by Roger Ebert
A day or two later, during a rehearsal at the theater, Oscar is playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father when he loses his place, forgets his lines, doesn’t know where he is. Within a day or so, he is dead of a stroke. All of this is witnessed by the solemn Alexander, who is awakened in the middle of the night by his mother’s animal cries of grief.
And then it is summer, and everything has changed, and his mother is engaged to marry the Lutheran bishop, Edvard Vergerus, who is a tall and handsome man, everyone agrees, but as Helene sees them leaving after the wedding, she says, “I think we will have our Emilie back before long.”
The first third of the story, taking place in winter, was filled with color and life, even life in death. Now Fanny and Alexander are taken to a new world, the bishop’s house, which he inhabits with his mother, his sister and his aunt, and which is whitewashed and barren, with only a few necessary pieces of furniture, locks on every door, bars on the windows.
The maid tells the children that the bishop’s first wife and two daughters drowned in the river; Alexander says he has been visited by their ghosts, who told him they drowned trying to escape after being locked up for five days without food and water. The faithless maid reports this story to the bishop, who whips Alexander, but not before a struggle in which the boy stubbornly makes clear his hatred for the bishop.
Already in the film, we have seen the ghost of Oscar more than once, morose, pensive, worried about his children. There is a touching scene where his mother wakes from a dream on the veranda of her summer cottage and has a loving conversation with him. (If elements of Hamlet creep in, with the ghost of Alexander’s father and his mother’s hasty remarriage, they are not insisted on, and coil casually beneath the surface of the action.)
Now we see another bit of magic. Isak Jacobi, acting for his friend Helena, enters the bishop’s house and offers to buy a trunk, and then smuggles her grandchildren out of the house in the trunk—and yet how can it be, when the bishop runs upstairs to look for them, that the children also apparently in their room?
Perhaps it all has something to do with the magic arts of the Jacobi family. Isak has two nephews, Aron, who helps in the business, and Ismael, who is “not well” and is kept in a locked room and can be heard singing at night. Brought back to Isak’s vast house, which is stacked to the ceiling with treasures to sell or barter, Alexander awakens in the middle of the night to urinate, loses his way back to his room, is startled by a conversation with God, and discovers that God is actually a puppet being manipulated as a joke by Aron. Then he is taken to meet Ismael (played, without explanation, by a girl), and it appears that Ismael can “see” what happens in the bishop’s house and can control events there so that the bishop dies horribly by fire.
There are fairy-tale elements here, but Fanny and Alexander is above all the story of what Alexander understands is really happening. If magic is real, if ghosts can walk, so be it. Bergman has often allowed the supernatural into his films. In another sense, the events in Fanny and Alexander may be seen through the prism of the children’s memories, so that half-understood and half-forgotten events have been reconstructed into a new fable that explains their lives.
What’s certain is that Bergman somehow glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams. Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality. The scenes at night in the Jacobi house are as intriguing and mysterious as any I have seen, quiet and dreamy, and then disturbing when the mad Ismael calmly and sweetly shows Alexander how everything will be resolved.
The movie is astonishingly beautiful. The cinematography is by Bergman’s longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist, who surrounds the Ekdahls with color and warmth, and bleeds all of the life out of the bishop’s household.
The enormous cast centers on Helena, the grandmother, played by Gunn Wallgren (in a role once intended for Ingrid Bergman). Wallgren is full-lipped, warm and sexy, and her affection for Isak is life-giving; she was the best thing in the film, Bergman believed.
Emilie (Ewa Froling) is the most conflicted character in the story; she marries the bishop for love, is tragically mistaken about what kind of man he is, thinks she can protect her children, and cannot. Her visit to Helena is heartbreaking. The marriage of Gustav (Jarl Kulle) and Alma (Mona Malm) is open enough to permit an extraordinary scene in which Gustav discusses his affair with his wife and Emilie, and they all try to decide what would be best for the maid. The bishop (Jan Malmsjo) is a tragic and evil man, strict because he is fearful and insecure, cruel because he cannot stop himself, in agony because, he confesses to Emilie, he thought everyone admired him, and he realizes he is hated.
This is a long film, at 188 minutes plus an intermission. But the version Bergman prefers is longer still, the 312-minute version he made for Swedish television. Both are available on a Criterion DVD, which includes Bergman’s feature-length documentary on the making of the film. To see the film in a theater is the way to first come to it, because the colors and shadows are so rich and the sounds so enveloping.
At the end, I was subdued and yet exhilarated; something had happened to me that was outside language, that was spiritual, that incorporated Bergman’s mysticism; one of his characters suggests that our lives flow into each other’s, that even a pebble is an idea of God, that there is a level just out of view where everything really happens.
Note: When Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, asked the world’s directors and critics to select the best films of the last twenty-five years, Fanny and Alexander was third, after Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.
Gremlins
PG, 106 m., 1984
Zach Galligan (Billy Peltzer), Phoebe Cates (Kate Beringer), Hoyt Axton (Randall Peltzer), Frances Lee McCain (Lynn Peltzer). Directed by Joe Dante. Produced by Michael Finnell, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by Chris Columbus.
Gremlins is a confrontation between Norman Rockwell’s vision of Christmas and Hollywood’s vision of the blood-sucking monkeys of voodoo island. It’s fun. On the one hand, you have an idyllic American small town, with Burger Kings and Sears stores clustered merrily around the village square, and on the other hand you have a plague of reprehensible little beasties who behave like a rodent road company of Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang in The Wild One.
The whole movie is a sly series of send-ups, inspired by movie scenes so basic they reside permanently in our subconscious. The opening scene, for example, involves a visit to your basic Mysterious Little Shop in Chinatown, where, as we all know, the ordinary rules of the visible universe cease to operate and magic is a reality. Later on, after a kid’s father buys him a cute little gremlin in Chinatown, we have a new version of your basic Puppy for Christmas Scene. Then there are such basic movie characters as the Zany Inventor, the Blustering Sheriff, the Clean-Cut Kid, the Cute Girlfriend, and, of course, the Old Bag.
The first half of the movie is the best. That’s when we meet the little gremlins, which are unbearably cute and look like a cross between a Pekingese, Yoda from Empire, the Ewoks from Jedi, and kittens. They have impossibly big eyes, they’re cuddly and friendly, and they would make ideal pets except for the fact that they hate bright lights, should not be allowed to get wet, and must never be fed after midnight. Well, of course, it’s always after midnight; that’s the tip-off that this isn’t a retread of E.T. but comes from an older tradition, the fairy tale or magic story. And in the second half of the movie, after the gremlins have gotten wet, been fed after midnight, etc., they turn into truly hateful creatures that look like the monster in Alien.
The movie exploits every trick in the monster-movie book. We have scenes where monsters pop up in the foreground, and others where they stalk us in the background, and others when they drop into the frame and scare the Shinola out of everybody. And the movie itself turns nasty, espe
cially in a scene involving a monster that gets slammed in a microwave oven, and another one where a wide-eyed teenage girl (Phoebe Cates) explains why she hates Christmas. Her story is in the great tradition of 1950s sick jokes, and as for the microwave scene, I had a queasy feeling that before long we’d be reading newspaper stories about kids who went home and tried the same thing with the family cat.
Gremlins was hailed as another E.T. It’s not. It’s in a different tradition. At the level of Serious Film Criticism, it’s a meditation on the myths in our movies: Christmas, families, monsters, retail stores, movies, boogeymen. At the level of Pop Moviegoing, it’s a sophisticated, witty B movie, in which the monsters are devouring not only the defenseless town, but decades of defenseless clichés. But don’t go if you still believe in Santa Claus.
Hannah and Her Sisters
PG-13, 107 m., 1985
Woody Allen (Mickey), Michael Caine (Elliot), Mia Farrow (Hannah), Carrie Fisher (April), Barbara Hershey (Lee), Lloyd Nolan (Hannah’s Father), Maureen O’Sullivan (Hannah’s Mother), Daniel Stern (Dusty), Max von Sydow (Frederick), Dianne Wiest (Holly). Directed by Allen and produced by Robert Greenhut. Screenplay by Allen.
Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, the best movie he has ever made, is organized like an episodic novel, with acute self-contained vignettes adding up to the big picture.
Each section begins with a title or quotation on the screen, white against black, making the movie feel like a stately progression through the lives of its characters. Then the structure is exploded, time and again, by the energy and the passion of those characters: an accountant in love with his wife’s sister, a TV executive who fears he is going to die, a woman whose cocaine habit has made her life a tightrope of fear, an artist who pretends to be strong but depends pitifully on his girlfriend.
By the end of the movie, the section titles and quotations have made an ironic point: We try to organize our lives according to what we have read and learned and believed in, but our plans are lost in a tumult of emotion.
The movie spans two years in the lives of its large cast of characters—New Yorkers who labor in Manhattan’s two sexiest industries, art and money. It begins and ends at family Thanksgiving dinners, with the dinner in the middle of the film acting as a turning point for several lives.
It is hard to say who the most important characters are, but my memory keeps returning to Elliot, the accountant played by Michael Caine, and Lee, the artist’s girlfriend, played by Barbara Hershey. Elliot is married to Hannah (Mia Farrow), but has been blindsided with a sudden passion for Lee. She lives in a loft with the tortured artist Frederick (Max von Sydow), who treats her like his child or his student. He is so isolated from ordinary human contact that she is actually his last remaining link with reality.
Lee and Hannah have a third sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest). They form parts of a whole. Hannah is the competent, nurturing one. Lee is the emotional, sensuous earth mother. Holly is a bundle of tics and insecurities. When they meet for lunch and the camera circles them curiously, we sense that in some ways the movie knows them better than they will ever know themselves. And to talk about the movie that way is to suggest the presence of the most important two characters in the movie, whom I will describe as Woody Allen and Mickey.
Mickey is the character played by Allen; he is a neurotic TV executive who lives in constant fear of death or disease. He was married to Hannah at one time. Even after Hannah’s marriage to Elliot, Mickey remains a member of the family, circling its security with a winsome yearning to belong.
The family itself centers on the three women’s parents, played by Maureen O’Sullivan and Lloyd Nolan as an aging show business couple who have spent decades in loving warfare over his cheating and her drinking and their mutual career decisions.
If Mickey is the character played by Woody Allen in the movie, Allen also provides another, second character in a more subtle way. The entire movie is told through his eyes and his sensibility; not Mickey’s, but Allen’s. From his earlier movies, especially Annie Hall and Manhattan, we have learned to recognize the tone of voice, the style of approach.
Allen approaches his material as a very bright, ironic, fussy, fearful outsider; his constant complaint is that it’s all very well for these people to engage in their lives and plans and adulteries because they do not share his problem, which is that he sees through everything, and what he sees on the other side of everything is certain death and disappointment.
Allen’s writing and directing style is so strong and assured in this film that the actual filmmaking itself becomes a narrative voice, just as we sense Henry James behind all of his novels, or William Faulkner and Iris Murdoch behind theirs.
The movie is not a comedy, but it contains big laughs, and it is not a tragedy, although it could be if we thought about it long enough. It suggests that modern big-city lives are so busy, so distracted, so filled with ambition and complication that there isn’t time to stop and absorb the meaning of things. Neither tragedy nor comedy can find a place to stand; there are too many other guests at the party.
And yet, on reflection, there is a tragedy buried in Hannah and Her Sisters, and that is the fact of Mickey’s status as the perennial outsider. The others get on with their lives, but Mickey is stuck with his complaints. Not only is he certain there is no afterlife, he is very afraid that this life might also be a sham. How he ever married Hannah in the first place is a mystery; it must have been an intermediate step on his journey to his true role in life, as the ex-husband and hanger-on.
There is a scene in the movie where Michael Caine confronts Barbara Hershey and tells her that he loves her. She is stunned, does not know what to say, but does not categorically deny that she has feelings for him. After she leaves him, he stands alone on the street, ecstatic, his face glowing, saying “I’ve got my answer! I’ve got my answer!”
Underlying all of Hannah and Her Sisters is the envy of Mickey (and Woody) that anyone could actually be happy enough and lucky enough to make such a statement. And yet, by the end of the movie, in his own way, Mickey has his answer, too.
Home for the Holidays ½
PG-13, 104 m., 1995
Holly Hunter (Claudia Larson), Robert Downey Jr. (Tommy Larson), Anne Bancroft (Adele Larson), Dylan McDermott (Leo Fish), Charles Durning (Henry Larson), Geraldine Chaplin (Aunt Glady). Directed By Jodie Foster. Written By W. D. Richter. Based on a short story by Chris Randant.
There is a point in Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays when a brother and his brother-in-law are fighting on the front lawn while the father tries to break it up by wetting them down with a garden hose. Looking across the street at the neighbors gawking, the father snarls, “Go back to your own goddamn holidays!”
The movie, which is about the Thanksgiving family reunion from hell, is not exactly a comedy and yet not a drama, either. Like many family reunions, it has a little of both elements, and the strong sense that madness is being held just out of sight. Have we not all, on our ways to family gatherings, parked the car a block away, taken several deep breaths, rubbed our eyes and massaged our temples, and driven on, gritting our teeth? That is not because we do not love our families, but because we know them so very, very well.
We get that sense in the opening scenes of Home for the Holidays, as Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) discovers she has been fired from her job at a Chicago art museum, and responds by kissing her boss; she’s already building up holiday hysteria. Claudia is driven to the airport by her teenage daughter Kitt (Claire Danes), who confides she will “probably” experience sex for the first time over the weekend. At the other end, she’s greeted by her parents, Adele and Henry (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning). Henry’s taking a home video. Adele has brought along an extra parka in case Claudia has lost hers (she has).
The Larson family home is a triumph of art direction. It has been furnished with dozens if not thousands of the sorts of objects found in mail-order gift catalogs. Not expensive catalogs, but the kind
s of catalogs with sixteen gifts on each page, each one a “miniature” of something you would not possibly want the full-size version of, such as a reindeer or a barbershop quartet.
Henry is a retired airport maintenance man. Adele chain-smokes all the time and can read her daughter-s mind. (“Mom, I’m thinking of a change . . . I may not be at the museum all that much longer.” “They fired you!”) Soon Claudia’s gay brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.) turns up with a new friend named Leo Fish (Dylan McDermott). The parents seem to accept their son’s homosexuality without acknowledging it, which is an accurate note for many families. Claudia is disturbed by the absence of Tommy’s former boyfriend, who was popular with the entire family.
Then Claudia’s sister Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson) and brother—in—law Walter (Steve Guttenberg) turn up. Walter cannot stand Tommy. Tommy cannot stand Walter or Joanne, and finds a way to deposit a turkey in her lap without quite seeming as if he meant to.
These are all routine family problems compared with the arrival of Aunt Glady (Geraldine Chaplin), who is quite mad in her own style of passionate intensity, and has had a crush on Henry since she first laid eyes on him (he looked, she recalls, like a horse in a uniform).
