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Snowballs in Hell

By David Edelstein
Posted Sunday, Dec. 6, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET
Movies

Home Fries
Directed by Dean Parisot
Warner Bros.

A Simple Plan
Directed by Sam Raimi
Paramount Pictures

Central Station
Directed by Walter Salles
Sony Pictures Classics
 		Movies

Snowballs in Hell
 Three winter horror shows.

By David Edelstein
 (posted Saturday, Dec. 5, 1998)
Barrymore and Wilson in Home Fries
Barrymore and Wilson in Home Fries
Drew Barrymore appears to take a lewd pleasure in her own wholesomeness. Maybe that's because it didn't come naturally. Compelled as a young actress to act more worldly than her years, she succumbed early on to the legendary Barrymore predilection for booze and pills, then underwent a well-publicized pre-pubescent rehab. Nowadays, that twisty little mouth tells you she knows a naughty thing or two but also that she enjoys her newfound self-possession and isn't about to throw it away on some bad boy. Although descended from a line of sotted hams, she has scrubbed herself clean of affectations: She seems to get more open--and younger--with every picture.
OK, she probably seems younger in Home Fries because the movie sat in the can for a year. What do you expect--people hate the thing. My wife questioned my sanity after I'd packed her off to see it, and the old gent behind me at the press screening announced, "I have better screenplays in my bottom drawer." I'd like to see those screenplays! This one was written a decade ago by Vince Gilligan, now a writer and executive producer of The X-Files but a cub when his work caught the eye of Mark Johnson, who has produced most of Barry Levinson's movies as well as A Little Princess (1995) and Donnie Brasco (1997).
It's a kid's script, for sure, revolving around an awkward, puppyish romance between two klutzy innocents, the drive-up Burger-Matic cashier Sally (Barrymore) and the guileless helicopter pilot Dorian (Luke Wilson). What twists this basic boy-meets-girl story into a surreal sculpture is the presence of Dorian's homicidal mom (Catherine O'Hara) and slavishly sociopathic brother, Angus (Jake Busey), as well as the sad fact that Sally is nine months pregnant with the child of Dorian's quasimurdered (heart condition, shock) stepfather. Plus, Dorian and Angus are expected to avenge their mother's humiliation by finishing off their stepfather's mistress.
The opening, in which a UFO swoops down on a terrified man, foreshadows Gilligan's work on The X-Files. But Mulder and Scully have never faced a gorgon like the mom played by O'Hara, who compels her sons to execute her will by portraying herself as helpless and abused. Hearing of a much-desired death, she takes pains to remind them that she wasn't responsible: "I never actually used the word 'kill.' " On SCTV, O'Hara was one of the savviest comic actresses in the history of the medium, but on the big screen she has a vaguely estranging blankness--a robotic quality that carries a chill suggestion of hysteria. Here, it's put to astonishing use. Hoping to drive Angus to commit the murder that his brother cannot, she "reassures" the young man that, although Dorian is her favorite, the difference is only (thumb and forefinger inches apart) "this much"--enough to send the stricken Angus on a rampage. In Home Fries, "this much" is the difference between life and death, comedy and tragedy--and at the box office, I fear, success and catastrophe.
What puts audiences off, I guess, is the juxtaposition of seemingly whimsical absurdism with an authentic vein of psychosexual horror. The New York Times critic compared the shifts in tone to those in the recent Clay Pigeons, but that's exactly wrong: Clay Pigeons uses bloody violence to add shock value to a deadpan, nihilistic comedy; Home Fries uses Middle American kitsch, farcical exaggeration, and romance to leaven what's essentially a nightmarish vision of a culture in which families are fractured and their wounds left to fester. Gilligan and first time director Dean Parisot carry this romantic comedy to the brink of tragedy and let it hover there for a disturbingly long time. When people say the mixture of genres "doesn't work," what they mean is that it made them uncomfortable.
Well, it made me uncomfortable, too, but not in the way Roberto Benigni's inspirational concentration camp clown show Life Is Beautiful made me uncomfortable. Home Fries is organic, all of a piece. And did I mention how delectable Drew is? Even with her belly stuck out, playing a character who, for most of the film, is completely in the dark about the evil that swirls around her, she radiates a charming aplomb. She's well partnered by Wilson, whose character isn't in the dark about anything and radiates a charming lack of aplomb.
Although watching scabrous talons rip through human flesh isn't often my idea of a good time, Sam Raimi's first movie, The Evil Dead (1983), had a gleeful concentration that won me over: Only growing up with a steady diet of comic books, cartoons, and horror movies could have instilled in its director a dementia so unmoored. There are different kinds of "cartoon" filmmakers. Tim Burton is a darkly inspired illustrator who works frame by frame and has but a grudging regard for how those frames fit together. Raimi, on the other hand, has an animator's zest for hyperbolic motion. He's the last person I'd have expected to direct a slow, intimate noir chamber drama, but after making his fortune as the executive producer of middlebrow TV camp (Hercules, Xena), he must have felt it was time to take a whack at a "straight" picture.
A Simple Plan is a terrific imitation of one--which is to say that it's no less artificial than 90 percent of what's out there, and it's far more visually resourceful. Written by Scott Smith, from his novel, the film begins by invoking the white-on-white winter landscapes that Raimi's old buddies Joel and Ethan Coen made a running (well, crawling) gag in Fargo (1996). Hank (Bill Paxton), an accountant who works several jobs to make ends meet for him and his pregnant wife, Sarah (Bridget Fonda), delivers a voice-over paean to the "simple things" it takes for a man to be happy: a wife he loves, a decent job. Uh-oh, we think, something bad is going to happen when the protagonist of a thriller celebrates "normalcy." Pretty soon, Raimi inserts a shot of ravens looking down from tree branches, waiting for something dead to feed on. In case you missed the first bird shot, there's another. And another. And--uh-oh, something really bad is going to happen.
Paxton and Thornton in A Simple Plan
Paxton and Thornton in A Simple Plan
Hank, his half-wit brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob's quarter-wit friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) trudge through a nature preserve after a fox runs across the road and Lou plows his truck into a tree. They get to arguing and Lou throws a snowball at a wall of snow and the snow collapses to reveal a small, crashed plane with a dead guy inside being pecked at by birds and with more than $4 million in $100 bills. Drug money? Hmm ... nothing wrong with taking that. The "simple" in A Simple Plan must be a play on "stupid" as well as "uncomplicated," because--as those birds keep trying to signal--no good can come from pocketing the loot and covering the plane back up with snow.
Part of the appeal of this sort of portent-laden movie is that there aren't a lot of surprises. The pacing is deliberate, and you can see each disaster limping toward you from across a vast, snowy field, which gives you plenty of time to yell at the characters: "Moron! Don't do that!" They don't hear you, of course, but then, they don't hear the smarter parts of themselves, either. For the whole film, the audience and the characters wait together for the other shoe to drop, as what was supposed to be simple turns physically and morally vertiginous. Raimi and Smith get laughs off the Dumb and Dumber dumbness of Jacob and off Thornton's seemingly limitless repertoire of cretins. Then they turn around and make Jacob the movie's suffering moral center--the simpleton who can't find a way to lie to himself that what he's doing isn't evil. Making a martyr out of Jacob is a bit cheap but, frankly, most of the devices in A Simple Plan are a bit cheap, from the fox in the henhouse to the damn crows to the ways in which Fonda's Sarah--who initially registers moral revulsion--evolves into a thin-lipped Lady Macbeth of Lake Wobegon.
That sounds too patronizing. A Simple Plan is a smoothly made horror film in which the horror comes from characters doing horrible things they didn't know they had in them. There is one brilliantly horrible scene. Stupid Jacob, long in Hank's shadow, is hectored by his brother into betraying his buddy Lou but can't quite bring himself to go through with it. Once he gets drunk, though, Jacob's venom against the smarter, better-looking, more successful Hank pours out until--as if horrified by his own deep-seated fury--he does a hairpin turn and executes the deception against his friend that will instantly send the narrative snowballing into hell. But from the start these guys had a snowball's chance in hell.
One of the first things I learned about great works of art is that they have to make "the familiar strange." One of the first things I learned about foreign films is that if they're going to have any kind of commercial life in the American market they have to make the strange familiar. They open with actors we've never seen before speaking a weird language in an alien culture. But just when we lazy Yanks think about fleeing this disorientation for the steady comforts of home and TV set, a "universal" story line kicks in, and we realize, "Hey, we've seen this before!"
Hey, you've seen Central Station before, in spite of its superbly disorienting first half-hour. It's a conversion narrative and, for a while, a compelling one, about a mingy-spirited maid, Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), who writes letters for illiterates in central Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She gets improbably saddled with 9-year-old Josue (Vinicius de Oliveira), after his mother, having just dictated a letter, gets flattened by a bus. At first, Dora has no qualms about selling the boy to a shady adoption ring, but after a spasm of conscience, she and the boy are making their bickering, odd-couple way into the mostly barren Brazilian countryside in search of Josue's estranged father. The father's name? Jesus. In A Simple Plan, you can see a hellhound padding its way toward the characters for miles; in Central Station (of the cross?) it's Jesus comin' at ya. "You even look like a man--no paint on your face," says the boy, who has a South American male's way with a compliment. Pretty soon the hitherto sexless crone is wearing lipstick, donning loose dresses, and having serial religious epiphanies in front of statuettes of the Virgin.
I'd have given up on the movie after 90 minutes, but the basset-hound-faced Montenegro is really as good as critics have said she is. As Dora, she has a quality you see in authentically rotten people but is almost never dramatized--a mixture of sneakiness and smugness. It's not just that she's shifty, it's that she regards herself as superior to anyone who isn't. It's a letdown when she gets all noble, but you know how actors get around certain statuettes, and I don't mean Mary or Jesus.
De Oliveira and Montenegro in Central Station
De Oliveira and Montenegro in Central Station

Links

Check out the official site for Home Fries, read about Drew's troubled past, or learn Drew trivia on the Drew Barrymore's Utopian Paradise Web site. (She was told by Dennis Miller she needed a spanking, used to talk to and eat lunch with E.T.'s actorless body, can't get her eyebrows to grow back properly, compares her hair to hay that's been barfed up by an animal, etc.) Here is the official site for A Simple Plan, and here is a gallery of gruesome photos from director Raimi's first film, The Evil Dead. The official Central Station site has photos, a synopsis, and video clips. Finally, click here for more Slate film reviews.

David Edelstein is Slate's movie critic.

Still from: Home Fries by Deana Newcomb © 1998 Warner Bros.; A Simple Plan © 1998 Paramount Pictures; Central Station by Walter Carvalho © 1998 Sony Pictures Classics.
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David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at .
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