The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 53

Friday February 8 1985 The Miami Herald 9D eamrntinmm argr smut Playing elsewhere 'Witness' is fine filmmaking heartbreaking context Dziki knew enough to leave that context in the background to let the drama flow from Rosenberg's painfully sane preparations in the face of insanity Dziki may mean to say something as well about man's capacity for self-delusion which in another movie might be the heroic element But merely by detailing the collapse of dignity in a single unexceptional man he has made a fine film CAST: Wladyslaw Kowalski Ratal Wieczynski Maja Komorowska CREDITS: Director: Waldemar Dziki Producer: Jacek Szeligowski Screenwriter: Wlademar Dziki Based on the novel "Mr Theodore Mundstock" by Ladislav Fuchs Cinematographer: Wit Dabal Music: Zygmunt Konieczny Running time: 85 minutes Unrated adult themes Shows Sunday at 5 pm Gnemateque lovie Reviews Witness (R) V4 CAST: Harrison Ford Kelly McGillis Josef Sommer Alexander Godunov Lukas Haas Jan Rubes CREDITS: Director: Peter Weir Producer: Edward Feldman Screenwriters: Earl Wallace William Kelley Cinematographer: John Seale Music: Maurice Jarre A Paramount Pictures release Running time: 105 minutes Vulgar language brief nudity violence glass wall You pay your money the curtain goes up and she sits in one of several settings and talks dirty to you over the phone It's a marvelously garish staging and it's perfect for Wenders' disrupted-communications theme Here are two people trying to recover themselves and revive their feelings through a pane of glass and over a telephone hook-up But it doesn't work as much of the latter half of the film does not Enough is enough: So Travis is wounded blistered by the heat of some emotional flare does this mean he cannot ever deal face-to-face? And if it does how then are we to feel anything for him incapable as he is of action? Still and this is what saves Paris Texas it is possible to feel little for Travis while savoring the performance by Stanton And he needed to be good if only to offset Kinski's anti-climactic delivery of modern cinema's most painfully errant Texas drawl For years a fine character actor with his drastically pinched face and world view to match Stanton steps into the feature role in a long movie and makes Travis fascinating to watch however blank he is to feel There's a tremendous amount going on in that face in the scenes between father and son And happily for a film in which the central character is for a long time inexplicably mute Stanton does a great deal with silence too Much of his performance is in the pauses the first of these is a half-hour long Paris Texas is thus a curiosity On balance it seems overblown and rickety as substantial as tum-bleweed And it seems to be less than the sum of its two major parts the script by Shepard and the images by Wenders Still it's an essential entry into the Wenders file full of hollow portents and signs signifying little And it would be worth seeing for Stanton's performance alone CAST: Harry Dean Stanton Dean Stockwell Aurore Clement Nastassia Kinski Hunter Carson CREDITS: Director: Wim Wenders Producer: Don Guest Screenwriter: Sam Shepard "adaptation" by LM Kit Carson Cinematographer: Robby Muller Music: Ry Cooder A Twentieth Century-Fox release Running time: 150 minutes Rated vulgar language brief nudity Shows Saturday at 6 and 9 pm at Arcadia begins a regular commercial run at Arcadia Feb 15 sneak a snapshot and studying the farmers as if they were alien beings The expression of horror when the Amish get a look at John Book's revolver (they are committed pacifists never striking back) And the rhythms of the lives There's a grace to Weir's work here that enhances his subject matter it's as if Witness were somehow more than a man-on-the-Iam picture And Weir has a wonderful touch in the love scenes as Ford and McGillis do a slow dance first figuratively and then literally waiting and watching for what will come of their forced companionship They're both effective though hers is the harder part She must project a certain innocence without seeming simple she is a woman after all and knows what a man is and she must show the little revelations involved in their blooming relationship without interior monologue It's a nice job Witness is a glossy piece of entertainment and it's fine filmmaking in nearly every aspect of the craft Weir continues to surprise us By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic Peter Weir the Australian director known for suffusing his films with an almost palpable sense of their physical place (Picnic at Hanging Rock Gallipoli) pulls off the same trick with Witness a thriller set in Lancaster County Pa home of the Amish Trick of course is not quite good enough a word Weir uses a lush and effective score by Maurice Jarre and the deeply saturated tones of John Seale's photography to establish and hold a milieu And all this for a story of a cop on the run It's serious moviemaking Harrison Ford plays John Book a Philadelphia detective who runs into big trouble A young widow (Kelly McGillis) and her son both Amish the "plain people" of Lancaster have taken a rare trip out of Pennsylvania to see relatives in Baltimore While waiting between trains in Philadelphia the little boy witnesses the murder of an undercover cop by two men And quickly mother son and detective Book are on the run back to the Amish settlements killers know who they are they just don't know where not yet And so almost all of the drama in Witness takes place against the backdrop of the Amish life life among people who do not drive cars or use electricity or phones simple farmers who regard non-Amish as "the English" outsiders And this world Weir captures beautifully even as he lets the thriller unfold The occasional contact between the Amish and the tourists who spill off the buses for instance trying to Slouching to find America Separate Rooms ftitiZVz In Separate Rooms one of two Bertrand Blier films to play in the Miami Film Festival the story of a trpubled marriage complete with a possible happy ending is told as a series of hilarious fragments in a bawdy dream It's the funniest film about romantic angst in recent memory Blier begins with characters vaguely familiar from his earlier work the man on the train muttering that "nothing" can happen to a man on a train and the woman who does not smile arriving in his compartment to make sure that something happens after all She seems to want the briefest of encounters a zipless embrace he can't help but follow her off the train and to the suburban home where she lives in desolation having lost her children in a marital dispute The man's only pleasure is to sit in the living-room easy chair and drink himself senseless with beer a process that is understandably lengthy The woman Donatienne does not seem to have any pleasure at all when finally she smiles briefly she summons the man with his camera to record the event Dour as this sounds superficially the uneasy union of an alcoholic and a sexual compulsive Blier's story begins to sprout unlikely subplots Soon it is densely packed with absurd characters and unexpected situations The suburban tract turns out to be populated exclusively with the woman's former lovers As a conflict spills out of her house and into the living room of a neighbor where it becomes a furniture-shattering revel the neighbors tumble from their homes and file to the scene in bathrobes and jam-mies for all the world like a procession out of The Night of the Living Dead Partners are changed the man Robert winds up with the wife of the house-wrecked neighbor and their successful couplings are witnessed by an appreciative crowd They are toasted all is well But the mysterious Donatienne is a great deal more than the most popular girl in the neighborhood And when she disappears suddenly and without a backward glance Robert goes off on a desperate search and the movie stops laughing Blier does not reveal where he's going until he is there in the final frames of this remarkable film But what he's up to is no secret: Every element in this romantic breakdown has been inflated into something darkly comical or dreadfully somber It's a nightmare of affections alienated and when Blier brings us around to something approaching resolution Separate Rooms is deeply satisfying The film is buoyed by a number of strong performances especially those by Alain Delon (as Robert) and Nathalie Baye (as Donatienne) each is as adept in the comic turns as in the dramatic clinches Stranger Than Paradise (R) CAST: John Lurie Eszter Balint Richard Edson Cecillia Stark CREDITS: Director: Jim Jarmusch Producer: Sara Driver Screenwriter: Jim Jarmusch Cinematographer: Tom Dicillo Music: John Lurie Running time: 90 minutes Vulgar language In Dade: Sunset Florida in search of someplace that looks different from the other places in Part 3 In Florida things brighten momentarily and Stranger Than Paradise takes on a narrative structure however frail Even though Florida seems to look just like Cleveland things happen to them there and the film concludes with some funny twists The appeal here is certainly minimalist if not minimal we can't exactly like these people because that's not the issue Observing them float through days in which nothing much happens is such a bare exercise that it forces us to look about in Jar-musch's frame in search of supporting detail diversionary elements anything But the movie is so low-key that it does not seem to have been designed to reward great interest the trick is to slouch into the theater like Willie expecting nothing and wait to be amused And this will happen in a number of small and unexpected ways not least the relentlessly deadpan tone of the film Eventually we laugh at it just because it's there shimmering tat-tily in the bad light After all it isn't every day that we get a comedy about lowered By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic Even as the Miami Film Festival celebrates new films by American independents one of the more interesting examples of the form sneaks into commercial release this weekend It's Jim Jar-musch's Stranger Than Paradise in which three characters in search of America make it only to Cleveland and then to a West Florida backwater They seem vaguely satisfied anyway for these characters a couple of idlers from New York and a cousin from Hungary don't have high expectations They have no expectations at all They're just kind of hanging around Jarmusch has made a punk-minimalist fable after the manner of Wim Wenders whose "road" pictures Stranger Than Paradise resembles except that Jarmusch is funny where Wenders is dark and perhaps blank where Wenders is contemplative Jarmusch shot all his scenes in single uninterrupted takes separated by blackouts and in washed-out-looking black-and-white It's like a home movie on an almost-grand scale Stranger Than Paradise comes in three parts the first was once the whole film until Jarmusch was able to use it to raise financing to make the rest In Part 1 Eva the 16-year-old emigre from Hungary arrives at the preposterously dingy Lower East Side flat of her American cousin Willie Eva doesn't expect a big welcome and that's good Willie ignores her Willie is the kind of guy who wears his little fedora even indoors when he's sitting on his couch preparing to brood It's only after Eva goes out and shoplifts him some food and cigarettes that Willie's face lights up and he begins to think of her as OK In Part 2 joined by Willie's pal Eddie who looks just like Willie only worse all are in Cleveland Willie and Eddie make a trek there to find Eva who has gone to live with Aunt Lottie and work in a hot dog stand Lottie is pretty funny she's a card shark and fleeces the boys but soon it's off to Finnegan Begin Again irVz Made for HBO and scheduled to show on the cable channel Feb 24 Finnegan Begin Again is very good television and pretty good movie It has the enclosed feeling of a low-budget film not many exteriors here but the high gloss of an accomplished film director (Joan Micklin Silver) working with two accomplished actors Robert Preston and Mary Tyler Moore are the stars and they look good together even when they're doing battle with the cutes This they must occasionally do Walter Lockwood's script is at some pains to make them likable which in this case means plenty of lovable eccentricities Mike Finnegan (Preston) for instance is a recently retired newspaperman who once shared a Pulitzer and has now been recalled by a Richmond Va daily to write the advice-to-the-lovelorn column under the byline Felicity Hope Mike's 65 married to a 75-year-old recluse who dances madly in the ruin of their living room They live in a ramshackle house in a transitional neighborhood which is to say that Mike has been mugged enough that he cheerfully carries a dummy wallet for surrender to the neighbors Liz (Moore) is a 40-ish widow carrying on a torrid dingy-flat-in-town affair with Paul a local mortician (played by Sam Waterston) Paul pulls up to Liz' house one night in the hearse and steals her a bouquet off the casket in the back this is how we know he's a heel and then forgets to latch the back door on the hearse by which we may predict the next 10 minutes of riotous comedy action On the other hand since this is a love story not about the mortician but about the 65-year-old man and the 40-ish woman much of Finnegan Begin Again doesn't depend on cute stuff but on the two principals And they're both good enough to make the thing work "To May from December" goes Finnegan's toast and we wish them well Finnegan Begin Again has a number of predictable subplots and a truly awful stretch with Liz and Paul at a morticians' trade fair It's never hard to see where the film is going But the performances are so good and Silver's hand on the controls so knowing in the clutch that Finnegan Begin Again is nearly irresistible anyway It's a guaranteed tearjerker for all but the most cynical and in its own quiet way a kind of affirmation: Life may not begin at 65 but it can still get pretty interesting CAST: Robert Preston Mary Tyler Moore Sam Waterston Sylvia Sidney David Huddleston CREDITS: Director: Joan Micklin Silver Producer: Gower Frost Screenwriter: Walter Lockwood Cinematographer: Robby Muller Music: David Sanborn Michael Colina An HBO Premiere Films release Running time: 116 minutes Unrated vulgar language Shows Sunday at I and 3:15 pm Beaumont Cinema CAST: Alain Delon Nathalie Baye Michel Galabru Genevieve Fontanel Gerard Darmon Jean-Pierre Darroussin CREDITS: Director: Bertrand Blier Producers: Alain Sarde Alain Delon Screenwriter: Bertrand Blier Cinematographer: Jean Penzer In French with English subtitles Running time: 11) minutes Unrated vulgar language sexual situations Shows Sunday at 1 3: 15 and 5:30 pm Arcadia Love story belongs to Keaton Mrs Soffel (PG 13) Blood Simple -kftizVz hat I know about is Texas" says the pri- vate eye with murder in his eyes and nothing much of anything in his heart "And down here you're on your own" On our own and in the hands of Joel and Ethan Coen filmmakers out of New York University and Princeton with one tjf the most exhilarating first features in memory Their movie is called Blood Simple it's a reference from James Cain to the condition of sudden foolishness after one has done CAST: Diane Keaton Mel Gibson Matthew Modine Edward Herrmann Trini Alvarado Jennie Dundas Danny Corkill Harley Cross Terry O'Ouinn CREDITS: Director: Gillian Armstrong Screenwriter: Ron Nyswaner Producers: Edgar Scherick Scott Rudin and David A Nicksay Cinematographer: Russell Boyd Production Designer: Luciana Arrighi An MGMUA release Running time: 110 minutes (Adult themes) Multiple theaters your-friends performance or that Gibson is awful and she overwhelms him (he isn't she doesn't) Her work is standard-issue Diane Keaton: The pleas-ant-to-watch fluttering and pure-hearted female of Reds and Annie Hall whose stated motivations never seem quite be-lieveable It is that Mrs Soffel a true story is romanticized to just this side of gooiness to create the perfect setting for Keaton The movie is so beautiful that all evil seems purged from it Nothing is ominous here not the prison not industrialized and smoky Pittsburgh not the final chase scene In front of Russell Boyd's camera the Allegheny County Jail and its seven-story atrium turn into a fairy-tale palace or a medieval cathedral The chase scene conducted in horse-drawn sleighs often looks like a Christmas card come to life And so time spent with Mrs Soffel passes pleasantly enough if slowly before the jail break It is a movie to take with tea and cookies By SANDRA EARLEY Herald Arts Writer I is the kind of love story that belongs amid the high-necked repression of the Victorian era and with Diane Keaton in the title role The year is 1901 the citj Pittsburgh and two handsome' brothers perhaps wrongly accused are sentenced to hang for murder Their plight has captured the imagination of the city's shop girls and factory workers who keep a daily vigil outside the grim fortress-prison where the brothers Ed and Jack Biddle are held Inside the prison and its staff apartments is another impressionable female: the warden's wife and the title character of the film Mrs Soffel Mrs Soffel played by Keaton has just arisen from a mysterious illness that kept her bedridden for three months As she resumes her rounds of the cellblocks distributing Testaments she too is mesmerized by the Biddies particularly Ed I vPxr 'I Soon Mrs Soffel is reading to him arguing theology with him and smuggling hacksaw blades to him under her skirts One cold snowy night when the Biddies escape Ed comes for her and she abandons her conservative husband and four children Mel Gibson the handsomest man in the world according to a recent People magazine cover plays Ed in this film directed by Gillian Armstrong best known for the low-budget and much-praised Australian film My Brilliant Career Matthew Modine is Jack Edward Hermann is Warden Soffel But Mrs Soffel belongs to Diane Keaton It is not that she dominates from the strength of a tell- Heaven help 'Heaven Help Us' Heaven Help Us (R) Vt A Postcard From a Journey iViinV A Postcard From a Journey opens dark and ominous and stays that way for most of its length There is at first the moving of shadowy forms to the snuffling and scratching and thudding of the sound track sounds that suggest cattle under the prod reluctantly on the move Soon the shapes resolve into those of men and women and then we can see the yellow Star of David sewn on the coats The noises on the soundtrack begin to make sense as well: These are people being herded onto trucks This scene also serves as coda for the film a remarkable first feature by a young Polish director named Waldemar Dziki His subject is the first stirrings of the Holocaust the "postcard" of the title is a black-comedy reference to the "summons" received by Polish Jews directing them to report with only a suitcase of carefully prescribed dimensions for immediate "relocation" Dziki drawing from a novel by Ladislav Fuchs focuses on one central character: Mr Rosenberg a prosperous former businessman whose preparations for his inevitable journey become his obsession Though it is early in the war and the atrocities are not yet even a rumor Rosenberg knows what is coming Around him his friends are disappearing one day the summons the next an abandoned home often with a friend left behind to watch over the family possessions And around him Rosenberg's remaining friends reassure one another: "Another five or six months it will all be over" "It'll be over next spring" There's a quota "50000 prisoners It'll soon be over" "The secret" Rosenberg says "is not to fall victim to delusions" And so Rosenberg meticulously outfits his suitcase balancing his desire to salvage something of his former life with his physical ability to carry it about with him He practices heaving the case upward as if onto the truck he takes a job hauling heavy baskets at no pay to toughen his hands he baits a larger man into attacking him "just to see what it's like" to be bullied He calculates how best to hide food in his clothing Soon after having been assured by a friend that "the next transport will be the last one" Rosenberg includes the young son of relocated parents in his regimen Together the two of them train becoming athletes of survival It's a quiet understated character drama with a Frances McDormand and Dan Iledeya in 'Blood Simple' murder and it's about film noir and American Gothic and how much trouble some good ole boys and gals really can get in down there in Texas And it's a spoof of course which is what makes Blood Simple so much fun The plot essentials: You have a man fooling with another man's wife and the jealous husband offering cash to the soulless private eye to do something about it You have a double-cross a comedy of er- rors and misunderstandings a corpse that won't lie still and a dead fish waiting waiting to be some kind of clue And then you have the visual gags which are inspired The most celebrated is the long tracking shot along the the honky-tonk bar a shot that confronts the head of a drunk passed out on the bar and simply lopes over him as if the camera were carried by a determined dog heading home The smack of a newspaper against a window the snap of bugs in one of those fluorescent insect-killers turn into images of Hitchcockian portent Boy is this ever Texas There's so much confidence in the film which was directed by Joel Coen (NYU) and co-written by Ethan (Princeton) that it makes you wonder what comes next The film's success also suggests quite lustily the importance of the American independent movement in film: This is what is possible first time out with the brothers spending most of their time raising cash to finish their film Next time given an easier time with the budget who knows what the limits are? Good performances all around too though Emmet Walsh as the private eye steals every scene he's in he even perspires well He's one of the best villains and Bfood Simple one of the best vehicles for an outsized heavy in a long time CAST: Emmet Walsh John Geti Frances McDormand Dan Hedaya Samm-Art Williams CREDITS: Director: Joel Coen Producer: Ethan Coen Screenwriters: Joel Coen Ethan Coen Cinematographer: Barry Sonnenfeld Music: Carter Burwell A Circle Films release Running time: 94minutes Rated vulgar language violence and gore "Blood Simple" closes the Miami Film Festival Sunday night at 8 at Gusman Cultural Center The film begins a regular commercial run at the Cinematheque Feb 15 Bamming and whamming when done as slapstick among equals can be funny But beneath the authoritarian stare of Brother Thadeus Heaven Help Us is literally as funny as a crutch Even the film's requisite car destruction scene Dad's luxury model is mangled in the jaws of a drawbridge has its brutal content When Dad learns of the car's destruction he blackens both his son's eyes Director Michael Dinner and screenwriter Charles Purpura try to suggest that Heaven Help Us doesn't mean its meaness They include John Heard as sympathetic Brother Timothy and there is a happy ending Dunn eventually fights back and Brother Thadeus throws out the worst sadist Brother Constance But Heard's role is small and it is impossible to believe Thadeus' drink of the milk of human kindness given his behavior before the end of the film What is possible to believe is that Heaven Help Us is a hellishly bad film By SANDRA EARLEY Herald Arts Writer Americans have always been good at coming-of-age stories be it The Catcher in the Rye or movies like Risky Business and Diner The stories even sell well as the public rises to their raucous joy and sweet pain So when movie ads promise a new boy-meets-manhood story Heaven Help Vs the story of five guys attending a Catholic boys' high school in the mid-1960s there is a particular relish a certain anticipation But the relish turns to bile almost instantly in Heaven Help Us It is a cold humorless film that dwells on brutality and sadism not adolescent agonies Here on the screen is the worst stereotype of Catholic education brown-hooded brothers beating up on clear-faced teen-age boys seemingly for the pleasure of the thumps thuds and tears The brutality begins psychologically with Donald Sutherland as the headmaster Brother Thadeus He orients a new student Andrew McCarthy as CAST: Donald Sutherland John Heard Andrew McCarthy Mary Stuart Masterson Kevin Dillon Malcolm Danare Jennie Dundas Kate Reid Wallace Shawn Jay Patterson CREDITS: Director: Michael Dinner screenwriter: Charles Purpura producers: Dan Wigutow and Mark Carliner director of photography: Miroslav Ondricek A Tri-Star Pictures release Running time: 102 minutes (Violence vulgar language nudity) Multiple theaters Michael Dunn to the ways of the school by insisting that Dunn punctuate the answer to every question with "Yes Brother Thadeus" and "No Brother Thadeus" Soon Brother Constance (Jay Patterson) is banging a student's head against the blackboard using Patience the Paddle to strike outstretched palms hard enough to break fingers and forcing a boy to degrade himself by crawling on his hands and knees in a classroom while chanting Even incidental scenes advance the film's brutality In the cafeteria when Dunn is establishing a friendship with another boy the background features a brother hauling off a boy by an ear ILUi.