The House Of Yes (1997) Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Freddie Prinze Jr., Genevieve Bujold, Tori Spelling Rated R, Four and one half stars (out of five stars)
Review and articles by Ed Johnson-Ott For more reviews, go to www.nuvo-online.com and click on "film."
On Thanksgiving eve, Jackie-O's eyes glisten as she tells her twin brother's fiancee, "I've been over the edge, now I'm back." She washes her anti-psychotic medication down with rum, noting that the pills are color-coordinated with her eyes. Surveying the goings-on, Jackie-O's mother excuses herself, saying, "I'm going to baste the turkey and hide the kitchen knives."
Welcome to "The House Of Yes," Mark Water's brilliant black comedy adapted from Wendy MacLeod's macabre play. "The House Of Yes" is a jewel, one of those rare and exhilarating films that completely realizes its own unique vision.
The privileged Pascal family inhabits a decaying Washington DC mansion, insulated from the rules of the outside world. Marty (Josh Hamilton) is the only family member to leave home since his father disappeared on the day John F. Kennedy was killed. When the young man returns with his fiancee, a Donut King hostess named Lesly (Tori Spelling), he hopes to introduce a little normality to the home. Nice try, Marty. His otherworldly mother (Genevieve Bujold) takes Lesly into the kitchen for a little chat, casually informing her that "Jackie was holding Marty's penis when they came out of the womb." After a storm knocks the lights out and Mom retires to her room, we learn more about the kids. Jackie-O (Parker Posey) and Marty have been lovers for years, reenacting the Kennedy assassination as foreplay.
You see, Jackie-O has this thing about the Kennedy's, routinely donning a pink suit, pearls and a pill box hat to emulate the former First Lady. While Jackie-O frantically tries to draw Marty back into her arms, Lesly's time is occupied by the twins' shy, eager-to-please younger brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.), who spills the beans about his siblings' romance, then wheedles Lesly to help him lose his virginity. Just to be fair, you should know that after this mundane stuff has been established, things get a little weird.
"The House Of Yes" has a delightfully creepy feel. It's like finally finding out what the Addams Family REALLY did behind closed doors. The whole thing could easily have become campy, smug or just too damn precious, but Waters' manages the mean trick of keeping this story emotionally grounded. By directing the actors playing the Pascal family to maintain a sense of heightened reality, he highlights just how isolated the Pascals are. With their mansion serving as some plush sensory deprivation tank, the family is cut off from life, damned by their own lack of self-restraint to live a hollow existence of melodrama and role-playing.
Water's couldn't have pulled this film off without skilled actors, and the cast of "House Of Yes" is superb. You'll immediately notice Parker Posey's triumphant turn as the whacked-out Jackie-O, but pay attention to the other performances as well. Genevieve Bujold creates a matriarch who is regal, snobby, droll and distracted in a truly odd, disturbing fashion. Josh Hamilton is a perfect yang to Jackie-O's yin. Watch his face when she tries to convince him to drop his attempts at a traditional life and return to the loony bed. Hamilton conveys a stunning transition of attitude using only his eyes and subtle changes in facial expression. He is exceptional. Tori Spelling conveys a charming naivete as a simple girl who "smells like powdered donuts." The real scene stealer, though, is Freddie Prinze Jr., who initially appears to be merely an ancillary character, but comes into his own with a sly, remarkably skilled performance. Watch him closely during Anthony's attempted seduction of Leslie. This boy can ACT.
While adroitly mixing humor and horror, Waters' plays games with your head. When Jackie-O begs Marty for some Dallas motorcade sex, you find yourself hoping he will agree. When Anthony tries to bed his brother's fiancee, you hope that he'll succeed. Is Waters trying to make a case for incest and stealing your brother's girl? Of course not. He is taking the audience, isolated in a movie theater, and showing us how easy it is to be seduced into wrong thinking by attractive, charming people while we're cut off from the rest of the world. Just like the Pascals.
At least that's my spin on it. Part of the beauty of "The House Of Yes" is that there are infinite ways to interpret the material. As the film makes its way across the country, it's proving to be one of those love-it- or-hate-it movies. That's the way it usually works with innovative films, and "The House Of Yes" is certainly innovative. Shocking in its originality, it is funny, frightening, thought-provoking and one of the years best films.
******* Interview with "House Of Yes" director Mark Waters *************
Ready for the anti-Camelot? In "The House Of Yes," a brilliant black comedy directed by South Bend native Mark Waters, we meet the Pascals, a privileged family who live in a Washington DC mansion, an insulated world where absolutely nothing is out of bounds. On November 22, 1963, at the same time President Kennedy was assassinated, Mr. Pascal abruptly disappeared from his family. Twenty years later, young Marty Pascal (Josh Hamilton) returns home for the holidays with new fiancee Lesly (Tori Spelling) by his side, ready to introduce her to the rest of the family; his regal, otherworldly mother (Genevieve Bujold,) younger brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Marty's twin sister, Jackie-O (Parker Posey,) a beautiful, totally whacked out young woman with an intense fixation on the former first lady, and a very unique relationship with her twin brother. The dark psychological comedy is based on Wendy MacLeod's play of the same name.
"In 1990, when I first encountered the play in San Francisco, I wasn't a film person," explained Waters in a telephone interview. "I was a theatrical actor and director. I didn't go for straight plays generally, I liked things a lot more stylized, yet when I saw this play I really loved it because it had this kind of expressionistic stylization to it and a bleeding of genres. It was a really funny black comedy, an extreme and exciting suspense play and a powerful tragic drama as well. I loved it because it was very ambitious and achieved most everything it went for. I got a copy of the play from Wendy MacLeod's agent and put it aside until years later, after I'd gone to film school. I realized that with only five actors and one location, I could make this into a film on very little money, while dealing with an exciting, full piece of material."
Creating a dark comedy that pulls humor from taboo themes wasn't easy. Handled wrong, the film could easily have become smug or too clever for its own good, but Waters established a delicate balance that makes the material sing. "It started with the adaptation," he said. "I stripped down the play quite a bit, taking out a lot of dialogue that was just repartee for repartees sake; lines that didn't really add to the characters or the story. I also restructured the scenes so that things didn't happen without an emotional justification for them occurring. I imposed a dramatic texture or structure which wasn't there before and then adjusted the scenes so there would be emotional connections throughout the material.
"The next part was really the casting. Parker, Josh, Freddie, Tori and, of course, Genevieve Bujold are all incredibly talented. I chose them because they were genuinely likable and charming, with a natural sense of acting. Even with Parker Posey's character, we tried to have her be more emotionally grounded than in most of her other roles and she relished the opportunity to do that more intimate kind of acting. We didn't want to veer off into camp, like the 'Addams Family' or 'Fassbinder,' where everything is so cold and dark that people wouldn't be able to engage the characters. When I started the adaptation, Wendy told me that it could work if it had high style with emotional truth. So in the movie, I decided we would have a level of stylization. We established a slightly heightened reality, without losing the emotional truth. The audience is able to stay with the characters as human beings even while watching them take things to unreal extremes at times.
"There's a scene in the dining room, where Jackie-O is at Marty's knees. She says "When you make love to that Lesly girl, do you see my face?" and Marty says "Sometimes." The movie is working well when the audience goes right along with them, wanting him to say yes, wanting him to acknowledge his love for Jackie. Then suddenly they think "Wait a second! They're brother and sister, I shouldn't be wanting this!" but at the same time they can't help but truly empathize and sympathize with the characters. It's one of the most crucial scenes in the movie. Going into shooting, I didn't know if we'd be able to pull it off. But both of those actors just stepped right up to the plate and did it. It's a very difficult, subtle thing to get the audience to sympathize with something they would normally find taboo and scary." Incestuous sibling romances aside, one of the most controversial aspects of "The House Of Yes," which appears under the banner of Spelling Films, was the casting of Tori Spelling. Waters laughed about the fuss, saying, "I had no real awareness of Tori before I cast her. I don't watch TV much, except for "Seinfeld" and "Friends," and I'd never seen "Beverly Hills 90210." When I read with her I was completely smitten. She was perfect for Leslie; shy, sweet and vulnerable. All I knew of her is that she was kind of a celebrity. I didn't know about all the baggage associated with her until we got to the Sundance Film Festival and we started getting reviews saying things like "a surprisingly capable Tori Spelling" and I thought "Wow, these people really have a chip on their shoulder about her." It was only months after the film was completed that I became aware of the charges of nepotism that have followed her through her career. Spelling Film's involvement with the piece came very late in the game. Aaron Spelling said he'd read the script, thought it was absolutely hilarious and wanted to acquire the movie, which was nice because we were all working on deferment and actually getting paid was great. If I'd been aware of all that nepotism charges, I would have insisted we stick with our old funding sources. But in the end Spelling Films was happy because they put their money behind a successful film, and Tori's happy because she got a chance to show her skills.
Waters is excited about his next project, "Strike." "It's also going to be a Miramax project; we're finalizing the contract and I'm about to get into the casting. It's great being a second time filmmaker because you don't have to struggle so much for money. The film is kind of set in Indiana, a mythical Midwestern High School based on my experiences. They were starting busing when I was going to school and I lifted the premise for the film from the Greek play 'Lysistrata' which is about a war between Athens and Sparta where the women get together and decide to withhold sex from the men in order to stop the war. I've set the story in a high school during a racial gang war where the black girls and the white girls get together and decide they're going to stop putting out, withholding sex from the boys to try and stop the violence. It's another black comedy, but the tone is different from 'The House Of Yes.'" This year has seen three films with Indiana connections, all dealing with dark topics. Asked about the other films, Waters said, "'The House Of Yes' is a dark comedy, yet we're actually lighter than those other two movies. When you think about it, that's really pretty funny. 'Going All The Way' and 'In The Company Of Men' were my two favorite films at Sundance and it was just coincidental that they had the Indiana connection." For her performance in "The House Of Yes," Parker Posey received a Special Acting Award at the Sundance Film Festival.
******* Interview with Freddie Prinze Jr. from "The House Of Yes" ********
When Freddie Prinze Jr., who plays Anthony, the younger brother in "The House Of Yes," walked in front of the crowd at a promotional appearance in Hollywood, he was visibly uncomfortable. As the cameras flashed and the emcee asked inane questions, Prinze looked desperate to get out of the room. Later, he discussed the evening. "To be honest, I'm still kind of learning how to do the celebrity stuff. It's not what I got into the business for, and I'm not very good at it. With people shouting ‘Freddie! Freddie!' and sometimes even calling me ‘Mr. Prinze,' it feels really strange. I understand it's part of the job, but I'm not good at it."
The talented young actor is far more comfortable discussing his work, particularly his outstanding turn in "The House Of Yes." "Anthony is kind of like Norman Bates before his Mom had the motel. He's so nice, yet has his own agenda. He can get manipulated, but at the same time he's very manipulative. The role was tricky because you don't want to give away too much at first."
The House Of Yes is a very intimate film, with the camera moving ever closer to the actor's faces as the story proceeds, which called for subtle performances from the cast. "I always worked from the gut, and this role called for me to play things mostly through my eyes, so I had to re-train myself. Parker Posey establishes a distinct tone, she's the thread between the beginning and the end of the movie and everybody revolves around Jackie-O, so you have to adjust your style so that everything meshes.
"My first job ever a three line role on Family Matters with Urkel," he laughed. "I was Burt the punk. I didn't even get a last name, just Burt the punk." Prinze also appeared in "To Gillian On Her 37th Birthday" and the current "I Know What You Did Last Summer." "It was so satisfying doing a film like ‘The House Of Yes.' Mark Waters, the director, was like a kid in a candy store. It was his first film and he'd get so into scenes that he'd forget to say cut. We actually finished a half day ahead of schedule, which is amazing for an independent film. I'm really happy about the reception the film is getting. It's definitely the role I'm most proud of and it's gratifying when people respond well to it"
Review and articles copyright 1997, Ed Johnson-Ott
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