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IT USED TO BE THAT AT LEAST A COUPLE of Christmas movies were, well, seasonal. You know, "Miracle on 34th Street," "Scrooge," the whole snowflakes-and-good-will-toward-men thing. In 1997, fuggedaboudit. We get ships that sink, ships that carry slaves, a masked man chopping up teenagers, James Bond slaughtering suavely, a president who molests young girls, a violent preacher, a misanthropic neurotic, more Quentin Tarantino gunplay, a cross-dressing child, the Chinese invading Tibet, Kevin Costner saving America in a landlocked "Waterworld" and Woody Allen behaving badly. Does this sound like fun? Well, actually, some of it is. We've made our list, we've checked it twice, a lot of it is more naughty than nice, but hey, that's entertainment. Get used to it.
Case in point: the most wickedly entertaining movie of the season is the one about the president who fondles an underage Firefly girl two weeks before an election. How can he overcome such a scandal? The scathing satire Wag the Dog shows you how: by bringing in legendary spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro), who instantly surmises that what is required is a massive diversionary tactic. Perhaps a war? Perhaps a war with Albania? A war that will occur not in reality but on prime-time TV. Enter Hollywood producer and legend in his own mind Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) to mastermind the production.
It's a deliciously outrageous premise, and director Barry Levinson and writers David Mamet and Hilary Henkin know just how to spin it, savaging Washington and Hollywood with merciless wit. This knowing political satire takes no prisoners and never goes soft. You can sense the cast's delight getting to play with such razor-edged material: De Niro hasn't been this breezy in ages, Woody Harrelson does a hilariously scary bit as a "war hero" who is inconveniently psychotic and there are sly turns from such co-conspirators as Ann Heche, Denis Leary and Kirsten Dunst as an actress deeply upset that she won't be able to list her performance as an Albanian war victim on her resume. (She'll be killed if she does.) But the cream of the jest is Hoffman's brilliant impersonation of the egomaniacal, motor-mouth producer (any resemblance to the overcoifed Robert Evans is entirely intentional). "Wag the Dog" was made fast (a 29-day shoot), relatively cheaply (a $15 million budget) and with a contagious sense of mischief. It's a hoot.
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Woody Allen is back in sharp comic form, too, though it's likely that his abrasive black comedy Deconstructing Harry will alienate as many people as it tickles. Let's be frank. Woody has a problem: people always think the characters he plays are him. He's certainly not courting fans by casting himself as novelist Harry Block, the oft-married, selfish, sex-obsessed and generally despicable hero of this smart, nasty and very raunchy comedy. A lot of women fall in love with Harry (you may wonder why), but they all end up furious at him; if he hasn't betrayed them in life, he does so in his novels, where his infidelities are barely disguised as fiction. (Think Philip Roth.) "Deconstructing Harry" hops brilliantly between Harry's real and fictional lives. (Thus Kirstie Alley, Elisabeth Shue and Judy Davis are "real," while Demi Moore, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Benjamin play fictitious versions of the real people in Harry's life.) The story-within-the-story called "The Actor," with Robin Williams, is Allen at his most inspired, but I won't spoil it by giving away the joke. In its structure, "Harry" echoes Bergman's "Wild Strawberries"-it's the summing up of a self-absorbed life. It may be the bleakest, most self-punishing comedy Allen has made. Amazingly, it's one of the funniest.
Woody thought of calling his movie "The Meanest Man in the World." This could just as well have been the title of James L. Brooks's new, wildly uneven romantic comedy As Good as It Gets. The man in question is Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), world-class grinch. An obsessive compulsive who'll use a bar of soap only once, he's also a sneering bigot who insults blacks, Jews and gays and is first seen throwing his gay neighbor's dog down the garbage chute of their New York apartment building. Because it's Nicholson playing Udall-with lip-smacking, eyebrow-raising relish--we know that sooner or later we're going to be asked to fall in love with this guy, who underneath it all is a lonely soul terrified of human connection. The agents of his redemption are: (1) the dog, which he must care for when his artist neighbor is badly beaten in a robbery, (2) the gay artist (Greg Kinnear), a sensitive soul whom Udall will come to befriend and (3) the waitress Carol (Helen Hunt), a no-nonsense saint with a sickly, asthmatic son. She, of course, will teach Udall to love.
The man who made "Terms of Endearment" and "Broadcast News" is too ingenious a writer to serve this sentimental tale straight: he comes at it sideways, mixing the sweet and sour in unexpected-and some-times hilarious--ways. But the marvelously unpredictable Brooksian moments coexist this time with shameless pandering (the old cute-dog trick), broad sitcom staging and some surprisingly klutzy filmmaking. Brooks seems so worried that Udall will turn us off that he overcompensates with the sort of crowd-pleasing shtik he used to shun. The tough-tender Hunt is terrific, and Nicholson has amazing moments, but does Udall add up to a coherent character? (What does his compulsiveness have to do with his bigotry, anyway? Why his abrupt, unlikely change of heart toward Kinnear?) "As Good as It Gets" works: by the end you'll no doubt be won over by its cranky hero. But for those of us who cherish the quirkily unformulaic Brooks of old, it's a tainted victory.
If it's ravishing filmmaking you want, search no further than Kundun, Martin Scorsese's visually exquisite account of the early years of the 14th Dalai Lama, driven into exile from Tibet in 1959 when the Chinese invaded his country. Except for the fact that it unfolds in a world of men, this would seem a total departure for Scorsese. His hero (played by four different Tibetan nonprofessional actors) is the anti-Raging Bull-- a man serenely devoted to the principles of nonviolence. This passivity creates a formidable challenge for screenwriter Melissa Mathison, for her protagonist is largely devoid of the internal conflict that is the staple of drama. But "Kundun" doesn't take a novelistic approach. Think of it as an epic poem, in which Scorsese's swirling, headlong baroque camera searches paradoxically for the stillness at the meditative heart of Buddhism. This is not a movie for those who crave plot: at times it gets becalmed in the merely ceremonial. The heartfelt, uncompromising "Kundun" is at its greatest in the magically subjective scenes of childhood and in the stunning and moving final act, when the young Dalai Lama must escape in disguise to the Indian border, and past, present and future become one in Scorsese's impassioned eye.
Robert Duvall plays a very different man of God in his fascinating, fervent The Apostle, which he directed, wrote and largely financed himself. "Sonny" Dewey is a devout Pentecostal preacher in Texas with a violent streak and an eye for the ladies. But he's no fraud, and this is no stereotypical Hollywood put-down of redneck religion. Duvall, in as gnarly, passionate and complex a performance as he's ever given, asks us to look at this man in all his troubled, contradictory glory. Sonny flees the law after beating his estranged wife's lover with a baseball bat, and starts a new life in a Louisiana bayou town, where he seeks salvation by starting a new church. Farrah Fawcett, Miranda Richardson, Billy Bob Thornton and John Beasley flourish under Duvall's artfull, anthropologically precise gaze. "The Apostle" captures the roof-raising, multiracial evangelical world with fresh, uncondescending eyes.
Another gem, from Belgium, is the not-to-be-missed Ma Vie en Rose, the first film of a very talented, funny and tender filmmaker named Alain Berliner. Its extraordinary hero, 7-year-old Ludovic, is a boy quite certain that when he grows up he will be a girl. His unshakable conviction, not to mention his habit of dressing in girls' clothing, throws his suburban bourgeois parents into a tizzy. Their son's difference is a problem for everyone but Ludo himself, the calm center of a storm that shakes the family, and their angry, scandalized community, to its roots. The issue of gender is a delicate one, and Berhner and screenwriter Chris Vander Stappen navigate this tricky terrain with charm, tact and sudden bursts of whimsy as the film takes us inside Ludo's candy-colored, TV-inspired fantasies. Young Georges Du Fresne may be the most enchanting child actor to come along in years. Ludo's story, told with the bold strokes of a fable, will break your heart and make you smile, often at the same time.
The heroine of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown is a 44-year-old flight attendant (Pam Grier) busted by the Feds for carrying 50 grand in tainted money and some coke into the country. Jackie gets her revenge on both the ruthless arms dealer Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), who set her up, and on the cops, when she enlists a tough but decent bail bondsman (Robert Forster) to aid her in an elaborate scare with a half-million-dollar jackpot as the payoff. The tale-faithfully taken from Elmore Leonard's "Rum Punch"-is filled with funny, gritty Tarantino lowlife gab (no director is more enamored of talk) and a respectable body count, but what is most striking is the film's gallantry and sweetness. Above all, it's a loving homage to '70s blaxploitation star Grier's sexy, poignant, middle-aged swagger. Filled with terrific acting--Forster, Jackson and Robert De Niro as a dumb ex-con are especially wonderful-"Jackie Brown" hums down the runway without ever quite taking off. Much too long for its own good, it's an honorable genre movie that falls curiously flat. But Tarantino hits some new and touching notes with Grier and Forster--a sense of what it means to grow old with grace--that make you want to see what he could accomplish without guns and gangsters.
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