Movie Remake Weekend
SOMMERSBY & THE VANISHING (1993)
A film review by Sarah M. Elkins
Copyright 1993 Sarah M. Elkins
*THE VANISHING*: Suspenseful "missing person" action/mystery
PLOT/KICK-OFF: Diane vanishes without a trace from an interstate rest stop in Washington State. Her boyfriend searches for her for years (time-lapsed, this is not a slow movie), meets the waitress Rita and tries to get on with his life but can't let go, and goes on TV to beg whoever took Diane to meet with him to tell him what happened.
CHARACTERS/ACTING: Kiefer Southerland is fine as the boyfriend. Jeff Bridges is okay as creepy Barney but has an inexplicably goofy accent (blame it on the director?). It is Nancy Travis, as Rita, that makes this movie succeed. She's no Sarah Connor (T2's Uzi-toting, sculpted-muscles waitress), but this admirable, believable and *smart* heroine got the audience rooting and cheering for her.
CINEMATOGRAPHY/FX: Some difficult scenes fairly well shot.
SCORE/SOUND: pretty good, sort of jazzy in places
SKIN/SITUATIONS: Some kissing.
VIOLENCE/GORE/LANGUAGE: Shovel fight. Not much gore, but realistic boinging sounds and one mercifully short somewhat gross still shot. Some curses, nothing not on TV.
*SOMMERSBY*: Post-Civil War "missing person returns" drama
PLOT/KICK-OFF: Jack Sommersby returns to his wife and farm in Tennessee -- or does he really? -- after being shut up in the Yankee prisoner-of-war camp in Elmira, New York for most of the War Between the States. His efforts to restore the family farm and fortune after the devastation of the war, and make a new start with his wife and son, are complicated by a Tennessee version of the Klan (angered by his promise to sell off his land to black as well as white sharecroppers after paying off the mortgage on the farm), his wife's ex-suitor who had worked the farm in hopes of marrying the grass widow, and accusations that he is not who he claims to be.
CHARACTERS/ACTING: Richard Gere is natural and charming as Jack, and Jodi Foster (Laurel Sommersby) excels as ever at unspoken conversations, but is perhaps a bit melodramatic in a few of her spoken lines near the end (again, blame it on the director?). James Earl Jones has a small but pronounced part as a judge (implausible, but this is a Hollywood movie, though it rises above that at various times in the movie). Although not as over-the-top as his performance in "Sneakers", I will repeat my suggestion from my previous review: "James! Stop these cameos and get a real role!"
CINEMATOGRAPHY/FX: Most evocative of my roots since FRIED GREEN TOMATOES. Beautiful scenery and interesting scenes of tobacco-farming. I avoided most of those films about farmers a few years back, but this movie had just enough to communicate some of the problems of farm life while advancing the plot, but didn't drag on interminably about them, sort of like the barn-raising sequences in *Witness*.
SCORE/SOUND: Pretty good, fitting
SKIN/SITUATIONS: A little foreplay (clothed)
VIOLENCE/GORE/LANGUAGE: Fighting, short shot of a man's whipped back. Some slurs against blacks uttered by the Klansmen (Knights of the White Chameleon).
ANALYSIS: Why did I like both of these movies better than their foreign originals (THE RETURN OF MARTIN GUERRE, with Gerard Depardieu in Richard Gere's role, and THE VANISHING, a Dutch film), even though it could be said that the originals were more tightly plotted and did not have the error of tending a few times towards melodrama? Because the originals didn't give me any reasons to care what happened to any of its characters, and the remakes did. Also, SOMMERSBY added interesting sub-plots, and THE VANISHING ('93) had some surprising twists.
- Sarah (elkins.wbst139@xerox.com)
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