret Hall, the mother that Tilda Swinton plays, never seems touched by the sordidness into which she also must plunge herself. (Swinton, good in Sally Potter’s Orlando, 1993, and even better in Tim Roth’s The War Zone, 1999, does only a tepid job here.) However, the shift of the relationship that leads to the accidental death from heterosexual to homosexual stirs up some exotic interest, especially when a videotape shows Margaret a scene of her son in bed with the sleazeball. Her rationale for ceding to blackmail then becomes the need to keep this information about their son’s sexual orientation from his father—a patent metaphor for the mother’s own denial of the matter. (Her dispatch of her son’s lover’s corpse to the ocean deep is almost too literary a device for suggesting her desire to drown the boy’s sexuality along with it.) In this redistribution of accents effected by the shift to homosexuality, Margaret’s complicity in the killing event amounts to symbolic incest with her son—I suppose an ultimate form of denial by a woman of her son’s homosexuality. Compared to the Ophüls film, this one is trivial and (psychologically) overelaborated. It’s borderline goofy.

Still, McGehee and Siegel thoroughly entertain. Those who ask no more than that from filmmakers won’t be disappointed.

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (John Ford, 1941)

Based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley has the dubious distinction of being the movie that beat Citizen Kane for the 1941 Academy Award. John Ford, who won for the third time as best director (with yet another such prize up ahead), didn’t think much of the film, and with good reason. This is not an interesting film, nor a particularly good one. It is to fellow nominee Howard Hawks, not Orson Welles, however, that Ford apologized in person for his Oscar victory. Hawks received his one and only Oscar nomination for Sergeant York, although this is one of his weakest films as well. What does all this say about the motion picture academy?

Give How Green Was My Valley this: it is a better film than either of the best picture winners to follow, Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, 1942) and Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, also 1942, but kept from opening in Hollywood until 1943). A lot of lousy films have won Oscars, including some of the lousiest, most unwatchable ones ever made: Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931), Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933), On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956), Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959), West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins, 1961), A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975), Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976), Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980), Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985), Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003). Such hollow, boring spectacles, tearjerkers and “entertainments” constitute an ignominious list.

Let’s say, then, that John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley is one of the better films to win the best picture Oscar. But that doesn’t keep it from being mediocre nor from possessing a hollowness all its own.

The protagonist is Huw, who lends voiceover narration as he prepares to leave the Welsh valley where he grew up. Now a middle-aged man, he recalls his youth, when he was the youngest child of Gwilym and Beth Morgan. Gwilym Morgan and his sons, including, eventually, Huw, are coal miners. A depression in the coal market leads to depressed wages for the workers; the Morgan sons and other younger-generation miners strike, but the settlement of the strike only forestalls economic decisions by owners, including downsizing, that devastates the working community. The Morgan family disintegrates as the grown sons move on, to find work elsewhere. Meanwhile, industrialization darkens and dirties the once pristine valley.

There is no reason why such material should not have resulted in a substantial and valuable film. The initial unionizing of a group of workers, especially in the absence of “outside agitation,” might have drawn a dramatic line of causality between the lot of workers and efforts at collective bargaining. Unfortunately, this film, by restricting its perspective to family dynamics in the Morgan household, shortcircuits such an opportunity. What we are given are confrontations across a generation gap as Gwilym retains faith in ownership and opposes his sons and the strike. The only glint of analysis that this situation provides derives from the irony that Gwilym’s traditional patriarchic authority in the Morgan household unconsciously mimics the exploitive antics of the mine ownership via-à-vis workers. The irony doubles when, as one of the higher paid miners, Gwilym’s purse is axed as a cost-cutting measure. Yet even these worthwhile insights grow faint and elusive given the film’s sentimental emphasis on the loving Morgan family and the deeply religious community to which it belongs.

Indeed, it is on the latter point that the film rings most hollow. A Godly vision that is visited upon Beth Morgan after the mine collapses and her husband is killed is preposterously rendered by Ford, whose atheism deprives him of any sensitive grasp of this gripping event. The American filmmaker famous for the dictum that one shouldn’t move the camera without some artistic purpose in mind jolts us with a sensational though meaningless camera movement the sole purpose of which is to distract us, and himself, from his complete lack of conviction here. I sympathize. Ford is entitled to his dismissive views about God and religion off the set, but his lack of faith makes him the wrong person to direct Philip Dunne’s script.

On another score, however, Ford has been wrongly criticized. Film critic Pauline Kael led the attack by faulting the sheer beauty of the set of the mining community, which struck her as being too well scrubbed to indicate reality. Keyed to the psychology of Huw’s memory, what we see here isn’t how the valley looked near the close of the nineteenth century but how Huw, now, remembers it, colored by his affectionate feelings for family and the distant past. Kael and others, then, fail to consider psychological realism; and, in any case, it borders on churlishness to fault this aspect when Huw himself notes the valley’s deterioration. Indeed, other elements of the film, such as the choral music perfectly sung by the miners as they return from work, are also keyed to Huw’s glowing memory. The literal-minded will never understand a poet like Ford.

Still, the film gives one plenty to carp about. There is insufficient historical context provided to make credible the stifled romance between the minister, Mr. Gruffydd, and the Morgan daughter. (These roles, incidentally, are beautifully enacted by Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O’Hara.) Too many of the alleged Welshmen too closely resemble Ford’s Irishmen. The music drips with sentimental affect when Mr. Gruffydd takes a sickly Huw on an outing to the hills to inspire him to recovery and to instill in him good Christian values. The blunting of the film’s political dimension, apparently, derived in part from studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s insistence on successive script revisions. Not surprisingly, Zanuck identified with the owners of the mine!

The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is by Arthur Miller. But how on earth did it better Gregg Toland’s in Citizen Kane in the eyes of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?

TO EACH HIS OWN (Mitchell Leisen, 1946)

Hollywood films can be silly in the extreme, and one of the clearest examples of this silliness is To Each His Own, scenarist-producer Charles Brackett’s first film apart from writing partner Billy Wilder. A farfetched soap opera of the Edna Ferber variety, the film is a lavishly produced entry in the subgenre of unwed-mother sagas, for the most part excrutiatingly “acted” by Olivia de Havilland, who followed, among others, Belle Bennett (1925) and Barbara Stanwyck (1937) in Stella Dallas, Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and Bette Davis in The Old Maid (1939) in paying for her romantic folly. De Havilland, a clever, forceful but essentially superficial actress, followed Hayes in another respect: acting in an overly technical way that stressed craft and virtuosity at the expense of deep insight into either individual psychology or the human condition. In this regard, both Hayes and Hayesy de Havilland anticipated a later “artist” who has succeeded in turning acting into a disease, the virus streeptococcus indicating a show of crafty tricks designed to obscure the fact that its self-involved (and, like de Havilland, very heavy-handed) carrier skirts surfaces—impersonates, not acts—rather than plumbing any human depths. I am happy to report that the current actress once thus afflicted has shown of late heartening recovery.

De Havilland had given a performance of exquisite tact and charm a decade earlier, as a decent, working-class girl who ends up being Napoleon Bonaparte’s courtesan in Anthony Adverse (Mervyn LeRoy, 1936), an outrageously entertaining romantic adventure, and capped an otherwise mediocre turn in the racist sob-story Gone with the Wind (George Cukor, Victor Fleming, Sam Wood et al., 1939) with an eerily lovely deathbed scene; but it’s the romantic melodrama Hold Back the Dawn (1941), by the same tormented soul who would direct To Each His Own, Mitchell Leisen, that introduced the selfconscious and insufferably arch performer that Paramount would later promote, with good reason, as “the dramatic queen of the screen.” In the 1930s James Cagney had said about his Irish in Us (1935) co-star, “That girl can play any part”; in the 1940s she did, grinding nearly every one of them through a technical device lodged in her high-IQed brain—both she and sister Joan Fontaine qualify as near-geniuses—that reduced each character to a series of imposing tics, mannerisms, and impressive fluctuations of voice. To paraphrase Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind”: “If Olivia comes, can Meryl be far behind?”

To Each His Own only encouraged de Havilland’s silliness. Are writers drunk in Hollywood when they come up with such goo? (The script is by Brackett and Jacques Théry.) During the First World War, Jody Norris, the young daughter of a druggist, falls in love with a fighter pilot passing through her small town; they make love, he’s killed in combat overseas, and she has his son in secret, out of town. Her plan is this: Leave the baby on the doorstep of the family in town most extensively blessed by children and then adopt the infant, making him her own without inviting scandal; but the miscarriage of someone else, Corinne Piersen, the daughter of the town’s richest family and the wife of a man who loves Jody, prompts the other woman to hand over the infant to Corinne as compensation for her loss, breaking her promise to Jody. Corinne gleans the double truth: that the baby is Jody’s and that her husband loves Jody, not her; she quickly adopts the child legally and banishes her rival from the boy’s life. Jody goes to New York and turns a gin mill—this is during Prohibition—into a cold cream factory that makes her rich. Secretly carrying the boy’s adoptive father’s ruinous financial obligations, she maneuvers herself into a position where she can extort the boy away from Corinne; but, homesick, he hates his “Aunt Jody,” who sends him home before packing herself up for London, to open an overseas branch of her company. It’s World War II and her son, a fighter pilot like his biological dad, arrives in London; she befriends him on the basis of her having once been a resident of Piersen Falls. Jody, with the help of a well-connected aristocrat who is dating her, arranges for the boy to marry his sweetheart in record time. (I’m not joking: the Archbishop of Canterbury has to intercede for this to occur.) Why has she gone to all this trouble for him? Belatedly, the light bulb turns on. The famous last line undams in audiences a torrent of tears: “I believe this is our dance, Mother.” Victor Young’s music swells; Jody searches her son’s face for his father’s face. The End.

Like so many ridiculous Hollywood films, however, To Each His Own is compulsively watchable. It’s also nicely acted by Roland Culver as Lord Desham—Culver makes the loss of a bottle of sherry a more piercing moment than Jody’s loss of either her lover or their child—and by John Lund, who plays both pilots, father and son. (The implicit stroke of genuine sadness, of course, is that these two characters can never meet.) Too bad that William Holden’s postwar career at Paramount eclipsed Lund’s; both were highly similar actors, but Lund had nothing like Holden’s charisma. Mary Anderson, so good in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), is adequate as Corinne, but clearly she is impersonating Miriam Hopkins. Hers is a “Miriam Hopkins part” for which Hopkins herself at the time was too old.

De Havilland won the first of her best actress Oscars for her tour-de-force here. (Her second came for William Wyler’s 1949 The Heiress, based on a play in turn based on Henry James’s novella Washington Square.) Better at playing the young and slightly older Jody, she is like a child playing dress-up as the middle-aged Jody. The makeup and (Edith Head) costumes are a help, and de Havilland has several strong, sure-fire moments. But hers is an overly crafted, at times tortuous performance. By contrast, Culver and Lund are “naturals.” Both have relaxed into their roles, and not a sign of effort shows.

ANTWONE FISHER (Denzel Washington, 2002)

In a piece about one of Denzel Washington’s few meritorious films, I spoke of the “cancerous ineptitude” of his acting, and indeed Washington consistently is a dreadful actor, and pretty much always for the same reason: in addition to his lack of acting ability, his incapacity to get down into the mental muck of a character that lies beneath the tidy surface that he prefers to skim across. Washington remains what he was on TV’s St. Elsewhere: a girlishly pretty face with little or nothing going on underneath. He is, perhaps, the worst American film actor since Troy Donahue, and also the smarmiest.

Now he is a director, too. Antwone Fisher is his maiden effort in this regard. I’m not going to get much into the plot, of which (as is the case with most Hollywood films nowadays) there is way too much. Briefly, Antwone Fisher, a sailor, is a violent punk with a distressing past that a naval psychiatrist (Washington, at his most insensible) draws out from him and encourages him to address. At the same time, the young patient’s “courageous” example inspires the psychiatrist to address problems in his marriage. If it were all any sillier, it would be Good Will Hunting (1997), which the film generously ransacks until its late foray into territory akin to that of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), when the boy locates and confronts the mother who long ago abandoned him. Davenport, the psychiatrist, had told Fisher to ask questions, but the only “questions” that Fisher has are rhetorical and judgmental ones. Verbally, he bashes this woman, and the film obscenely supports him in this, apparently missing the point that she also may have a story to tell, one as much overloaded with black hardship as Fisher’s. To mask this gaping failure of humanity, the film proceeds to Fisher’s mass reconciliation with every biological family member of his except his mother—a scene incredibly cheapened, additionally, by its echoes of a dream of Fisher’s with which the film opens.

This is a sentimental and disgusting piece of work purportedly based somewhat on the life of a malcontent by the name of Antwone Fisher, who is credited with the film’s self-serving script.

For a few years, there have been a couple of things about Washington I’ve wanted to get off my chest, and this is the moment, I feel, because the utter lack of character in Washington that these matters expose is of a piece with the sort of morally odious film he has concocted here. One has to do with a film in which Washington starred: Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), a resonant postwar film noir based on Walter Mosley’s novel. Washington, at his best as detective Easy Rawlins, was nevertheless (much) bettered by Don Cheadle’s hot-tempered Mouse Alexander and Jennifer Beals’s deliriously ambiguous Daphne Monet. When in 1996 Cheadle wasn’t Oscar-nominated for this role, something of a firestorm broke out regarding the Academy’s tendency to overlook African-American achievement. Washington, who had won an Oscar for allowing his character to be stripped and whipped in the postcard Civil War drama Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989), weighed in, but not with support for his fellow African-American actors, whom Washington chided, describing them, that year, as undeserving of nominations. Who knows what Washington intended; perhaps he merely meant to encourage black actors to try harder. However, his remarks carried an imperious tone, and it truly seemed that Washington was doing the unconscionable, to wit, playing nice with the Academy to increase his own chances of winning another Oscar in the near future. Especially since Cheadle outshone him in a high-profile film, Washington wasn’t immune, either, to the charge of jealousy, although, as usual, he appeared lofty, superior, smug, self-satisfied. By way of a footnote, it occurs to me that, while I’ve never seen Washington give a good performance, I have never seen Cheadle give a bad one.

The other burden I wish to toss off has to do with The Hurricane (Norman Jewison, 1999), a sentimental piece of tripe about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whose boxing career was cut short when he was convicted of triple murder. Carter’s eventual legal “exoneration” actually didn’t address the issue of his guilt or innocence, and most reporters who covered the crime insist on Carter’s guilt. Taking his cue from Carter’s autobiography, written in prison, Washington portrayed Carter unambiguously as an innocent man victimized by a racist system. This invited a firestorm of protest. What sours and sickens me about all this is that the filmmakers might have ventured into any American prison and found an innocent “nobody” whose incarceration was indeed the result of entrenched and institutionalized racism. Washington, to be sure, wasn’t one of the filmmakers, but his performance gave uncomplicated cover to their cynical choice and tack. The controversy that the film encouraged over its canonization of a sports figure who is likely a beast buried an important message, and Washington’s participation in such a project seems all too typical of him. He is a man without a conscience or a soul.

This is without doubt the man who was drawn to Antwone Fisher’s “plight” and who, instead of making an honest film about the worthless soul that Fisher apparently is, made one that flatters him to the finish. In this way, Antwone Fisher is as infuriatingly uncritical as Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), which at least benefits from Stone’s clear and immaculate images. (Not that Washington has an altogether bad eye himself, which his color cinematographer, the great Philippe Rousselot, does much to enhance.) Where Stone’s film utterly fails, both morally and intellectually, is in its abdication of responsibility to cast a critical eye on Ron Kovic, the whining malcontent whose story the film purports to show. Apparently, Stone “doesn’t get it.” In canonizing Kovic rather than probing his human defects, Stone obscures what ought to have been the film’s powerful message regarding governmental deception on matters of life and death. Stone has deluded himself into believing that by not examining Kovic and Kovic’s complex motives for turning from super patriot to protester he is strengthening the film’s message. Directorial deception hardly lends a film credibility when the director is attempting to spotlight deception in other quarters! Antwone Fisher repeats this sort of moral murkiness, self-delusion and sentimental canonization of a complex, plainly disturbed and unwholesome human being.

Derek Luke (Independent Spirit Award, best actor), who plays Fisher, is not the problem. He did what the script and Washington directed him to do. He is a gifted young actor. By far, though, the best performance comes from Viola Davis as Fisher’s mother. In her brief role, she is heartbreaking, and momentarily she brings the film to emotional life. There’s also a passage detailing a date between Fisher and his supportive girlfriend that suggests that Washington has a keen and sweet recollection of his long-ago dating days. Indeed, Fisher’s relationship with this girl, Cheryl (Joy Bryant), who is also in the Navy, generates the film’s most appealing moments.

But these are peripheral. Next time, Washington should choose instead an honest and compassionate path, and by all means he should cast good actors again, keeping himself behind the camera.

HARRY & SON (Paul Newman, 1984)

On occasion a magnificent actor (Hud, 1963; Cool Hand Luke, 1967; The Color of Money, 1986; Nobody’s Fool, 1994), Paul Newman became a filmmaker mainly to provide his spouse, Joanne Woodward, with roles he deemed worthy of her gifts. I like Woodward in a lot of things, including her Oscar-winning Three Faces of Eve (1957), The Long, Hot Summer (1958), The Fugitive Kind (1959), Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), none of which Newman directed. On the other hand, I do not account Woodward at her best in such films directed by Newman as Rachel, Rachel (1968), from Paul Zindel’s play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) and, from Tennessee Williams’s best play, The Glass Menagerie (1987); but guess what? I find Newman’s direction of all three, and especially the last two (Rachel, Rachel, his maiden effort, relied heavily on Dede Allen’s editing to pass muster), very good indeed. Harry & Son, despite a good deal of cloying sentimentality near the end, is a very likeable film, and—this is the only time he has done this on film—Newman directs himself, as Harry Keach, and Woodward, who especially delights as Lilly, a neighbor who had been Harry’s deceased wife’s closest friend.

Dying from heart disease, Harry, a wrecker on demolition sites, loses his job when temporary blindness nearly costs a fellow worker his life. Harry struggles to come to terms with his diminished capacity and, fearing death, his worry over his unsettled son Howard’s future only exacerbates his tendency to oppose the boy, a writer, at nearly every turn. The two live together but, after the boy loses a series of jobs, Harry evicts him. Nevertheless, he is touched when Howard succeeds in selling one of his stories for a handsome price: “Harry,” a sketch about the widowed father whom Howard loves despite all their arguments and differences.

Harry & Son opens powerfully, with a sequence of shots showing the material destruction the wrecking ball that Harry operates enacts. From various camera angles crashing wood and glass fill the successive images, depicting not just the employment, the livelihood, that will shortly be taken away from Harry but also the mental chaos he experiences as he loses control of his life. Here, assisted by cutter Allen again, Newman filmmakes with purpose, brio and assurance. (Compare Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, 2002, where through loads of repetition shattered glass and wood cease to reflect on the predicament of the leading character and become only the things themselves: a barrage of pointless special effects.)

But the film is also—ultimately more so—the son’s story. A tolerant sort, Howard has managed to stake out an impressive independence despite his father’s cranky, demanding, at times bewildering nature. The boy revives his relationship with a girl—Lilly is her mother—whose baby he delivers in the back seat of a cab that is stalled in traffic en route to hospital; he is that adaptable. And loving: He dotes on the baby, whom the girl in appreciation names after the boy’s father. That at least is the explanation Katie gives Howard as to why she has named her baby Harry. It might even hold water, given her gratitude and the degree to which the object of her gratitude dotes on his father; certainly if there is hint of another reason for the baby’s name, Newman the director provides the requisite delicacy not to disturb the present with too much past. He understands he is not doing Greek tragedy, or Ibsen, or O’Neill. Indeed, above all else he must avoid doing anything that might derail the upbeat ending he pursues; for Harry’s death leaves Howard lost and frantic only briefly, for Harry the Second and the infant’s mother provide the boy with an instant family of his own.

Newman doesn’t entirely elude bathos in the spectacle of Harry’s death, to which Robby Benson’s Howard responds in an almost laughably tearjerking fashion. Nor can Newman’s otherwise admirable restraint hope to win against his own motive—it may be unconscious—for making the film. The father dies; the son, at last appreciated, survives: plot points suggesting a wishful and uncomfortably self-pitying reversal of facts from Newman’s own life, the suicide of a grown son who struggled in his father’s iconic shadow. I do not need this film for my heart to go out to Newman; on this buried autobiographical pivot, I do not need the film at all. Newman and Ronald L. Buck wrote the original story and screenplay from which the film proceeds, and the worst aspect of its execution, again I feel determined by wishfulness and projective self-pity, is Newman’s blatant idealization of the boy, who is good-humored and gently natured beyond belief. It doesn’t help, either, because he is played by Benson, that he looks like a mawkish ape.

Acting is what commends Harry & Son. Newman is good as Harry, an unhappy man with a mean streak of humor and a persistent shyness. The star relies on his good looks not once—not even in the clever, inverted way some glamorous stars tread when they are seeking credit for not having relied on their good looks. Newman stays with his part, which he nicely inhabits. His scenes with Woodward are the best in the film, full of charm, pleasant but also poignant sparring, and a delicious brief attempt at romance. Woodward’s Lilly is among her finest creations, a splendid balancing of the two categories that account for many of her roles: the kook; the sensitive, responsible woman. Ossie Davis is excellent as an unemployed man whose truck, in one of his many attempts at employment, Howard tries to repossess. (Wouldn’t you know they become friends?) Judith Ivey is a sexual knockout as a professional person whose car Howard polishes. Alas, Newman adds to Sally’s seduction of Howard some gratuitous visual dazzle. This woman doesn’t need such help. With her crooked mouth, Ellen Barkin as Katie may be a matter of taste: an apt pun, since Barkin suggests (great) sex appeal and little else. One cannot imagine her Katie ever attaining anything like her mother’s profound humanity or Sally’s show of efficiency and competence.

Benson. An effete, affected, very often smug individual, Robby Benson—the name itself!—is among the least likeable of all show-biz personalities. He had long been the butt of jokes when Newman took him under his wing. A director himself now (of trash, though), one must also recall that Benson was an earnest and eager actor. Whatever; he blossoms into silent comic subtlety in a great scene where Howard runs amok with an automated machine to which he is feeding cardboard boxes (Morgan Freeman plays the foreman)—Newman’s fine allusion to the assembly-line panic Charlie suffers in Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). But Benson cannot escape being Benson for long; less lighthearted moments find his work afflicted with his congenitally soft, precious voice and manner. Why this choice of casting on Newman’s part, goodness knows. Perhaps it was the challenge.

Perhaps by symbolical indirection he hoped to redeem a part of his past.