BOGUS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Whoopi Goldberg, Gerard Depardieu, Haley Joel Osment. Screenplay: Alvin Sargent. Director: Norman Jewison. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It is a frustrating thing to watch a high concept get in the way of a perfectly good film. In BOGUS, there is a scene in which the Jimmy Stewart classic HARVEY is showing on a television, and the reference makes you suspect that someone went into a pitch meeting to describe BOGUS as "HARVEY, but you can see the rabbit...and he's Gerard Depardieu." BOGUS could have been -- and should have been -- a simple story of mutual need, and there are plenty of reasons to believe it could have been a rather good one. Instead, poster-driven film-making has turned out yet another promising but disappointing effort.
BOGUS begins in Las Vegas, where 7-year-old Albert Franklin (Haley Joel Osment) is living with his mother Lorraine (Nancy Travis), a circus performer. When Lorraine is killed in a car accident, Albert is left in Lorraine's will to the care of her foster sister Harriet (Whoopi Goldberg), whom she had not seen in many years. Harriet, a serious-minded businesswoman living in Newark, NJ, claims she doesn't "have a maternal bone in (her) body," but she agrees to take Albert in when the only other option is state care. Still, Harriet has difficulty relating to the young boy, who has chosen to relate instead to an imaginary friend who emerged from a coloring book, a Frenchman called Bogus (Depardieu).
There are a lot of things right with BOGUS, beginning with the performances. Whoopi Goldberg apparently decided to shake off a string of one-note trash-talkers and turn in some of her best work in years; Harriet is not the typical Whoopi wiseacre, although she still gets in a few decent lines. Instead, she is a woman dedicated to over-compensating for a harsh childhood by becoming a more successful adult. Shaggy-haired Haley Joel Osment hovers just this side of precocity, doing surprisingly little posing and emoting as the smart but lonely Albert, and he really seems to work well with other actors. The connection between Goldberg and Osment develops slowly, but eventually it seems quite genuine. And Depardieu, who is genetically incapable of sleep-walking through a performance, has the ideal comical demeanor for his role.
That role, unfortunately, is the real problem with BOGUS, because someone should have realized that its central conceit was a big mistake. It is evident enough in the fact that Depardieu really has nothing to do but strike an offended pose when someone doesn't believe in him or feed Albert lines like a French TelePrompter. Bogus is a prop, not a character -- he is required strictly to smile benignly and to offer advice which one would expect from a child psychologist rather than an imaginary playmate.
The more substantial issue from a structural standpoint is that screenwriter Alvin Sargent never commits to whom this story is about, and Bogus is the crutch which allows him to do it. When Albert and Bogus are conversing, BOGUS is about a boy in need of comfort, and that is _not_ what it should be about. This is Harriet's story, and we should watch her grow into an understanding of what her life is missing through her attempts to understand what Albert's life is missing. By attempting to place those two stories on an equal footing, Sargent and director Norman Jewison diminish both of them. They also end up condescending both to Harriet and to the audience, because we should no more be able to see Bogus than we are able to see Harvey. Harriet's doubts are given no weight, and there is a strange lack of trust in the audience demonstrated by the refusal to allow our imaginations -- which the story seems to value so greatly -- do their work.
I am certain that some viewers will find the more fanciful elements in BOGUS enchanting. These same viewers might also consider my pooh-poohing of those elements so much humbuggery, but to do so is to misunderstand my meaning. BOGUS should be fanciful; it simply didn't need to be obvious. Imagine the story with a boy fond of magic, chatting with an invisible friend instead of grieving, and the severe Harriet (whom we see in a wonderful scene reacting so violently to a gathering of children that she actually knocks several of them over) struggling to connect with Albert by re-connecting with a childhood she feels she never had. Imagine more time spent establishing Harriet's workaholic character, and less time spent on goofy scenes like Albert's defense of Bogus in his classroom. BOGUS is far from a bad film -- Goldberg is too good, and there are some solid laughs -- but there is a far more affecting film to be found somewhere where a tale of redemption and imagination takes precedence over how easy it will be to construct an advertising campaign.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Bogus journeys: 6.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Receive Scott Renshaw's pre-release reviews directly via email! Write to srenshaw@leland.stanford.edu for subscription details.
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