November 1990
Odyssey
Comedy, Romance, Historical
VHS
B-
This is an uneven but pretty good film, where the main plot, of a 1951 romance between Martin, a 21-year-old New Orleans man (played by 26-year-old Keanu Reeves with a shaky Southern accent) and his 36-year-old "aunt" (actually his aunt-by-marriage's sister) Julia (42-year-old Barbara Hershey), who's been living in New York, is overshadowed by the goings on, on and off the air, at the radio station where Martin works. Reeves and Hershey have decent chemistry together, and the age difference doesn't seem like an especially big deal, but the problem is that their characters aren't particularly interesting or likable, together or separately. And the way that soap-opera writer Pedro Carmichael (Peter Falk) manipulates them, and that they fall for it, adds to the faultiness of the romance. (When Martin shows up with a gun and then it's resolved through unfunny humor, it leaves a bad taste.)
Luckily, Pedro's machinations for the characters of Kings of the Garden District more than make up for this. While some plain-looking and -sounding radio performers act, we see the scenes played out with stars like John Larroquette and Dan Hedaya (as two brothers), Hope Lange, Elizabeth McGovern, Buck Henry (as a priest) and so on. Incest is a theme on the radio soap as well, but taken to ridiculous heights. And Pedro's unremitting and unmotivated hatred for Albanians leads to some of the funniest lines. I'd almost recommend you fast-forward through the romance parts, but that "reality impacts" the soap. And the Wynton Marsalis soundtrack is nice, although I'm not a jazz fan generally.
Richard B. Shull, who was Emery Bush in The Big Bus, is Leonard Pando (the actor Pedro convinces to masturbate to improve his acting). Irving Metzman, who was the Theater Manager in The Purple Rose of Cairo, is the Producer of Detroit Radio here, while Crystal Field was in the audience there and is Josephine Sanders here. (She was also in Radio Days.) Bill Moor, who's Duke Vermont here, was U.S. Consul in Ishtar.
Peter Gallagher, playing sister-lover Richard Quince here, would be Dan Riley in Bob Roberts. Jerome Dempsey who plays Sam & Sid (the split-personality/ twins who run the station), would be a board member in The Hudsucker Proxy.
This movie is based on the Mario Vargas Llosa novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (obviously not set in New Orleans), which I couldn't get through when I tried it years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment