The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 67

ARTS MOVIES FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 1998 E3 Colour us cynical: Tell-all story too far behind news THE OTTAWA CITIZEN ,1.11, II ,111, ,11 Ml, I .1,1, 111.11 .1 I (f Denise Richards plays a sexual predator-cum-high school student who sets her sights on her hunky guidance counsellor, played by Matt Dillon. Sex, lies and alligators Set in a Florida high school of sexy students and hunky teachers, Wild Things is a cheesy, ludicrous thriller that's as irresistible as a Melrose Place special And it starts so well, too. The story is told through the eyes of idealistic political aide Henry Burton, played by British actor Adrian Lester. He's an unknown, and that helps give the film a fresh viewpoint; the actor, like the character, is an innocent drawn into a political campaign that looks like it might rival that of Kennedy in its popular appeal and liberal ideals, and we're in there with him, idealists all, just dying to be corrupted with all the skinny. The cleverly written script by Elaine May, Nichols' former comedy partner, gives us a lot of it in the early going, especially in Thompson's Susan, a hard-eyed political wife who plays the smart card the way her husband plays the Southern charm schtick.

Stanton and his good old buddies reminisce drunkenly about their long-suffering mothers; Susan turns to Henry and tells him such "mommathons" can last all night. Billy Bob Thornton, the Sling Blade guy, also has some good moments as Richard Jemmons, the James Carville-type political adviser who wears his scruffy redneck coarseness like a badge and gets himself all tied up in a boar hunt metaphor trying to explain the first whiff of Stanton sexual scandal. But they're not quite as good as almost any scene in The War Room, the documentary that took us behind the scenes in Clinton's first campaign and showed Carville himself at work. He's twice as smart and twice as devious as Richard Jemmons, just another case of a failure of imagination. Kathy Bates is more like it as Libby Holden, another adviser, this one recently out of the mental hospital and not prepared to take much guff from anyone.

But Libby is the sacrificial lamb of Primary Colors, and it is her voyage that takes the story from the hard-edge political satire of the first half hour to the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (Via The Doughnut Shop And The Hairdresser's Bedroom) message of the final scenes, a voyage that drags on at least 20 minutes too long. Primary Colors has some wonderful comic moments, but it doesn't enlighten us much about the political process. Travolta does a fine Clinton imitation, and he can even persuade us of the president's ability to sell caring as a political value, but we never see how he dragged himself from underdog to winner. Not much of the nuts and bolts of either the campaign or the candidate's family come to light: he goes to New Hampshire and finishes a respectable second, and we don't know why he did so well or why his opponent won or what he was selling that was different.

Primary Colors wants to be more than a gossip film, it wants to be a drama about power and decency and the limits of public life in America in the 1990s. And the irony is that it is those things, more than the grisly details, that we can get for free from CNN just about any night of the week. Primary Colors Starring: John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Adrian Lester Directed by: Mike Nichols Written by: Elaine May Rating: AA Playing at: World Exchange, St. Laurent, Orleans, Westgate, South Keys, Cinema 9 BY JAY STONE In interviews before the release of Primary Colors, director Mike Nichols sounded disappointed that the film version of the roman clef about the Clinton administration was coming out just as the latest basket of dirty laundry was going into the machine, therein to be sullied further in the kind of reverse bleaching that constitutes political and journalistic life these days. The reasons for Nichols' unease were, one assumed, that the public would be staying away in droves, the theory being that nothing in a fictionalized scandal could measure up to what was unfolding for free in so-called "real life" on CNN every night; not in gossip value and certainly not as Art can do a pretty good job of imitating life, but it would take Luis Bunuel to do justice to the Clinton story.

And there is some truth to that. Primary Colors is a sporadically devilish, often pedestrian accounting of Clinton's first run at the presidency, when the fictional Gov. Jack Stanton (John Travolta), a womanizing, doughnut-eating candidate of considerable cracker charm and untapped cracker deviousness, runs for the Democratic nomination, aided by his sharp but betrayed wife Susan (Emma Thompson) 'and a host of backroom workers who Can be lined up easily with their real- ljfe counterparts. The problem with Primary Colors lies not, however, in the fact that it needs to be updated to include the latest allegations of Oval Office carnality. The problem is that this movie which tells us that the president is a sexual cheat and that using political dirty tricks and blackmail and quasi-truths to get such a man elected is all right if he is the best of a bad bunch seems sort of innocent.

Primary Colors, the Joe Klein book that blew the lid off Washington in 1996, has be-: come, two years later, a movie that has nothing left to shock us with. It's not the facts or allegations of Clinton's sex life that are outdated, it's our idea of what is shocking. In sequences like a simple-minded view of how a cell phone conversation could be tam- pered with and the public reaction to that, or the ease with which an opponents' secret life can be uncovered, Primary Colors is a bit naive. In its depiction of down-and-dirty politics, it is a bit old hat. The movie hasn't kept pace with public cynicism.

say that everything changes so often you may never catch up to who's who and how all this got started, and when the final secrets are revealed you're better off not looking back to try to reconstruct it, although some of the mysteries are revealed over the final credits. The script by Stephen Peters (Death Wish 5, apparently) has to cheat like crazy to get it all in, but like I say, we all enjoyed it madly, having given up early on sense and gladly settling for things like the look on Kevin Bacon's face when he stumbles on a scene of lesbian love-making. This is an X-rat-ed Melrose Place, to be sure. Wild Things was directed by John McNaughton, who made the infamously scarifying Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and then The Borrower, a sci-fi comedy about an alien who has to borrow human heads to stay alive, and then Mad Dog and Glory with Robert De Niro and Murray again. Wild Things is such a shameless, exuberant, sexually voracious piece of nonsense that I expect it will occupy a valuable place in his oeuvre: his TV knockoff phase, first of the post-Scream mysteries, in which sex, bikinis, comedy and snaky plot reversals occupy equal weight and characters arrive and depart at whim.

It's the overall effect we're looking for here call it Coastline Preposterous and Wild Things has it in spades. gather seashells. "Which one of your deckhands is Kelly asks mom as another stud dives into the Van Ryan pool. "Whichever one I want," mom replies, a conversation typical of the movie's tone of hurry-up-and-reveal-character because there are many more people to be introduced. One day, Kelly goes into Sam's house and comes out crying rape.

That gets policeman Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) on the case, and he and his partner discover a second young girl, Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell), who says Sam raped her too, a while back. Suzie is a bit of a swamp tramp, though, living on the wrong side of Florida among the alligator wrestlers. And that ain't the half of it folks. There's Ken Bowden (Bill Murray), a great low-priced lawyer who has to defend Sam. Murray is like a guest star from another series; his Ken wears a neck brace in case of insurance investigators and dresses in Full Florida Pensionwear.

It's a very funny performance, a sort of parody o.f John Grisham, and it would be worth seeing the movie it belongs in. Robert Wagner is also around as a fancy lawyer, and he helps give the movie that second-rate tone that plays so well in the derivative serpentine mystery game. It would be unfair to give away much more of Wild Things, except to us Wild Things i2 Starring: Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell Directed by: John McNaughton Written by: Stephen Peters Rating: AA Playing at: Britannia, World Exchange, St. Laurent, Orleans, Kanata, South Keys, Cinema 9 By Jay Stone We all got a huge kick out of Wild Things, an immensely cheesy thriller that had a preview audience this week laughing happily at its sexual overkill, gasping ironically at its serpentine twists and, finally, bursting into applause at the great, thick-headed entertainment of it all. Wild Things is like some two-hour season-ending Melrose Place special, populated by beautiful and devious young things all embroiled in such improbable complications that you have to sit back and let it all roll over you.

If you don't understand this particular scene just wait, because a less likely one is just around the corner, and it's probably going to feature lurid sex to boot. Of course, if this was Melrose Place you'd have a season's worth of background about who all the people are. In Wild Things there's barely a clue, and since the characters keep changing personalities throughout the movie you have to just hold on tight and go along for the ride. You don't have to wait long to find yourself in that imaginary America of the prime-time soaps. Wild Things plunks us down in Blue Bay, Florida, where the high school girls look like the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and the teachers look like Matt Dillon.

He's hunky Sam Lombardo, the guidance counselor, which at Blue Bay High means running sex education classes, teaching sailing and fighting off the advances of student Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards, most recently of Starship Troopers, which was Melrose Place in space), a sexual predator who looks like she stepped off the set of Goin'All The Way or Doin'It or one of those other beach party films where the outfits included short-shorts, lotus lips and inflatable bosoms, and the final consonants are as optional as underwear. Just to complicate matters, it turns out that Sam has had an affair with Kelly's mother, Sandra Van Ryan (Theresa Russell), a matriarchal version of the sexual huntress who collects guidance counselors and pool boys the way other Florida residents abolished and who, one day, kisses Clarissa full on the lips on the lawn outside her home. This seems to be another possibility, albeit one that is not fully explored. Eventually we will meet the fourth wheel in this somewhat anemic quartet: Richard Dalloway (Robert Portal), who is presented as a rather stiff young man with a laughably overblown sense of himself, although to be honest, he seems perfectly acceptable and, moreover, doesn't share Peter's annoying habit of sulking. Richard (we know from the title) will win Clarissa's heart, or at least her hand.

At the same time, a parallel story is taking place on Clarissa's present-day travels. Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves of Intimate Relations, and not to be confused with Rupert Everett of My Best Friend's Wedding), is a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, who hears voices and sees trenchmates long since dead. Septimus says he has lost the ability to feel, but he apparently once had it; the bourgeois manners of the Dalloways and their friends seem to preclude I I. 4i l' Kevin Bacon plays a policeman investigating the alleged rape of a trampy young woman played by Neve Campbell. Adrian Lester, left, is the idealistic political aide to Gov.

Jack Stanton, the Clintonesque presidential candidate played by John Travolta. Redgrave's talent illuminates ambiguous, subtle film Ml years earlier in the more vibrant palette that expresses the indelible feelings of the young.) The film, like the novel from which it derives, is set in one day in London in 1923, the day Mrs. Dalloway will be giving a party. "What a lark! What a plunge! says Clarissa Dalloway (Vanessa Redgrave) as she steps out into Bond Street on her way to buy flowers to decorate the table in the sedate mansion where she lives her sedate life. But events draw her mind back to an earlier day, before her ascent into compromise, when all possibilities were open.

That takes us to the world of young Clarissa (Natascha McElhone of The Devil's Own), a smart young thing who is nonetheless leery of throwing herself too fully into the world. "Life seems to me to be very dangerous," she tells her friend Peter Walsh (Alan Cox), who is smitten with Clarissa but whose full engagement in love frightens her. Peter is given to having his face collapse pitifully when Clarissa won't have him. There is also the matter of Sally (Lena Headey), a bit of a radical who believes private property should be FT TIM i I iV, 'l I anything so grand as emotion. This all comes together at Clarissa's party.

Young Peter, who has grown up to be Michael Kitchen (Enchanted April) has just returned from India, and he shows up to confess that he has spent his whole life in the coloured regret of his early love. And Clarissa too appears to be drawn back to those days, although it is questionable whether she would have been better off with Peter than she is with Dalloway (now John Standing), who appears to be quite a reasonable and gracious man. It is the story of Septimus that is more disturbing here, a story that is about the only real flesh-and-blood experience in the movie, disregarding that stolen kiss. "Have I lost the thing that mattered?" Clarissa asks, in the manner of Gretta, the Anjelica Huston character in The Dead, although that Joycean meditation on lost love comes with a lot more Irish juice and feeling. Gorris, who directed Antonia's Line, keeps the mood ambiguous and mature, and we are mostly left to the art of Vanessa Redgrave to find the finely shaded themes.

She is both assured and warm, a woman who has found Mrs. Dalloway 2 Starring: Vanessa Redgrave, Natascha McElhone, Rupert Graves Directed by: Marleen Gorris by: Eileen Atkins Rating: PG Playing at: ByTowne Cinema, today to March 29 By Jay Stone Marleen Gorris's film version of the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway is a rich and delicate version of very difficult material an interior monologue in which a woman in her 50s remembers her youth on the eve of one of the silly parties that have become her life now. Too delicate perhaps: Mrs. Dalloway exists in the narrow range of emotions between the almost passion of yesteryear and the almost regret at having passed it by for the al- most shallow comforts of middle age.

1 Mrs. Dalloway is smoothly adapted Eileen Atkins in a form that draws us in and out of the past with no hesi-; tation (Gorris films the present in faded pastels and the memories of 30 Vanessa Redgrave's character is both content with her life and curious about what might have been. her place and will never know if she could have found a different one. Mrs. Dalloway is a very subtle film that leaves us not as much moved as quiet, looking back to what might have been and wondering if it really might..