Reeling

I saw three very different movies this weekend. First up was A Hard Day’s Night on DVD. I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. The movie is sheer exuberance and joy. I realize now that I wasted my youth. I should have been the Beatles.

The music, of course, was great. But the the personalities of the Beatles shone through with such clarity and honesty that it completely validates Beatlemania in my mind. How could all those teenagers watch this movie and not fall in love with this band? Forty-odd years later, they're still breaking hearts.

For a completely different take on being young, Kathy & I went to see Juno on Saturday night. It’s a terrific little movie. Ellen Page is wonderful as Juno, of course -- sarcastic, impulsive, vulnerable and creative. You’d want her as a friend. I was also really impressed with her parents (dad and stepmom), played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney. Diabolo Cody’s script sets them up to be more than the usual teen-comedy dupes and foils, and Simmons and Janney make the most of the opportunity, playing them with wisdom and bite.

I topped off the weekend with Magic, Tivoed from AMC a few weeks ago. This evil-ventriloquist-dummy movie has a heck of a pedigree: Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a skilled technical magician with no charisma until he “teams up” with a ventriloquist dummy. Ann-Margaret is Penelope, the now-married high-school sweetheart, and Burgess Meredith pays his agent (who has one of the funniest lines in the movie, as he barks to his secretary, “Sylvia, what’s the first rule of being an agent? Never forget it was an actor killed Lincoln.”). The movie is directed by Richard Attenoborough from a script by William Goldman. They weren’t messing around for this dummy movie.

Naturally, the movie plays Corky (get it?) as an unknowing schizophrenic who uses the puppet (named Fats*) as a release, all the while teasing that the sinister Fats may be more than he seems. That sort of theme was in the air, and even if I never saw the movie, the zeitgest haunting it surely rattled its chains in my direction as well -- I wrote a play in college that trod the same psychological ground.

In hindsight, the movie seems trite and a bit too earnest for its own good, but there are a couple of scenes that are nicely affecting, and another that underplays what is actually pitch-perfect EC-comics style irony. The first of the bunch is an opening scene where Corky’s act bombs in front of a distracted audience. As Corky tries to impress them with card tricks, the camera keeps cutting to a woman’s rich, horsey laugh -- at something her dinner companion said, rather than anything to do with what’s happening on stage. Finally, after lifting an ace from the deck and getting no response, Hopkins spits, “Do you see that? That’s a thousand hours of my life.” I’ve heard Penn Jillette say that the secret to magic is devoting more time to fooling people than they’d consider the trick is worth, and Corky’s frustration magnifies that pain in that statement.

Later, there’s a great moment when, to break the tension between them, Corky brings Fats into a conversation with Penelope. Fats uses the opportunity to tell Penelope about a betrayal. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t tell her that Corky killed her husband that afternoon. Instead, he sabotages their budding relationship by telling her the secret behind a magic trick Corky used earlier to get her into bed. It’s a sharper cut, and a much more interesting swerve.

But the topmost moment in irony comes at a point when Fats is telling Corky how he might just blurt out the details of Corky’s double-murder at an inopportune moment. Fats is pressing him and pressing him until Corky just can’t take it any more, and suddenly Fats slumps down at Corky’s side, motionless. And, as a veteran of hundreds of murder movies, a thought flitted unbidden across my brain: He killed the dummy. Because he was afraid he would talk.

Rob

*While "Corky" is a fairly inelegant reference to a material dummies can be made of, "Fats" strikes me as a more clever nod to one of the components of flesh-and-blood folk. So hats off to "Fats".