1987 bum movie
Rating: 16/20
Plot: A bum returns to his old town to look for a shoelace. He finds it! He meets up with some old pals, some who actually exist, and visits his ex-wife.
What a skimpy dvd release of a really good, mostly ignored movie. The menu screen boasts a "play" feature and a "scenes" feature, and that's it. You can't even get subtitles for this thing which is too bad because hobos sometimes mumble. If this movie has flaws, one might be that it's a little too glossy although they did get the teeth right. But it's hard to forget that you're watching very rich people playing very poor people. That might make Meryl Streep's performance that much more impressive. She's got an accent which almost threatens to become a little too much, but shows off a versatile singing voice in an absolutely heartbreaking scene and gets to jerk off a dirty guy in a car. More accurately, the guy uses her hand to jerk himself off. That probably has a special name, but I'm not sure what it would be called. Nicholson's almost as good, wearing miles of despair on his face while still having enough swagger to make the coulda-been aspects of his life even sadder. And there's my man Tom Waits in the type of role he's perfect for, a silly drunk. He wears a perpetual childish grin, and gets to say things like "Cancer's the first thing I ever got" and "That Charles Darwin, he's dead. Master of botany." There's also a great little detail where he has to zip his pants. Oh, and he sings--"Big Rock Candy Mountain," first boisterously and later as a hobo lullaby. This movie's long, and it's really a downer. But it's packed with really good scenes. There's a cool shot of Waits sleeping on a sidewalk about five feet from the foot of a bed behind glass in a storefront window. There's a hallucination featuring Nathan Lane, maybe the worst kinds of hallucinations, where he asks, "Why'd you kill me? My brain poured out." There's a great small performance by a woman Streep gives a toast to. There's a fight in the street between Streep and Nicholson that was powerfully sad, a real shot in the gut. There's another hallucination of a flashback or maybe a flashback with a hallucination in it. And another great moment with Streep's character in a church. Great lines--"My duck died." "Lubricate your soul."--in this although you could accuse it of being a little too talky. I think a lot of this could have survived with just the imagery, as Hollywood glossy as that was. Ironweed feels more like a poem than a movie, does its business abstractly. It's a movie that feels so American and addresses themes about the human condition and the worth of our lives with poignancy. There's a scene featuring a great sound effect--a need scratching the inner part of a record that has long finished playing--and that works a little like this movie. This is one that scratches in your head for a bit after it's over. It's a damn-near classic that needs to be discovered.
This is definitely one of those movies that stays with you after you've watched it. Even though the surrealistic parts of this movie could be distracting, the acting gives this movie a free pass to take risks. And not to say that the dream-like sequences were distracting at all. I like how you put it comparing this movie to a poem.
ReplyDeleteBut, like I said, the acting was top notch. Everyone played their part and did what had to be done to make the scene, the story, and the film work (I always like seeing Fred Gwynne in these kind of roles, by the way. He was a gentle giant, and these roles are a lovely fit for him). Tom Waits is truly underrated as an actor. You have to be so self-aware in order to pull off what he does in this movie. That's the talent of acting: self awareness. And all of these players have it to the MAX!
That thing you didn't know if there was a name for it...is called a "dutch rudder."
I figured you would know, but that seems to be something else. A dutch rudder involves a guy holding his own penis and somebody else moving his arm up and down which doesn't sound like much of anything.
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