SCENES FROM A MALL
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
SCENES FROM A MALL is the new Paul Mazursky film starring Woody Allen, Bette Midler, and the Beverly Center shopping mall. Paul Irwin, the "new vaudevillean," appears as the mimic.
It's an incongruous casting idea putting Woody Allen, the ultimate New Yorker, in a Southern California mall with Bette Midler, who may just be the last word in ditzy rich California. If it had worked, it would have been brilliant; it didn't and it ain't. All that is left to us the audience is assigning the blame.
First off, there's Mazursky, who when he's good is very, very good. However, he seems constitutionally incapable of making two good movies in a row. Now, he's done nothing quite as wonderful as his early NEXT EXIT GREENWICH VILLAGE, but his last Beverly Hills movie, the name of which escapes me just now, had a wonderful zany chaos about it, a kind of kitchy UP STAIRS, DOWN STAIRS, that approached at least the lost art of the screwball comedy. SCENES, on the other hand, instead of opening up Beverly Hills to satire and humanization, traps us in its own self-referential claustrophobia. Several times, Nick and Deborah, the major characters, almost succeed in breaking out of the mall, only to be dragged back in by some circumstance or other. Their failure to leave is the movie's failure, too.
Then, there's Woody Allen looking and sounding as natural and naturalized as a Martian at a Ku Klux Klan rally. He's got a preposterous tuck of hair gathered in a teeny tiny ponytail. That's the signal that he's a real California sports agent/lawyer. Allen is too familiar to us to be anything but Woody Allen, and no one who knows Allen thinks that he would ever be a Californian. Neither is there anything in his performance that in any way makes it possible for us to make the leap of faith to enable us to forget ANNIE HALL and a lifetime of slamming L.A.
Finally, there's Midler, fussy and over-upholstered as usual, but totally unable to convince us that she is a licensed psychologist and successful self-help author. She's not the Beverly Hills princess she was in her previous B.H. films -- the one with Nick Nolte and company [DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS] or the one with Danny DeVito [RUTHLESS PEOPLE]. Neither is the vulgarian with the heart of gold that she's played opposite Shelley Long [OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE] or in BEACHES. What is she, who is she, how does she succeed either professionally or personally? She hasn't a clue how the play Deborah and we haven't a clue how to read her.
If this is satire, it is a cold, uncaring kind. If it is a tribute to SoCal culture, it misses altogether. I think of SCENES and then of L.A. STORY as the portrait of Lotus Land. Steve Martin's got this movie beat all hollow because there is love behind his movie. There is nothing behind Mazursky's.
I can recommend this film only to those fans who have to see everything with Allen and/or Midler in it. The rest of us would be better off shopping.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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