Retrospective: Six Days, Seven Nights
Starring Harrison Ford, Anne Heche,
and David Schwimmer
Directed by Ivan Reitman
In Movieland, when a man and a woman who hate each other get stranded together, they must inevitably fall in love. This charming and nonsensical idea is the heart of this eminently likable film directed by comic mastermind Ivan Reitman.
Like Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen, Harrison Ford and Anne Heche are an unlikely pair who are thrown together by circumstance. Instead of a steam launch, their vehicle is a single-engine airplane, and instead of Africa, the setting is the South Pacific. But the story is every bit as delightful and improbable as the John Huston classic. To make this kind of thing work, the dialogue has to sparkle and the two stars have to have chemistry. Six Days scores on both counts.
Harrison Ford's Quinn is a superannuated adolescent who chucked it all and moved to Tahiti. He runs a charter business that consists of one airplane, but he is mostly just a beachcomber. Anne Heche's Robin is an editor for a fashion magazine, vacationing in the islands with her fiance. Anne and Harrison are off on the wrong foot right from the start, when she makes fun of the little single-engine tail dragger, his pride and joy, that he intends to take them up in. `Where's its mommy?' she asks. Sarcasm is her stock in trade; she's had a lot of practice, and she's very good at it. Harrison neatly sums up her character when, having been shot down by another of her verbal barrages, he simply says, `you're from New York, aren't you?'
Unexpectedly having to fly back to fly back to Tahiti for a fashion shoot, the pair run into bad weather and crash land on a deserted island, where they can go about the business of hating one another full-time. With mutual recriminations mixed in to spice things up. He still insists that he's the best damn pilot she's ever flown with; she points out that she's flown with him twice and he's crashed half the time. She begins to mellow however when she discovers he's handy to have around when there are snakes. And scorpions. She's pretty capable herself, and saves both of their lives at one point. In short, they need one another. It's not long before they want one another, too.
Harrison Ford, his age notwithstanding, can still pull off boyish charm. Amazing. Anne Heche more than holds up her end, and she has a real gift for comedy. The plot of this movie is tried-and-true Hollywood formula. No surprises there. In order for it to work, the two principles have to deliver the goods. And they do. It's sexy and it's funny ... who could want more?
But there is more. These characters actually have some depth. Quinn is a guy who has pulled back into his shell, who makes a pretty convincing case that he really is satisfied with diminished expectations. Robin is the kind of person who can't rest until she has gotten him to open up. So she prods him until finally, over a dinner of barbecued peacock (!) he begins to tell her his life story, the `better way of life' he has found, simple, uncomplicated, unambitious, `the life every man dreams of.' `Yeah,' she responds, `until they're twelve.' Her wit is a little too quick, her tongue a little too sharp. She's immediately sorry, but the damage has been done. It's an oddly touching moment, and it raises a theme that is returned to later in the movie, when the two are returned to civilization. (I'm probably not spoiling any great surprise when I reveal that they don't leave their bleached bones on that desert island.) The question is, what do this incompatible couple do then? Him, who wants his life uncomplicated, and her, who craves complication? Or as Quinn puts it, `I'm not going to New York to become your secretary, and you're not going to stay out here and become my copilot, so where does that leave us?'
Writing satisfying, believable endings is hard. This movie has one, and I'm not going to spoil it by telling. Rent this movie. You won't be disappointed.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews