Section: PERSPECTIVES '98
MOVIES: On screen, the dead won't stay dead and the Grim Reaper has gotten mighty Cute. What's up?
IMAGINE IF SOMEONE MADE A PORNO movie and left out the orgasms. Imagine a remake of ``Rocky'' that neglects to include the championship match. Imagine a movie in which the leading lady is dying of cancer but the movie never gets around to her death. Actually, you don't have to imagine. You can go to your local theater on Christmas Day and watch ``Stepmom,'' in which Susan Sarandon, instead of shuffling off her mortal coil, smiles beamingly at the camera in a happy family portrait in the last frame.
Death just isn't what it used to be. Not in the movies. Don't misunderstand. There's no shortage of mangled, strangled, machine-gunned bodies in our movies, oozing state-of-the-art blood and gore. But those are violent deaths, which are not considered threatening. It's only natural expiration dates that have become taboo; it's only movies about death itself in which death gets a Hollywood makeover. At the end of the endless ``Meet Joe Black,'' when the Cute Reaper (who's assumed the form of Brad Pitt) gently escorts the World's Nicest Capitalist Tycoon (Anthony Hopkins) across a lawn to his final resting place, death literally becomes a stroll in the park. In that orgy of masochistic emotionalism ``What Dreams May Come,'' an entire family--kids first, then Dad, then Mom--are wiped out by the big D, but nothing sticks: our cast is merely transported into a kitschy romantic painting called Heaven. O you-know-who, where is thy sting?
Somebody has taken death out of the Death Movie. The old Hollywood moguls would not approve. They knew that audiences flocked to these sobfests for the pleasure of watching an artful final exit. Who'd remember Garbo's immortal ``Camille'' without her exquisitely languorous last gasp? Every moment in ``Dark Victory'' pointed toward the payoff of blind Bette Davis's courageous departure. Millions of satisfied tears were shed when Ryan O'Neal climbed onto that narrow hospital bed next to the (strangely robust) Ali MacGraw at the foretold end of ``Love Story.'' Given the obvious fact that people have always liked to see other people die in lingering close-ups, why the sudden skittishness?
Dare we suggest that the boomers who now control Hollywood are exhibiting a touch of, um, denial? As we approach the (pardon the expression) death of the 20th century and a generation begins to grapple with its own mortality, not only are death scenes airbrushed out of movies but the pesky dead keep popping back up. Our already overcrowded planet is suddenly teeming with ghosts, angels and second-timers. Papa Michael Keaton doesn't really go away in the new ``Jack Frost,'' he just turns into a snowman, offering parental guidance to his son from beyond the grave. Pitt gets to come back to life in ``Joe Black.'' This year's other gym-toned Angel of Death--Nicolas Cage in ``City of Angels''--exchanges his celestial duties for a night of great sex in L.A. with Meg Ryan. Now, that's something an Armani-clad vice president of production can identify with.
A generation of moviemakers devoted to preserving itself in a state of permanent youthfulness via personal trainers, plastic surgery and ginkgo biloba doesn't want to watch its glamorous stars actually bite the big one. But boomer Hollywood can't get its signals straight. Since the whole point of making a movie like ``Stepmom'' is to wring tears over the premature death of its earth-mother heroine, why is the studio afraid to tell the audience what it's really about? In previews it's pitched as a comedy, with no hint of the cancer angle.
Obviously, marketing departments think death is a turnoff, but they may be misinformed. It didn't seem to hurt a little movie called ``Titanic.'' James Cameron knew perfectly well what every dramatist since Sophocles has known: death makes a socko ending. Consider the alternative: after sinking six feet under, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) suddenly pops up to the surface, reborn as a talking Popsicle (Robin Williams). Back in New York, the Popsicle graduates from medical school and becomes a psychoanalyst. His first patient is Rose (Kate Winslet), whom he counsels in grief therapy. Rose falls in love with her doctor, not knowing he is really Jack. They agree to meet at the top of the Empire State Building to consummate their love, but before she can get there she is hit by a car driven by a ghost (Patrick Swayze), whose driving skills have grown rusty. The ghost follows Rose to hell (her sin: posing for a nude painting while underage) and brings her back to heaven, where she meets and falls in love with Brad Pitt. The movie ends sadly, however, when Brad's sojourn in heaven is rudely interrupted by a screenwriter who forces him to return to life and Claire Forlani. Rose, crushed, takes up pottery.
PHOTO (COLOR): 'What Dreams May Come'
PHOTO (COLOR): 'Meet Joe Black'
PHOTO (COLOR): 'Stepmom'
PHOTO (COLOR): 'Jack Frost'