The Andrew Extravaganza

ABC 13 in Houston shows a movie after the news on Sunday nights, their ‘Late Night Movie Showcase.’ I’m not sure who is in charge of selecting movies, but the choices range from classics like Sweet Smell of Success to comically bad chick flicks like An Officer and a Gentleman to the undeniably awful like Legacy. It’s seemingly random, but the picks do tend to be obscure. Regardless, I watch them loyally. For better or for worse. Mostly worse.

A couple of weeks ago the movie was A Couch in New York, starring William Hurt as Dr. Henry Harriston and Juliette Binoche as Beatrice Saulnier. The plot of the movie is full of holes and doesn’t matter for the sake of this entry, but here goes:

Dr. Harriston is a big time pshrink in New York on the verge of a breakdown, Beatrice a dancer in Paris with a legion of admirers and a friend dancing in New York. Through a hollow plot contrivance and an ad in the Paris newspaper, they quickly agree to swap apartments for a couple of weeks. Beatrice plays head-pshrinker with Dr. Harriston’s patients, while Harriston deals with Beatrice’s jealous would-be lovers and the chain smoking, un-bathed French populace. Dr. Harriston returns to New York and discovers Beatrice is playing doctor, and even more astonishing is that she’s good at it and making great breakthroughs with his patients. He makes an appointment (she doesn’t know what he looks like you see). After a couple of sessions, she gets him to open up, and they begin to fall in love. A few supporting scenes then a happy ending.

That covers the major plot points. It’s like someone took a good, complete script and shot it full of buckshot then filmed the legible scraps. But it worked. I couldn’t turn it off despite being very sleepy. Juliette Binoche has this incredible screen presence. Building off her beauty was this zest for life and an innocence that is difficult to pull off without getting too cutesy. I’d compare the performance to Nicole Kidman in Bewitched (more on this one in a minute), Audrey Tautou in Amelie, and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.

I grouped the performances the way I did on purpose. Juliette Binoche and Nicole Kidman were stuck with broken scripts but acted brilliantly. The two Audrey’s had the luxury of being in near perfect movies. But I think the performances were very similar.

Now some thoughts on Bewitched. It got rented, so I watched it tonight. I’m not going to say the movie could have been great, but it certainly could have been and should have been very good. The cast was solid, with Kidman displaying more charm and energy and innocence than ever. She’s really become one of the best and most versatile actresses of her generation. Will Ferrell did a decent job: always likable, he showed restraint and had his usual good timing, but it was still a caricature more than a character. The movie started off well, kept chugging along in the second act, but completely blew it it the third act. Nora Ephron dropped the ball and it kept rolling faster and further away. I was surprised to see that Rotten Tomatoes has it at 25% fresh, which suggests it’s a train wreck of a movie, which it isn't by any stretch. It has some fine scenes and oozes charm so it never becomes a labor to watch. Here’s a quote from Ebert’s review:

“It’s one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one.”

He summed up Bewitched perfectly and I think the same can be said for A Couch in New York, although it has less laughs. The tragedy of the thing is that two really good performances will be forgotten because they were stuck in movies that can’t be recommended.

Just FYI, Bewitched was complete ass. Kidman and Ferrell had no chemistry and the storyline seemed like a week's worth of hastily prepared leftovers. The dialogue was awful. I cringed throughout most of the movie. Several times I actually had to close my eyes.

The movie could have been good, but was in fact ass. But Kidman was perfect and kept me watching anyway. That's my point.

And there were a few good lines: In asshole star mode, Will Ferrell said, "Make me 20 cappucinos and bring me the best one!" That's a good line; go to hell if you don't think so.