EDEN
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Legacy Releasing Director: Howard Goldberg Writer: Howard Goldberg Cast: Joanna Going, Dylan Walsh, Sean Patrick Flanery
"Money is not important to me," insists the 16-year-old Dave Edgerton (Sean Patrick Flanery), a student at an exclusive New England live-in prep school named Mount Eden. "My father wants me to study so I can become a doctor or lawyer so that I can buy a big car and a big house." That's about as original a segment of dialogue you'll get in Howard Goldberg's "Eden," a movie so small, so pallid and so blandly acted that it would scarcely qualify for a disease-of- the-week TV melodrama. Placing the action in 1965 at a time that the Vietnam war was just beginning to escalate dangerously and a small contingent of young people were considering fleeing to Canada, Goldberg seems to have made a movie that does not simply deal with the period: it seems to have been made in the sixties as well. As dated as Stuart Hagmann's 1970 film "The Strawberry Statement," about the Columbia University riots but in no way as compelling (after all scripter Goldberg is no Israel Horovitz), "Eden" mixes New- Age mysticism with preppie banality unconvincingly in a movie that lacks intensity or even a point of view. The teenaged students--who, to a man, look like 23-year-old graduate students and seem to act as august as the denizens of a British club--are forced to suffer the indignities of living under the same roofs as their instructors while the faculty are likewise compelled to put up with their charges at mealtime, in the classroom, and in evening bull sessions.
At the center of this insipid tale is a foolish triangle pitting 29-year-old Economics teacher Bill Kunen (Dylan Walsh) against a flunking and alienated student, Dave Edgerton for the affection of Bill's wife Helen (Joanna Going). To Helen falls the burden of caring for the house in which she, her husband, her two small children, and three teen students board, an ordeal made almost unendurable because Helen is afflicted with Multiple Sclerosis. Wearing a brace on one leg and feeling fatigued most of the time, she carries out her household chores and finds the time to tutor the disaffected Dave, who develops a crush on a woman who is no much older than he and has begun to study hard under her kind and temperate instruction. Helen insists that her method works while her husband feels that riding roughshod will bring his charges to heel. Cracking under the strain of her progressive illness, Helen begins to fantasize out-of-body experiences and looks forward to her frequent naps, which afford her to ability to soar above her disease-wracked body and feel absolutely free.
Perhaps to gain literary credentials, Goldberg uses a heavy-handed metaphor of a wounded crow who is being nursed back to health while kept in a cage, but who gets well and flies away, much to the dismay of young daughter Amy (Annie Michele Price). To capture Helen's experience of freedom, he is unable to transcend the restrictions of his producer's budget and resorts to obvious, tacky special effects to illustrate Helen's voyages to freedom.
If "Eden" serves any purpose, it at least alerts the audience to think twice before sending their children to boarding school. The ironically named institution features faculty members who think nothing of barking their contempt to the kids as when one instructor harasses poor Dave, who is sitting on the grass minding his own business, by shouting "Get a haircut." (It should be noted that Dave's hair, if not a crewcut, is perfectly neat.) And would you expect a TV disease show to portray how a husband's love drives his wife's disease into remission? Expect it here as well. Rated R. Running time: 109 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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