Crazy in Alabama (1999)
Starring: Melanie Griffith, Lucas Black, Meatloaf Aday, Rod Steiger, David Morse, Cathy Moriarty Directed by: Antonio Banderas Screenplay by: Mark Childress, based on his novel. MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running time: 112 minutes.
This is not a movie for film buffs, or movie buffs, or film fans. This is a movie for film *freaks*, those who love not only what is best in movies but also what is worst. The reviews didn't begin to plumb the depths of what is dreadful about this movie. This movie may have a great future as a midnight feature in cities like San Francisco where there are many movie freaks. It is one of those movies that will come up over and over again in conversations in bars where people say, "Do you remember X, with A and B in it? It was SOOO bad!"
It is TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD meets screwball comedy, with occasional touches of Ed Wood (PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE and GLEN OR GLENDA) and Pedro Almodovar. Roger Ebert's review points out the most conspicuous flaw (oh, I need I much stronger word than this here) in the conception of this film. You *cannot* make a movie in which a woman in an appalling black wig (Melanie Griffith, no less) carries around the head of the husband she has murdered in a hatbox and hears it talking to her (other people occasionally hear it too) and, in the same movie, have a civil rights theme in which a teenage Black protestor gets killed by a Southern sheriff. You *cannot* do this. You *must not* do this. Anybody who has been to film school knows this. Anybody who has sat in lots of theatres on Saturday nights knows this. There is nothing funny about Blacks getting killed protesting segregation. You cannot make this the major subplot of a zany comedy and keep jumping back and forth between the two plots.
This movie is directed by Anthonio Banderas, who happens to be Melanie Griffith's husband. How else could a director convince an Academy Award winning actress, a beautiful woman who I have always loved ever since I first saw her in Jonathan Demme's film SOMETHING WILD, to put on a one of the world's worst wigs and dress in clothes that represent California supermarket couture at its worst and play the lead in a movie where one of the big jokes is that everyone in the movie thinks that this woman is beautiful whereas in fact she is the ugliest trashy divorcee one might ever expect to come across in Santa Monica or Waikiki?
Jennifer Jason Leigh (another of my favorite actresses) could have been right at home with this role. But Melanie Griffith? Melanie Griffith??? I mean, really!
There have been many instances in movie history of directors making movies to give their wife or girlfriend the chance to for a sort of starrring role they could never have got otherwise. But here we have the opposite case, where an Academy-award winning actress is willing to make a sacrifice bunt in order to give her husband's first attempt at directing some chance of success.
This is one of those movies where one just throws everything in the pot that happens to be in the refrigerator. It's one of those movies where the entire point is for the director (and producers) to prove that they are actually capable of making a movie and completing it. Whether it's any good or not is a luxury the makers clearly couldn't afford to worry about.
Roger Ebert's review quotes a few of the really atrocious lines from the screenplay. The sheriff at the swimming pool that the Black teenagers are trying to integrate says, "You are trespassing on public property." Clearly this line was intended to be funny, but given the situation, one has no inclination to laugh. In Melanie Griffith's completely bizarre courtroom speech at the end, she justifies having murdered her husband by saying, among other things, "You spend all day making a beautiful meal for your husband and he comes home and gobbles it down and a little piece of you dies." To which Ebert comments, "Yeah, and big piece of him does."
But I was disappointed that Ebert, who, after all, wrote the screenplay for BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, did not notice all the myriad ways in which the script for this movie is gloriously dreadful. This movie is camp at its best. Not camp that self-consciously sets out to be camp, but camp made with complete seriousness.
I was tempted to walk out after the first half hour of this film, something which I never do. But there are some beautiful outdoor scenes --- something which is pretty much inevitable in any movie shot in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana. And if you stay with the film and give up being a critic and just let yourself have fun, by the end I think you'll find that in its own way it has its charm. I was glad I saw it while I had the chance.
-- Lee Lady <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady> -- It is a question not of being happy or fulfilled, but of being on fire. --- Anais Nin
lady@Hawaii.Edu <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>
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