Reeling Backward: "Harry & Son" (1984)

 

"Harry & Son" isn't a great or even particularly good movie. It's very much an "actors' film," more focused on mood, dialogue and moments than any kind of coherent narrative, and suffers because of this. The story of a fractured father-son relationship, it wanders here, wanders there, and winds up right about where we expect it.

But the film -- one of six directed by Paul Newman and the only with a screenwriting credit -- has a couple of scenes of absolute pure perfection. The movie will just sort of amble along, one dialogue scene falling into another, our attention will stray, and then you'll get a moment that lands with a helluva emotional wallop.

It's like an aging boxer who can't move around very well anymore, but watch out for that haymaker. Let's talk about those two scenes. 

In the first, Harry Keach (Newman), a cussed widower who has lost his construction job for health reasons, is hosting his married daughter, Nina (Katherine Borowitz), her newborn daughter and her husband at his home, which he shares with his son, Howie (Robby Benson). Harry doesn't much like Nina's husband, solely because he sells insurance, and has been estranged from them to the point he's not even clear on the baby's gender.

Nina has dropped a hint to Howie that she'd like to have their mother's fine china set, since it's not being used after she passed two years earlier. During the visit they manage to drop enough hints to Harry that he offers it to them. But while fetching a box, he intentionally soaks the bottom with hot water. So the moment his son-in-law picks it up, all the china falls out the bottom, smashing to bits and cutting the guy's foot to boot.

Harry thinks this is a real hoot. "Got any insurance on that foot?!?" he yells as they beat an angry retreat.

Howie can't believe it. A smart, sensitive kid who's trying to make it a a writer, he's fairly indifferent to his brother-in-law and to the china. But he can't fathom why his dad would trash a family heirloom just to show up his son-in-law -- likely further pushing Nina away, possibly forever.

"This was my mother's. She cherished this!"

Nina returns, having forgot her keys. Howie helps Harry pick up the broken china into another box -- which then proceeds to fall out the bottom, the kid having just pulled the same trick as his old man. Nina can't help laughing at the juvenile hijinks as Harry playfully chases Howie into the yard. 

But then he pulls up, another twinge from the heart condition that's been bothering him, and for which he refuses to seek treatment. Harry leans on a tree, smiling as Nina and her husband enjoy a rare good laugh at his expense, trying to conceal his pain. Letting them have their fun is as close to apology as Harry is capable.

Howie sees it all, of course; Howie has made a study of Harry. Not just because he's writing about him for the submissions to publishers that are constantly rejected, but also because he loves his pa more than anything else in this world.

In just five minutes, "Harry & Son" lays out the entire dynamic of this family. We understand the pain, the anger, the resentment, the rare but spectacular moments of joy. 

Now to the second scene -- and I'll admit this one brought me to tears.

It's near the end, Harry and Howie are still going at it. Harry has kicked the kid out of the house, hoping the need for housing and shelter will spur him to give up the endless string of dead-end jobs he soon quits. They've gone out for a rare night on the town, and after a bit of fun Harry has fallen back into his default sullen mood as they drive home.

He's disappointed in his kid, who was high school valedictorian but is now a free-spirited bum, in his mind. He can't stand that he lost his job running the big crane wrecking ball, tearing down garish old facades of the Florida beach town where they live so they can slap up new, even more garish ones. (It was shot in Fort Worth.) 

Mostly, Harry is angry because he was robbed of the happy retirement with the woman he loved, which is what he deserved.

A piece of mail has arrived for Howie, which he has resisted opening because it's surely another rejection letter. So he offers to let Harry, who quietly peels the envelope with a check for $1,500 and an enthusiastic offer to publish more of Howie's stories.

And the moment just... lingers. Achingly, gorgeously. Harry's a blue-collar guy lacking a way with words, so he rubs a rough hand across the kid's bushy hair. Newman just sits there with his neck cocked, staring at this son he has struggled so hard to understand, and in doing so failed to take pride in for the wonderful young man he's become. 

Tears well in the old guy's eyes, and slowly -- as if being pulled in by an inexorable force that he can't and doesn't want to resist -- he leans over and cradles Howie's head in his arms.

We know, without being told, that this is probably the first time the two have embraced since Howie was a kid. What an utterly crystalline moment of cinematic grace.

The rest of the movie... well, not so much. 

Screenwriter Newman and collaborator Ronald Buck make the common mistake of not knowing how to pare down the elements of Raymond DeCapite's novel, and end up using the kitchen sink approach. There are too many supporting characters and subplots, meant to fill out the background of Harry and Howie's story but wind up pushing it aside.

Some of these pieces are just fine in of themselves. I liked the bit centered around Raymond (Ossie Davis), a man not unlike Harry who Howie takes a shine to. Howie tries to repossess Raymond's truck during one of his many job tryouts, and the old guy ends up inviting him in for a beer. Howie realizes he's not cut out for (legally) stealing cars, but gets them to hire Raymond instead, who finds his niche and is soon flush with money and purpose.

We also briefly meet Morgan Freeman in one of his early film roles as a hardcase foreman at a factory job where Howie lasts less than 10 minutes. 

I was surprisingly uninterested in Lilly, played by Newman's real-life wife, Joanne Woodward, who was Harry's wife's best friend. She runs a local pet shop, and there's a flirtation of something between Lilly and Harry. But the movie keeps misplacing the romantic thread. It's the sort of thing that needed to be front and center of a different story, not on the sidelines of this one.

Lilly's daughter, Katie (Ellen Barkin, age 30 playing about 20), used to go with Howie in high school -- along with every other guy, it seems. She's now pregnant with some guy's baby, and she and Howie wind up gradually easing back into each other's lives. The character of Katie is terribly underwritten and hard to fathom. She acts resentful of Howie for having dumped her, which is a strange emotion for a serial cheater to feel.

Wilford Brimley is similarly underused as Tom, Harry's brother, who runs a surplus store and still pines wistfully for that time he bought up a lot of army surplus junk and made 15 grand in a single day. We may find it hard to believe they're brothers, though Newman was actually nine years older than Brimley.

Judith Ivey turns up as Sally, an amorous secretary who takes Howie, and later Harry, into the sack for a tumble. 

Newman is solid in "Harry & Son," but really this is Benson's movie. With his big blue eyes and lean frame, he's believable as Paul Newman's kid. I liked how he used his voice in the performance, speaking mostly with a very soft, high tone but occasionally pulling out baritone snarls when required. (Which he also used to great effect in "Beauty and the Beast.")

Benson was a teen idol in the 1970s whose career never quite took off to star stratosphere. He spends a lot of time without much in the way of clothes during the movie, and the camera makes sure to leer over his physique, which is boyishly skinny without a lot of built-up muscle aside from an early cinematic example of the six-pack -- not terribly dissimilar from Newman's own body as a young man.

Like Barkin Benson was older than he played, 28 when the film came out. That same year he had the first of a several heart surgeries to correct an aortic valve birth defect, likely ending his days as a shirtless pin-up boy. Though he's remained busy to this day, including doing a lot of voice work.

No, "Harry & Son" isn't a particularly well-made movie. But it boasts two perfect scenes that will stay with me forever. That's more than most movies can say. 

 

Reeling Backward: "The Natural" (1984)

In the vast and expanding forest of films whose echoes take up much of my cognitive array, "The Natural" stands out like a crowning oak. Its memory towers above nearly all others; its roots are sunk deep into the formation of my perception of cinema.

It's one of the movies that made me fall in love with movies.

I think about it often, though it's probably been close on to a decade since I last saw it in its entirety. I recall flashes, moments, snippets of dialogue -- generally not the big "wow" stuff, like Roy Hobbs smashing the final home run into the stadium lights, setting off a shower of falling stars.

More like, Pop's grumblings about his awful team and the middle-aged rookie they stuck him with; his whistling contest with Red to guess old songs; or the nimbus of light director Barry Levinson continually puts behind Robert Redford's head to give Hobbs a beatific halo.

Like the best sports movies, it's not really about the game. Rather, it's an exploration of the creation of myth.

Roy Hobbs was destined to become a legend, but didn't. Then in the twilight of his youth he decides to make another go of it, and runs into a buzzsaw of disdain, suspicion, sudden fame, greed, envy, betrayal and regret.

Odysseus' journey was no more laborious.

Ostensibly an uplifting movie, "The Natural" has sadness clinging to its every molecule. Bernard Malamud, upon whose novel it was based, had a very pessimistic view of humanity in the days after World War II. If you've read the book, you know that the big difference from the movie is that in his ending Hobbs strikes out, and is forgotten.

(At least, that's what we gather, given Malamud's signature run-on sentence writing style, where trains of thought can go on and on and on and on and on and on and...)

The essential tale is thought to have been inspired by Phillies first basemen Eddie Waitkus, who was stalked and shot by a female fan in a hotel in 1949. He had been nicknamed "the natural" during a brief major league stint prior to the war. However, he was already several years into his career when he was injured, returned to play less than two months later and batted .306 for the season.

Hobbs, of course, was just a kid going for a tryout with the Cubs when he was wounded by a black widow (Barbara Hershey) who'd already killed two other famous athletes and was gunning for the trifecta. She had set her sights on "The Whammer," a not-at-all subtle mirror of Babe Ruth played by Joe Don Baker. But after the young pitching prospect, on a dare, strikes out the pompous star with three straight pitches, her aim is altered.

Hobbs spent two years in the hospital recovering and was told he'd never play ball again because of the silver bullet lodged in his guts. As he reluctantly answers anyone who asks where he's from, he knocked around from here to there, odd jobs of this and that. Sixteen years after his shooting, now in the 1930s, he decides to give his dream one more try.

After two weeks of playing for the semipro Hebrew Oilers -- a fictional team that became a real one -- he's signed to a $500 contract by a scout for the lowly New York Knights.

Aging and the passage of time are very much at the forefront of the film's themes. To my recollection, the book is pretty specific in giving Hobbs' age as around 35 -- which is advanced but hardly ancient for baseball. Even back then, top players continued their careers into their early 40s.

(And, if they're Satchel Paige, allegedly well past that.)

Redford was nigh unto 50 when the movie came out, and looked every day of it. He remained gloriously handsome -- still is, past 80 -- but he wore his years plainly and proudly. Not until "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" has another movie star's aging process been so intrinsically woven into the fabric of a film.

Hobbs isn't the only major character worrying about his last shot at baseball glory passing him by. Pop Fisher is the manager and co-owner of the Knights, who loves the game more than anything but saw his heart strewn to pieces by it. His lament is a refrain: "I shoulda been a farmer!"

It's probably the signature role of Wilford Brimley's career -- he's just two years older than Redford, by the way -- a cantankerous oldster who's capable of small-mindedness and vindictiveness. He refuses to play Hobbs and is ready to send him down to the minors before a batting practice performance in which the lefty right fielder seems to hit every seat in the far stands.

Hobbs has many nemeses in the movie, the chief of which is The Judge, the other owner of the Knights. But the Judge's true antagonist is Pop, from whom he bought controlling shares of the team the previous season when fortunes were down. Unless the Knights win the pennant, Pop is out and the Judge becomes sole owner.

Physically Brimley and Robert Prosky, who plays the Judge, resemble each other so much it could not have been happenstance on the part of director Levinson. They're both older, squat men with thinning hair and owlish glasses. While Pop lives very much in the dirt and the sun, forever traipsing about the dugout, the Judge preens blackly in his high nest above the ballfield, the shutters kept perpetually shut against any ray of sun or inadvertent glimpse of baseball.

The sun-dappled counterpoint to all this darkness is Glenn Close as Iris, Roy's childhood love and (unofficially) betrothed. He was so hurt and embarrassed about being seduced and wounded by another woman that he apparently never bothered to even contact her again -- and likely would not have, if she hadn't gone to a game when the Knights were visiting Chicago. In one of the film's more iconic scenes, she stands in the sun when Roy, in the midst of an epic hitting slump, goes to bat, inspiring him to wallop a titanic homer.

The character isn't well fleshed out -- Close only has a handful of scenes, in which Iris remains rather remote and distracted. Nonetheless, she scored the film's only acting Academy Award nomination. We get the sense that she is reaching out for her own sake, a sense of closure, rather than seeking to rekindle long-dormant ashes. But, of course, she brings the light back into Roy's eyes.

He had been carrying on with Memo Paris (Kim Basinger), niece to Pop but secretly a creature of the Judge and his nefarious partner, Gus Sands. I love that name: Memo Paris; it connotes that she's exotic and beautiful but also somehow lacking a complete humanity. Her story is not a book or a chapter or even a poem -- just a scribble is all you need.

Roy's poor play coincides with his romance with Memo, who distracts him with the high life and moral corrosion. Iris acts as the tonic that cures him of what ails. It's the classic good woman/foul temptress dichotomy straight out of the mythology of the Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, etc.

Gus (a curiously uncredited Darren McGavin) is the bookie who's got a line on everyone, laying odds on everything and always finding a way to come up the winner in the long run. He even claims to have a magic eye to help him pick winners and losers. I had never noticed before this most recent viewing that one of Gus' eyes appears to be larger than the other, possibly even prosthetic. I believe this was achieved with makeup, as McGavin had two good googlers.

Richard Farnsworth plays Red, the laconic assistant manager who acts as Pop's shield man, protecting him as he can from the uncaring fates, but also from Pop's own ornerier instincts. Red's the one who convinces Pop to keep Hobbs around after he shows up unannounced, and quietly nudges everyone to behave better than they are.

Any movie about mythologizing isn't complete without the character of the chronicler, a journalist or storyteller whose job is to bear witness and relate the great events to the world with tremendous accuracy, or not. Here it's Robert Duvall as Max Mercy, a weaselly sports columnist and hustler.

He's happy to use Roy as a springboard to a great story -- oldest rookie inspires kids -- and also more than happy to turn him into a chump as needs be. It's implied that he's on the payroll of the Judge and Sands. He's the one who digs up Roy's salacious past and threatens to use it against him, after the gambits with Memo and outright bribery fail to force Hobbs to throw the big game.

Also bearing witness is Bobby Savoy (George Wilkosz, in his only film role), the plump, smiling batboy for the Knights who becomes Roy's first baseball apostle. He makes a bat of his own, the Savoy Special, as tribute to Hobbs' mighty Wonderboy, which he carved out of a tree split open by lightning outside his boyhood home.

When Wonderboy is shattered in Roy's last at-bat, Bobby offers up the Special like a knight's page surrendering his own sword to his master. Indeed, if Roy Hobbs is a mythological hero straight out of an Edith Hamilton text, then he needs his signature weapon: Hobbs/Wonderboy, Arthur/Excalibur, Thor/Mjölnir

Let me tell you about my favorite scene, which since I first saw it I have been able to recall with near-eidetic clarity:

The Knights are on a roll, playing great team ball on the back of Roy's power hitting. Max, who was witness to Hobbs striking out the Whammer so many years ago, has been unable to recall where he met Roy, or how such a great player could have come out of nowhere. He even drew a cartoon of the event that was going to go out to all the papers that syndicate him, but presumably when Roy failed to show up for his Cubs tryout, the story died.

(How any competent reporter would forget the young lad who struck out Babe Ruth, or fail to follow up on that story, we'll chalk up to Hollywood's general ineptness in depicting journalists.)

Perturbed at this vexing puzzle, Max hangs around the team all the time, even sneaking into the stands during batting practice. Roy saunters in from right field, passes across the pitcher's mound and is challenged by another player to throw one pitch in for fun. Roy pauses, considers, goes into a long wind-up -- possibly for the first time in 16 years -- and throws a heater with such force it sticks in between the links of the chain fence.

Everything goes into slow time; the music dims to practically a hum. Pop, Red and the other players sit speechless, before and after the pitch. The challenging hitter simply lets his bat slide through his hands to the plate, an ineffectual cudgel against such an immortal beast of a throw.

And up in the stands... Max's perched seat is suddenly empty. The lost connection has been made.

Randy Newman's musical score is critical to the success of this scene, and indeed to much of the movie's surging emotional tides. Its soaring crescendos and blaring horns have justly become some of the most recognized musical cues in moviedom.

Director of photographer (as he prefers to be credited) Caleb Deschanel had just scored his first Oscar nomination the year before for "The Right Stuff," and would add his second with "The Natural." There's an elegant washed-out beauty to his cinematography, a slightly gauzy quality that underscores the sense of history unfurling.

"The Natural" may be one of my favorite movies, but it is not one without flaws.

The character of Roy Hobbs is at the center of a tremendous tale, but he is rather uninteresting in of himself, aside from his prowess at baseball. He is good-hearted, unfailingly polite and cherishes the game for its own sake rather than what it could do for him materially. As we know, his only wish in life is to be able to walk down the streets and have people say, "There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was."

Screenwriters Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry translate Malamud's depiction of Hobbs as deliberately flat and pure. Like King Arthur, he is the stuff of legends, and I guess they thought the legends would be enough.

Still, at times it seems like even Redford struggles to imbue Hobbs with the basic shadings of an individual personality beyond the mythic persona.

The plot can be rather languid and shaky, particularly in the third act leading up to the big game. Hobbs has been laid low after being poisoned by Memo, which caused doctors to pump his stomach and inadvertently retrieve the silver bullet -- a totem of past misdeeds that causes the hero to doubt himself.

In short order Hobbs is visited in the hospital by his teammates, Iris and the Judge, who offer him condolences, empathy and $20,000 in cash, respectively. (About $350k in today's dollars.) Tonally, these encounter are all over the map, and for a moment it almost seems the movie will trundle completely to a halt just as it's approaching its denouement.

There's also the matter of Bump Bailey -- the star player played by Michael Madsen in one of his earliest roles, who happens to occupy the same position as Roy. He's a petulant prima donna, a thorn in Pop's side, and an impediment to Roy's rise. So the movie simply kills him off, having Bump ridiculously crash through the outfield wall chasing a long hit. His ashes are scattered over the field by airplane in a comic hiccup that sticks out from the rest of the movie like a sore thumb.

(And granted, my baseball knowledge is bupkes, but is playing right field really that different from center or left? Bump that guy.)

Still, in my long view these faults are less deficiencies in the facade of "The Natural" than intrinsic parts of a great movie's makeup -- like moles on the Madonna. Somehow, the imperfections make the film more approachable, human and eye-level. It's a story about how we come to look up with reverence, but the movie never condescends.

Can a film still be a masterpiece while remaining intrinsically flawed? If so, "The Natural" comes as close as it gets. Here is a movie that swings away.

Reeling Backward: "Tender Mercies"

With the release today of "Crazy Heart," it got me to thinking about the 1983 classic "Tender Mercies," starring Robert Duvall in a film with very similar themes. Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a once-legendary country singer who has disappeared off the face of the globe in a trail of booze and debauchery.

Mac and Jeffrey Bridges' Bad Blake from "Crazy Heart" both were once big-time stars, but are now out in the music business wilderness. Well, Blake at least was still playing in bowling alleys and two-bit honkey-tonks. When we first meet Mac, he's coming off a bender at a tiny Texas motel/gas station. He apparently was traveling with a friend who left him high and dry, with just his old trailer to call his own.

I loved the plain language of the Horton Foote screenplay. Mac simply goes to the woman running the motel and says, "Lady, I'm broke. I'll be happy to work off what I owe you." The woman is Rosa Lee, a young Vietnam war widow with a small son, and she will become Mac's salvation.

Foote -- who gave Duvall his start in movies by pushing for him to be cast as Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird" 20 years earlier -- won an Academy Award for best original screenplay, to go with the gold statuette Duvall took home for Best Actor.

The time compression of the first 15 minutes or so of the film is amazing. In just a few quick edits, director Bruce Beresford lets us know that Mac stayed on as a hired hand, fell in love with Rosa Lee, gave up drinking, married Rosa Lee and bonded with Sonny, her boy. And yet this quick transition doesn't seem hurried or arbitrary.

Mac used to be one-half of country music royalty with his ex-wife Dixie Scott (Betty Buckley), whom he once tried to kill during one of his alcoholic binges. At one point Mac goes to see her perform in nearby Austin -- he wrote most of her songs himself -- and they have a short but bitter exchange in which she warns him not to attempt to see their daughter, Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin, age 29 and playing 18).

Mac gives a new song he has written to Dixie's manager, played by Wilford Brimley, but he returns it to him a few days later, saying it's no good because the country music game has changed. Mac is so enraged, he drives off in a huff, intending to get drunk, but he pours out the bottle he bought and returns to Rosa Lee.

A newspaper reporter turns up to write a story about Mac, but he refuses to answer questions. The story comes out anyway, mostly Dixie's tales of his terrible treatment of her, which generates some notoriety in the sleepy little town. The film's critical exchange comes when Mac is coming out of a feed store, and a woman asks him, "Were you really Mac Sledge?" He says, "Yes ma'am, I guess I was."

A young band turns up on Mac's doorstep looking for inspiration, and he eventually agrees to record the song he wrote for Dixie with them. Just when the record comes out and Rosa Lee tunes the song on the truck radio, Mac reaches his hand in and snaps it off. He has just received word that his daughter, who ran off with a much older man, has died in an accident.

This leads to perhaps the most important scene in the movie, with Mac tending a small garden he has planted across the street from the motel. Beresford shoots naturalistically, almost documentary style, in long shot with a long take with no cuts or close-ups. You can't even see Duvall's face underneath his wide-brimmed hat in the slanting sun. But the pain and power of the scene just spill out over that spare Texas landscape. "I don't trust happiness; never have, never will," Mac confesses.

Like Bridges, Duvall did all his own singing for the film, and even wrote two songs. When I first heard him, I told myself that couldn't be Duvall -- it sounded exactly like an old-school country singer, with a deep, baleful tone. Duvall reportedly spent weeks driving around Texas, listening to accents and small-town bands to get his sound just right.

I have to say that after seeing "Tender Mercies," "Crazy Heart" diminishes just a little bit in my eyes. Many of the themes of redemption and regret seem clearly inspired by the earlier film.

3.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "The Thing" (1982)

It would be fair to say that John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the sci-fi/horror classic "The Thing from Another World" was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. Shortened to simply, "The Thing," Carpenter's film was a study in moody atmospherics and eye-popping gross-out special effects.

Unlike the 1951 original, there are no female characters, just a motley bunch manning an Antarctic science station. There's not even much characterization, other than a few broad strokes for each guy: There's Windows, the nervous one, and Doc Copper, and Blair the scientist, and Clark, who likes dogs, and so on. And yet each man is distinct and easily recognizable from one another. It sort of reminds me of the space Marines from "Aliens," where within 20 minutes you knew every soldier's name and identity.

The protagonist is MacReady, the helicopter pilot played by Kurt Russell. He's moody, and a loner, and a heavy drinker. But like a lot of Russell's action characters, he has that uncanny ability to stay icily calm in a crisis. So naturally the other men look to him for leadership, even though Garry is ostensibly in charge.

MacReady's main foil is Childs (Keith David), who's a hothead and the most logical choice to challenge MacReady's status as alpha dog.

Speaking of dogs, the movie begins with the image of a beautiful husky being chased across the snows by a helicopter, with a man aboard firing a hunting rifle at it. This launches us into the plot of the station being attacked by a creature from outer space. It had crash-landed here eons ago, was found and thawed out by some Norwegians who fell victim to it.

The creature is very different from the one in the original movie, which was some kind of plant-based blood-sucking vampire thing. Here the creature is more like a virus that attacks living things, assimilating them and copying them perfectly. In effect it is a changeling, although it absorbs whatever it copies, rather than destroying the body.

The special effects, which were simply amazing back in 1982, still hold up very well nearly 30 years later. The scenes I remember most are when the doctor is trying to shock one of the team members back to life, and the defibrillator pads crash right through his chest, revealing him as infected. Then sharp teeth from either side of the chest cavity snap down on the doctor's arms, severing them.

MacReady burns the body with a flamethrower, but the creature's head -- still wearing the outer guise of a the red-headed guy it had infected -- separates itself from the flaming corpse, crawling onto the floor and sprouting spider-like legs and eye stalks.

I still get a thrill watching this stuff. "The Thing" has lost none of its bite.

4 stars