LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 31

KERRY HAYES Kavner, with Hoffman and Mathis: Single motherhood, sitcom style The Savage Breast Nora Ephron soothes it, Mira Nair arouses it Dottie, the divorcee who feeds her chicks and sharpens her comic skills by persuading single persons with married skin to buy placenta emollients at Macys cosmetics counter on Queens Boulevard. Convinced as I am that a rollicking standup comic sleeps within Julie Kavner, I was hoping at least for a performance movie in which she would finally let herself go and lather up a virtuoso fit of kvetchy vitriol. A little creative bitching, perhaps, about how goddamn hard it is to raise two offspring alone with no money? True confessions of the dating mom? Not on your life, and certainly not on Dotties, which takes a flying leap for the better when she meets Claudia the Associate Agent (Carrie Fisher, wearing unattached-career-girl neurosis with her usual clipped asperity) and Arnold the Paper-Eating Superagent (Dan Aykroyd, looking unaccount- The women in This Is My Life at too level lv observed to be deeplv felt or undei stood. The Ephron sisters know how to repioduce gill talk in all its careless, sharp-witted acidttv, which allows them to get away with a lot ot waggish manbashing. They also displav a biacing unsen-timentalitv about the small brutalities of familv life.

But thevve trapped their film (and, disap-pointinglv, Kavner) in safe, jokev amiabilitv, and This Is My Life sags into an evasion ol its own challenges. Its easy to drum up sympathy lot a woman on her own who slogs away at a lousy job at Macvs because she has to leed her kids. But Dotties not just a wot king mothei, shes an ambitious working mothei who gels to lealie her ambition. Thats a hot potato for women as well as men, and worth pushing as fat as it'll go. Ephion isnt willing to take this on, so she depo-liticies Dottie bv scaling her down into nine selfishness, tinning hei into anoihct unteeling iclebi it mom who must be put tlnough the chastening tiauma that will bting hei to hei senses and ictool her loi a more modest career in television.

Suitably contrite, Dottie discovus that yes, Nla, you can have it all it just takes a few shared feelings and some creative shilts in the domestic division ol labor. So, Julie, Ive had this high-concept screenplay knocking around that has Kavner" written all over it. Its about a Bronx babe with two kids who stumbles into standup comedy and grows a mouth so foul, superagents and studio execs across America implode upon contact with it. The boys in development say theyre real excited. Call me, Jules.

Well talk grosses. PEAKING OF GROSSES, IM NOI IIU HRSF to have noticed in print that five of the current Top 10 movies are, in one way or another, beamed at women. Honored as I am that we are now officially a Market, I must churlishly point out that with the exception of The Prince of Tides (about which the less said the better), all these films were made by men. And if the liveliest images of ourselves the studio chaps can offer are a murderous nanny and a wasp-waisted cartoon named Belle, its time to think women independents. Think Mira Nair, for example, whose 1988 docudrama about Indian street life, Salaam galvanized the critics and walked away with several upmarket film-festival prizes.

Nair is one of a rising generation of women directors including Barbara Kopple, Jennie Livingston, Jane Campion and Jan Oxenberg who are making, not necessarily womens films (whatever the hell that means) but films that reflect the variety of female sensibility, and doing it their way. Those Ive talked to seem to prosper on a durable mix of fanatical persistence, a willingness to run up record frequent-flier mileage for the sake of international funding and promotion, and an amused sense of irony about the industrys more winning ways of selecting material. In the press notes for her new film, Mississippi Masala, Nair describes her attempts to pitch an interracial love story around Hollywood. I was reminded time and time again that films of this sort dont make money. I got so used to rejection of this kind that I felt I must be doing something right.

To judge by the level of excitement in the audience (many of whom were people of color) at the screening I attended, Nair is doing quite a lot of things right. Together with Sooni Tar-aporevala, who also wrote the screenplay for Salaam Nair has made a cheei fully lowbrow, feed-good romp more cheeky than explosive that has the chutpah to sneak in some quick-witted straight talk about race, sex and gender. Nair speaks in an unapologetically popular voice: the cinematography is gleet ullv garish; the script, though it clips along with a wicked capering wit, is forever explaining itself; the comedy is a broad grin filled with sitcom retreads; the plot jci Ls tears with dockwoi reg-ularity. Delivered with enormous good humor and affection, all of this works. In fact, youre having FOR ADDITIONAL FILM REVIEWS, SEE THE CALENDAR FILM SECTION ON PAGE 57.

mmmm. FILM BY ELLA TAYLOR THE END OF THIS IS MY LIFE, DOTTIE Ingels, a standup comic whos been neglecting her two daughters ever since she hit the big time, lies in bed with them hatching a nifty solution to all their problems. She and the girls are going to devise a TV show loosely based on their situation. This will preserve family togetherness while allowing Mom to carry on following her bliss. Thus repossessed, the girls throw their arms around Dottie and make happy-ever-after noises.

Im willing to bet that Dotties TV show will bear a remarkable resemblance to This Is My Life, which bears a remarkable resemblance to an appealing but hedge-betting subgenre of womens television. From One Day at a Time through Kate and AUie, single-mom comedies have soothed the savage breasts of modern women by converting their most intractable dilemmas into attractive, soluble fun that bobs simultaneous curtsies at family unity and career feminism. This is called demographics, or trying to please all your women viewers all the time without upsetting anyones political apple cart. If I sound cynical, let the record show that single-mommery is my preferred brand of prime-time feminism, because it creates a space for women to misbehave in inventively unorthodox ways and because its almost always an outlet for womens wit, however domesticated. Actually, Id be content if This Is My Life did nothing but jump-start Julie Kavners always-a-bridesmaid career.

Kavner has been playing movie variations on a theme of Brenda Mor-genstern ever since the Rhoda show expired in 1978. With her husky voice desexed by an adenoidal Bronx whine, a dejected stoop and puppyish brown eyes, she seems built for the faithful-retainer roles she played in Penny Marshall Awakenings and a whole slew of Woody Allen films. But theres always been a brooding anxiety in Kavners Marge Simpson voice-over, and the dark, almost sardonic irony of her characterizations on The Tracey Ullman Show flirted with something sharper and less distractingly haimish than Rhodas good-natured fall girl. This Is My Life ought to be Kavners coming-out movie as a woman of parts, but it isnt. Based on a novel by Meg Woliuer, directed by Nora Ephron, and co-written by Ephron and her sister Delia, the film is a decent girls night out: a funny, likable movie full of funny, likable woman-types.

Unfortunately, it has no people in it; only a bunch of gag dispensers, headed up by Otertv ably depressed, though comfortingly encased in a supergut topped by a floppy sweater). Flushed with success from the L.A. talk-show circuits and her own cabaret show in Las Vegas, Dottie, were meant to understand, takes a serious nose dive in the mothering department. This means that her stage monologues, tepid riffs about how being in love makes you smile constantly, start to become ever so slightly shrill and risque. Shes seen blowing kisses at her admiring, then gradually festering daughters from the TV set or dispensing long-distance cold remedies over the phone.

But Kavner comes across as little more than a mildly manic yenta: Jeffrey Kurlands borderline-vindictive costumes (lots of giant suburban polka dots) are more than a visual gag they turn Dottie into a matron-intraining, letting us know, as does Carly Simons determinedly perky score, that this mom wont be absentee for long. Meanwhile, the Dot-lets, watched over by a stream of otherwise unemployed comedians, gallantly wisecrack their way through a forest ol pretty good sitcom sketches that never turn into a story you could care about. One ol the funniest is a first-sex-and-condom scene between elder daughter Erica played by the movies real star, Samantha Mathis (Christian Slaters lively partner in Pump Up the Volume), whose sour, tightly wound expression bespeaks an inner panic at once hilarious and pitiful and her shambling, socially concerned swain (Danny Zorn)..