MARVIN'S ROOM
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1997 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
As the opening credits roll for MARVIN'S ROOM, the camera takes us through a long, slowly panning close-up of a forest of medicine bottles. Great, I'm thinking to myself. I'm going to have to sit through another manipulative, maudlin show about terminal illness. Usually I find watching this type of film about as enjoyable as peeling onions.
Although there have been serious illness movies that I loved, SHADOWLANDS and TERMS OF ENDEARMENT come immediately to mind, more often I get offended by their overbearing sentimentality. MARVIN'S ROOM was a pleasant surprise because it is about people's relationships, not their dying, although dying they are. As an extra treat, the picture is naturally, but not excessively, funny. Not the black comedy of a HAROLD AND MAUDE, but an upbeat one ready to laugh death in the face.
Bessie, played with resolve but none of her normal ditziness by Diane Keaton, is her family's Rock of Gibraltar. She has given up her own life to go to Florida to care for her dying father Marvin, performed only with grunts by Hume Cronyn. "Dad's dying," explains Bessie. "He's been doing it for about twenty years so I don't miss anything."
Bessie also cares for her quirky and senile Aunt Ruth (Gwen Verdon). Aunt Ruth lives through her television soap operas. She even dresses up when the characters on one of her favorite shows get married. She is oblivious to real life, but highly attuned to the imaginary.
One day, Bessie goes to the doctor, aptly named Dr. Wally and played with charming forgetfulness by Robert De Niro. After the obligatory battery of tests, he decides she has leukemia and not the vitamin deficiency he first thought. Bessie has to find a compatible bone marrow donor if she is to have a reasonable chance of survival, and the only likely candidates are her relatives. This means that Bessie must contact her only sister, but she has not spoken to her in twenty years.
Bessie's sister Lee is a low class, chain smoking, new cosmetology graduate. Meryl Streep has the part of Lee, whom Streep approaches much the same as she did her famous Karen Silkwood role. Lee has a problem bigger than Bessie's. Her son Hank (Leonardo DiCaprio), having recently set fire to Lee's pictures and thereby burning their house down, is in a prison mental facility. Lee tells Bessie that, "We call it the loony bin, or the nut house, to show that we've got a sense of humor about it." Lee's other son is a bespectacled nerd named Charlie (Hal Scardino), and he is everything Hank isn't. Lee gets Hank a short leave of absence from the facility so the three of them can leave Ohio to go to Florida to be tested for donor compatibility.
The script and the play upon which the film is based is by writer Scott McPherson, who died of AIDS soon after the play was produced. The press kit has an insert from the play's original program. In it, he says that his grandmother was the first dying person he had ever known. Soon he and his friends would begin dying, so the energy and honesty in the script comes from his experiences. My main complaint with the filmed version is that director Jerry Zaks treated McPherson's staging too reverentially. Plays are best when opened up for the big screen. Too often this movie has the claustrophobic and confined feeling of a play without the intimacy that a live play provides.
The heart of the story is the rekindling of the dormant relationship between the two sisters and the beginning of a relationship between Hank and the others. Hank breaks out of his shell and comes to know his mother and his Aunt Bessie -- both for the first time.
The script has a delicacy along with the humor. This is best evidenced in Bessie's telling Lee about her adolescent fling with a "carny worker" who had a voiceless scream.
The emotive music by Rachel Portman is full of dreamy and sad little piano tunes. The cinematography by Piotr Sobocinski, on the other hand, is too dark. Although he is clearly trying for intimacy, it comes off more ugly than effective.
Without the humor, the film would have been unwatchably morose, but with it you can concentrate on the blossoming relationships, which comprise the core of the picture. Still, the coming of death does seem to lurk around every corner of the movie. The saddest scene in the film ironically happens in "the happiest place on earth" -- Disney World. Surprisingly, this is not a movie that builds to the big event. The most important act turns out to be the middle one.
MARVIN'S ROOM runs 1:37. It is rated PG-13 for its realistic consideration of dying and for a little bad language. There is no sex, nudity, or violence. The movie would be fine for kids interested in this type of serious material, and I think that probably means kids nine or ten and up. I recommend the picture to you and give it ** 1/2.
**** = One of the top few films of this or any year. A must see film. *** = Excellent show. Look for it. ** = Average movie. Kind of enjoyable. * = Poor show. Don't waste your money. 0 = One of the worst films of this or any year. Totally unbearable.
REVIEW WRITTEN ON: January 6, 1997
Opinions expressed are mine and not meant to reflect my employer's.
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